Assorted items and reflections from my tour of The Netherlands – this time on recycling and waste.
When it comes to recycling, even some of the Dutch have difficulty in separating their garbage. One source estimated that central Amsterdamers, living in very confined spaces, have a recycling rate of only 15 percent compared to other parts of the Netherlands which reach 60 to 70 percent.- Residents are supposed to take their garbage to one of the many curbside stations in the streets (right) and then deposit the various recyclables into underground bins – there are 8,000 of them – accessed by the green boxes. But often they are surrounded by piles of bags: unseparated evidence of un-Dutchlike behaviour.
- Bulk waste is dropping – up to 25 percent. But household waste is increasing by about 2 to 5 percent.
- Amsterdam has a significant waste-to-energy facility (AEB below) only five km from Centraal Station (map here) that burns much of the city’s garbage and supplies 150,000 households with electricity, as well as providing hot water and district heating.
- Some argue that it would be more efficient to let consumers throw everything into the underground bins, separate out the recyclables at the centralized facility and burn the remainder for energy.
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That would be like us building a giant plant in the Terminal Flats for waste disposal and district energy. Not going to happen. Especially since the AEB plant is having to import waste from Germany and England to meet demand.
Some lessons for Vancouver here.
1. Even in the most environmentally progressive countries, asking citizens to separate waste yields pitiful compliance.
2. The best we can do is to emulate San Francisco, which has far higher compliance rates. Citizens put all recyclables into blue bins, food scraps and yard waste into green bins, and the rest into black Landfill bins. Contaminants (paint, oil, electronics, large household items) can be taken to a landfill centre, but there are two free household pickups a year.
3. Recyclables go to a nearby citywide separation station. From there, they’re distributed through the worldwide recycled materials system.
4. Organics are hauled about 60K to open fields where they are mulched and fed into 3m diameter bags, 70m long, that are extruded like sausage. The chemistry and temperature of the enclosed organics are carefully controlled in an industrial process. Most of the resulting rich soil is sold to wineries. Each year, residents are invited to bring a 5 gallon bucket to a festive event at a neighbourhood centre to collect some San Francisco Soil for free.
5. The rest goes to landfill.
6. Waste-to-Energy seems like an attractive concept, but note that trash burners are industrial operations with fixed intake needs. If you scale them to current need and people reduce their trash output (as San Francisco has done), then you have the problem of under supply of input and greatly reduced efficiency. Trash burners are continuous systems, not something you start and stop as the supply of raw material changes. Note that the Dutch must import trash from other countries to keep their burner working.
I’m pretty leery about incineration for as long as we so much dangerous waste in our garbage. Many, if not most, don’t know that many rechargeable batteries, old cells etc, should not go in the garbage. They will get incinerated along with everything else.
Compliance is pitiful, but it could be improved with just better labeling. Putting clear type codes on all pieces of plastic, clearly indicating on all coated paper whether it can be recycled (like milk cartons). But the best way to improve compliance is to tax and discourage the creation of unrecycleable waste, or even better, the creation of uneconomically recycleable waste. Things that should go are useless paperboard boxes for things that are already in plastic bags (cereal, crackers) and useless bits of metal, zinc wine bottle sleeves, foil wrapping, and as much as possible bonded products like tea bag packets made of plastic bonded to paper bonded to aluminum. Things like that are just hard to economically recycle.
I also expect that we will end up with standardized plastic or aluminum shipping cartons that will eventually phase out much of the tremendous use of corrugated cardboard boxes. With embedded RFID tags, they will be easier to trace and keep track of.
Starting organics programs is another obvious one. The office building that I work in has an organics program that will also take paper towels. However, someone should do a carbon impact analysis of this. Letting items decompose will probably increase the carbon footprint. Strangely, turning trees into paper and then entombing it in an anoxic environment at a landfill stops the organic material from degrading and thus removes the potential carbon from the atmosphere. Sort of like putting the coal back in the ground and breaking the carbon cycle. Not that this would necessarily make me against composting organic waste because that can be useful in soil restoration and limiting landfill construction, but it might be useful to run the math just to see what the effect it.