Looking back on the hottest year in recorded human history, which for Seattle was also the wettest ever, one has to wonder if maybe the Pacific Northwest is starting to live up to the somewhat exaggerated reputation for being too soggy to be enjoyable. Rainy day tall tales once served as warnings to traveling hipsters that Seattle was a nice place to visit in the summertime, but you really wouldn’t want to live here. Global climate change appears to be making the planet as a whole warmer and dryer but our little paradise is slated to receive extra dampness during the winter months, reduced snowpack in the winter because of all that extra rain, and hotter, dryer summers that sound delightful in theory but will likely be obscured by wildfire smoke and extreme heat events. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that if we don’t reduce our malevolent impact on the ecology of the planet, including our greenhouse gas emissions, damp times like this are going to be considered the “good old days” back before the mass die-offs began. Since we seem to be so good at ignoring the mass die-offs of animals that have been happening with increasing regularity in the last century, it may well be the mass die-offs of our fellow humans that awaken us to the reality we are on the brink of the sixth mass-extinction event in Earth’s history, but by then it might be too late.
In January of 2006, Seattle began an experiment requiring all houses, multi-family residencies, and businesses to start collecting all their recyclable waste. A year later, Mayor Greg Nickels was declaring the program a model for the nation. Then in January of 2015, with that success behind it, the city introduced mandatory composting, “no longer allowing food-soiled pizza boxes, paper napkins, and paper towels in the garbage.” Now, any garbage containing ten percent or more compostable material is subject to a fine of up to fifty dollars, although according to Seattle Public Utilities, that fine is rarely levied as the preferred solution is to bring the account into compliance with the goal of reducing waste. Money can’t buy us love, nor can it buy us a reduction in global average temperatures and extreme weather events, not at a mere fifty bucks a pop anyway.
Organic waste, such as food scraps and yard clippings, makes up anywhere from a quarter to half of the solid waste generated by cities around the United States. Most of this comes from businesses, like restaurants and grocery stores, but we’re all contributing either at home, when we get groceries at Safeway or Amazon Fresh, or when we order Pagliacci’s or dine out at Chipotles. All of the food we don’t eat and throw away decomposes and produces methane, a climate-change-inducing carbon-centered greenhouse gas that traps heat forty times more efficiently than carbon dioxide. Experts maintain that a nationwide program to collate bio-materials out of solid waste would reduce the country’s carbon emissions by up to twenty percent.
While transportation and power generation make up the bulk of America’s carbon footprint, food production and waste account for an even larger combined percentage according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Most of this is due to domestic animal methane generation and wastewater treatment, but a substantial amount is from landfills and is the third-greatest single source of methane emissions in the nation. Landfill gas has traditionally been captured and burned at the source, a process called “flaring”, but there are pushes to refine it into renewable methane gas for fuel or converted into methyl alcohol for use in industry or as an alternative to ethanol. Americans waste thirty percent of our food by throwing it in the trash, making composting easy pickings for local governments seeking to lower their contributions toward global climate change while saving money on the municipal garbage bill.
If you aren’t a home or business owner and haven’t heard much about mandatory composting, you’re not alone. Educational efforts by the City of Seattle haven’t been stellar. Unless you have a conscientious property manager or a friendly neighborhood hippy, you’ve probably overlooked the “Where Does It Go?” flyer either in your move-in packet alongside the lead paint warning pamphlet or that is hanging on the bulletin board in your building’s laundry room. This might not seem like a big deal, but if you’re not doing your part you’re probably already paying more to live where you do because of fees being levied by the city for improperly sorted recycling and compostables. We should all be outraged at the perpetrators and demand something be done this very minute. That should be easy, because in this case, it’s our own darn fault the rents are too damn high.
Seattle Public Utilities maintains an active education campaign which includes advertisements, flyers (like “Where Does It Go?” and “It’s Not Garbage Anymore”), training, and outreach. No one is demanding or expecting one hundred percent compliance so soon after implementation but Seattle has traditionally had a “can do” attitude when it comes to sorting our garbage. Mayor Murray’s office announced late last year that already the program is way ahead of it’s first year goal of nineteen thousand tons of organic material diverted from being transported by rail to Oregon and buried along with the soiled Huggies and Keuring coffee pods at great expense to everyone in the city. In mid-March, Seattle Public Utilities announced the results of a survey showing that seventy-one percent of Seattle residents are aware of the composting law and are presumably doing their best to comply. In a recent conversation with Seattle Public Utilities, Hans Van Dusen reported that in the last three to six years, participation has been “pretty good” at about twenty-five to thirty percent and that has risen in the last year to fifty to sixty percent of food waste being been diverted from the garbage. That’s incredible societal change in a very short amount of time.
