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Reaching for Zero:
A The Citizens Plan for Zero Waste in New York City
By Resa Dimino and Barbara Warren
New York City Zero Waste Campaign
and Consumer Policy Institute / Consumers Union June 2004
available in pdf format

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REACHING FOR ZERO:
The Citizens Plan for Zero Waste in New York City

Overview

Reaching for Zero presents an alternative approach to handling solid waste in New York City. It envisions a system in which waste prevention, reuse, recycling and composting are the central elements of the management strategy, and waste transfer and disposal are phased out over time. As such, Reaching for Zero does not address the future of waste transfer and disposal, but rather focuses on strategies to eliminate waste altogether.

The Current Waste Problem and the Zero Waste Approach

With close to 8 million residents and over 12 million people during a workday when commuters are in the City, New York City produces enormous amounts of waste. New York has thousands of businesses, hundreds of institutions like museums, colleges and universities, and a large number of City, state and federal agencies. So when NYC generates waste it is not just at home, it is on the way to work or school, in public transportation, while visiting government agencies, while shopping at stores and supermarkets, or while at work, or at play at many of New York City’s recreational facilities, such as parks, zoos and sports venues.

The City generates 13,000 tons per day of trash and recyclables from the residential and institutional sectors and 9,900 tons per day of putrescible trash–food scraps, dirty paper, and recyclable containers -- from the commercial sector. Commercial construction and demolition debris and fill material are generated in even larger quantities.

Until 1997, New York City dumped all its garbage at Fresh Kills on Staten Island, an enormous, unpermitted landfill. Fresh Kills throughout its history has been in violation of numerous environmental standards. As public pressure mounted, along with proposed state legislation to close it, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Borough President Guy Molinari and Governor George Pataki announced plans to close Fresh Kills. The City began exporting a portion of its garbage elsewhere with an initial contract to export garbage from the Bronx in 1997. The City subsequently contracted with major multinational companies–Waste Management Inc. and BFI/Allied--to take the rest of its garbage to disposal sites in other states. Fresh Kills was officially closed slightly ahead of schedule in 2001. However, it was reopened on an emergency basis a short time later following the September 11^th tragedy involving the World Trade Center.

The City’s Recycling Law of 1989 attempted to reform the way the City was managing its garbage by mandating recycling. However, despite more than ten years of experience with the program, recycling is pummeled during each budget cycle. The City has been unable to grow recycling into a mature program that operates efficiently because it is continually in a new start-up mode, either adjusting to, or recovering from budget cuts. The failure to develop recycling and other waste diversion programs to their fullest potential carries a considerable cost.

The cost of exporting the City’s residential and institutional trash has now resulted in a Sanitation budget of over $1 billion annually. Disposal costs have been on the rise, particularly over the last few years. In February 2000, the Sanitation Department had to request additional funding from the City Council because the cost of export had risen from $55 per ton to $62 per ton (Warren, 2000). In February 2004, New York City’s Independent Budget Office reported that the cost of export was now $105 per ton (New York City Independent Budget Office, 2004). This is a 91% increase or almost a 23% increase per year in the costs of export from 2000-2004. These increases are primarily the result of increasing costs of landfills over the last decade and are believed to be at least partly due to the increased consolidation in the waste industry, leaving only a few major multinational companies controlling most disposal facilities.

Looking at it another way, as of 2004, the City is spending over $1 million per day to dispose of City-collected garbage outside our borders, and the cost is rising. This does not include collection costs within the City. New York City thus finds itself in a position, which is clearly untenable for the long term.

Reaching for Zero therefore proposes a new model, a "zero waste" plan, for managing New York City’s solid waste. This plan has as a goal-- the total elimination, or very close to it-- of garbage disposal in twenty years. Although this may seem like a radical concept, it is not. In fact zero waste goals have been adopted in several major cities, such as San Francisco and Toronto. While the plan will involve major restructuring of policy and programs to maximize waste prevention, reuse, recycling and composting, the plan contains very practical programs for implementation. This report describes in detail how to make this transition.