Despite our reputation as the Emerald City, Seattle has a complex relationship with the environment. Our very existence as a city came into being through the plunder of natural resources: shipping timber to California to build San Francisco and rebuild it after the earthquake. Yessler Way, downtown, is the original “Skid Road” — from which the term “Skid Row” for a dilapidated urban area is derived — as it was the chute where logs were skidded down to the mill to be processed. After World War I, Seattle began the transition from logging town to hipster ecotopia it’s known for today, but all along the way our sense of environmentalism stemmed from the middle class’ desires for extravagant public gardens in wealthy urban areas that beautified their own enclaves. Less interest was shown in creating truly public spaces that could be shared by all residents, such as playgrounds. We see these competing philosophies of land use and infrastructure still today as we wrestle with issues of affordable housing and public transportation.
Emerald City was part of a slogan suggestion Seattle was a “gem” of a city with many facets, with only a tangential tie to the greenery of the Pacific Northwest. We’re generally good people with plenty of eccentricities and lovable quirks, but we’re too quick to believe our own myths about ourselves. If we want to be exceptional in our love and appreciation for the unquestionable beauty of the Pacific Northwest, we need to act on it by preserving it; not just spending time biking, kayaking, or skiing on it.
The 2007 City of Seattle resolution on Zero Waste is clear that waste-reduction actions are to be taken by pursuing stewardship approaches first and outright prohibition as a last resort. Homes and businesses seem to have an easier time following the instructions for recycling and composting, even back when it was an optional activity, because homes and businesses have had incentives to reduce waste since the 1989 Waste Not Washington Act and some before even then. The University of Washington held the world’s first “Trash-In” in 1970, where students brought trash from around campus, dumped it on the ground in front of the HUB, and sorted it into special bins for plastic, paper, glass and metal. Seattle has been working for a very long time to create a culture where this is an activity that is a normal part of our daily lives.
What frustrates this process is large numbers of new Seattleites, mainly living in apartments and condominiums, are being asked to collate their garbage for the first time in their lives. Overworked and used to living a life of convenience first, centered around delivered food and excessive packaging, the difference between a recycling cart and a garbage dumpster and what to do with them seems to be non-existent. Just a single resident in an apartment or condominium can foul the composting bin for everyone in the complex and no one wants to be responsible for sifting through a disgusting bin of rotting fruits, veggies and meats to decontaminate it. The contractors hired by the city to collect our waste, Recology and Waste Management for most of us, are empowered to search through bags and bins — which prompted a breach of privacy and due process complaint in King County Superior Court by the right wing Pacific Legal Foundation as Bonesteel v. City of Seattle — but are understandably reluctant to do so. If non-compostable material is visible in a food and yard waste bin, the entire bin is marked as contaminated and won’t be sent to the composting farm. Then the property manager has to call for it to be specially processed as garbage which adds fees to the standard costs and this is where your utility bill or rent increases at a time you’d rather it be going down or at least staying in one place long enough for wages to slowly start catching up.
When a food and yard waste bin is tagged as being ineligible for pickup, the contractor places a check mark on the tag explaining why the cart wasn’t emptied. When someone uses a plastic bag instead of a compostable bag (to the untrained eye, a compostable bag appears indistinguishable from a plastic bag), or discards recyclable or otherwise uncompostable material, someone needs to pick through the mess to remove it. Compostable bags are made from plants, vegetable oils and compostable polymers. They are not the same as “biodegradable” bags and “oxo-degradable” bags, neither of which are acceptable in the food and yard waste carts and are considered contamination. Adding to the confusion, compostable bags are usually dyed green, but not all green bags are compostable; some bags are identified as degradable but aren’t dyed green and may or may not be compostable. Regular plastic bags are never considered compostable, but many residents use them to contain the foul smells of food scraps. Whose job is it to clean up after irresponsible, uneducated, or just plain confused apartment dwellers?
Enter the Friends of Recycling and Composting, or FORC (pronounced “fork”). To further education and stewardship goals, Seattle Public Utilities offers a program offering a one hundred dollar utility bill credit to a property owner or manager in exchange for assigning a steward to monitor the recycling, garbage and composting at a building. If the FORC steward attends a training session, held three to four times a year, the Seattle Public Utilities website promises free compost bins for the multi-family residence they represent. Signing up as a FORC is a simple process of filling out a form, reading some documents, and watching a few videos.
http://www.seattle.gov/util/MyServices/Recycling/BldgOwnersManagers_Recycling/HelpResidentsRecycle/index.htm
The FORC training materials encourage the steward to “monitor” bins and carts and remove contaminating items using a “grabber” when doing so is considered safe in the judgment of the steward (one presumes). When it’s not safe, the cart is fouled, won’t be picked up by the waste management contractor, and will require a special pickup which will incur extra fees and possibly fines. The training materials suggest writing thank you notes to “green heroes” in the building and holding recycling- and compost-themed parties for residents to share tips and enthusiasm. The approach seems to be heavy on carrot for residents (if you can call a waste-reduction-themed party a carrot with a straight face) and sticks for property managers and FORC stewards (being assigned to pick through smelly refuse to avoid paying extra fees feels stick-ish), which seems like it’s keeping true to the spirit of the City of Seattle Zero Waste Resolution’s intent to encourage participation before penalties but this ignores the essential fact of American life: shit oozes downhill so costs and aggravation always get passed on to the consumer.
There are no official fines for contaminated food and yard waste carts, but there are de facto fines: property managers are directed to call for a special pickup for contaminated food and yard waste carts which costs fifty dollars. Thrifty managers will let the compost collect to fill the cart before paying to have the mess removed which probably isn’t the intended effect of the ordinance. These unintended effects are troubling because they go against the stated goals of the ordinance. While fines are currently waived, they may begin if Seattle Public Utilities feels they’re needed to bring someone into compliance, which is only going to add to the cost that gets passed on to residents in the way of rents or inflated utility bills in a city already struggling under runaway housing prices and a heavy cost of living burden.
It’s been said that no criticism is complete without suggestions for how to better handle the problem. In that spirit, here are some suggestions to Seattle Public Utilities that might help make the composting program more effective.
Encourage apartments to use smaller carts and bins for resident food waste. Currently, the recommended cart size is a ninety-six gallon container per fifty residents. These are the giant plastic, square-edged wheeled carts from the same mold as the recycling carts but in green instead of blue, marked “Food & Yard Waste” that residents are currently throwing their garbage in because they look like large, slightly misshapen garbage cans (there are similar garbage carts molded of brown plastic). The smaller “residential sized” thirteen-gallon and thirty-two gallon carts would be a better option, even if it requires multiple bins for a single building. People will be resistant to filling them with bags of garbage because it’s physically more difficult to cram a bag of garbage into them. Their size would fit with the smaller size of the composting bins and bags in each apartment unit.
Reevaluate the prices for curb service versus on-site service for multi-family residences especially in high-density, high-traffic areas. Few property owners are going to choose the expensive on-site service when there is a far less expensive option available. Just why does it cost forty to fifty dollars more for waste removal contractors to open a gate or walk a few extra steps to retrieve a food and yard waste cart when it’s usually in the same area that already contains garbage and recycling containers? People shouldn’t throw litter in compost carts awaiting curbside pickup, but if one does, it can contaminate the cart and delay or cause a denied pickup. We can be grateful that people are at least throwing litter somewhere other than the ground, but not when they contaminate a bin and incur pickup fees and fines for the building.
The FORC program to get composting bins into residential apartment units is a great step and along with an upcoming SPU program to offer a composting bin and educational materials to residents who open new accounts with Seattle City Light can be a great foot in the door. Follow up on that by considering a program to provide the correct type of compostable bags to FORC stewards to be distributed to residents on an as-needed basis. This furthers education efforts by encouraging interaction with FORC stewards and helps them keep tabs on resident’s usage of bags, giving them direct feedback on who might need more education. Yes, this will cost money, but the city would easily save more money than is being spent on bags in reduced waste haulage and landfill fees. Consider it an ongoing investment in the FORC stewards who are volunteering their time for the betterment of the city and residents.
Waste reduction is important, not just for the City of Seattle and residents, but for the whole world. Excessive greenhouse gasses are changing the planet’s climate in ways that are becoming increasingly deadly to people, animals, and plants. It used to be an issue that some far off “future generation” would have to worry about, but it’s becoming clear that this is the generation everyone was referring to and that the old ways of managing change don’t seem to be very effective. In fact, the old ways seem determined to discourage any kind of change at all. We need fundamentally different thinking and courageous attitudes if we are to take on the challenges that have been put off for too long because they were too complicated, expensive, or controversial to seriously consider.
Recycling has been become a cost effective way to reduce waste because of a generation-long effort to change the ways we interact with the packaging of the products we buy. Composting can be equally as successful if we take many of the same steps we took to make recycling work for us. That involves conversations we have around our relationships with the food we waste, inspecting the processes we go through to purchase and prepare our food and how we dispose of the excess efficiently. Taking personal responsibility to change our behavior from passive consumer to mindful caretaker will make reducing food waste and composting what remains a hassle-free activity that feels an effortless part of our daily lives.