The restructuring of New York’s solid waste management system will require enormous effort, especially in the first five years. It will require building new facilities, such as centralized composting plants for converting kitchen scraps into usable compost, and legislative changes, such as a law that will extend deposits on bottles to more types of beverage containers. It will take a consistent commitment, so that programs do not have to continually recreate themselves as funding jumps up and down. And it will require creativity, ingenuity and flexibility, characteristics that have up to the present not been hallmarks of the City of New York’s Department of Sanitation (DSNY).

The benefits to the City of embarking on such a path are enormous. The first will be freeing the City from the ever increasing costs of hauling waste to distant landfills. Given that other localities are increasingly loathe to continue to accept NYC’s waste, and that transportation costs are expected to rise, the cost alone would make it wise to pursue a zero waste plan.

But there will be other extremely significant benefits as well. When we export our trash, we export dollars to other communities. When we process, remanufacture and resell recyclables, reusables and compostables in NYC we add value to the materials and dollars to our economy, creating jobs and generating taxes in the process. Waste prevention, while not directly spurring economic development, can result in immediate savings; dollars saved in City agencies can go to essential City services. See Chapter 5, Economic Development in this report.

For example, $100 spent to export a ton of waste to a distant landfill benefits the multinational waste management company that earns the money and the distant town that accepts the waste at its landfill. It does little for New York City. However, $100 spent to support a local reuse operation that takes reusable goods such as furniture and equipment and repairs and cleans them, so that these goods can be used for schools and the non-profit sector creates tremendous value added and employs New Yorkers. Indeed, we have a homegrown example of what investment in recycling in NYC can achieve. Visy Paper, which currently processes and recycles about 150,000 tons of paper collected by the City, now employs 160 people at its plant on Staten Island, and was in fact the largest new investment in manufacturing in the City in 50 years when it opened in 1997.

Reaching for Zero proposes that the City focus on using its discarded materials and waste management policy as a tool for economic development, thereby accomplishing several objectives:

Diversifying the entities that process materials in the City’s waste stream, making the City less dependent on a few large multinational corporations.
Reducing trash disposal costs.
Building industries within the City, like Visy Paper that will utilize recycled materials to make new products.
Creating jobs.

None of these objectives is achieved by pursuing disposal for the majority of our trash. Dr. Barry Commoner of Queens College has studied and advocated for intensive recycling systems for NYC. In 1999 he and other authors at the Center for Biology of Natural Systems issued a detailed study, which demonstrated the potential for new industry to utilize the materials in our waste stream. The study concluded that between 3,416 and 12,025 new jobs would be created and between $616 million and $2.41 billion in revenue would be produced by maximizing recycling and stimulating local industrial growth in the recycling industry (Eisl et al., 1999).

This Zero Waste Plan proposes that we substantially improve our existing recycling program and add major programs in three areas–waste prevention, reuse and composting–which have received inadequate attention and funding to date. Fifty-six percent of the City’s managed waste stream could be addressed by expanded programs in three areas–waste prevention, reuse and composting. All four waste diversion methods are what we call "Pieces of Zero", whereby we can achieve zero waste over 20 years. The Final Chapter of this report lays out the accomplishments that should be achieved in each of three periods–Near Term, Intermediate Term and Long Term-- if we are to reach our zero waste goal.

Achieving this ambitious goal requires a long term commitment from top elected officials and City Agency Commissioners and a management structure that prioritizes waste diversion strategies over disposal in terms of personnel and resources.

Seven chapters of this plan are devoted to supporting the four primary waste diversion methods: Education, Economic Development, Financing, Enforcement, Transportation, Legislation and Regulation and Research and Data-gathering.

We recommend expanding the recycling program and adding other zero waste programs. While DSNY has continually reported that recycling costs more than trash collection, DSNY’s obscure accounting practices make it extremely difficult to verify whether this is true. However, it is clear that the City has been making some fundamental mistakes when it comes to recycling. The most prominent mistake is the continual failure to adequately invest in and sustain the recycling program over time so that it can mature. Repeated recycling cutbacks and reinstatements keep the programs operating always in the startup phase and prevent the necessary progress toward greater efficiencies and cost- effectiveness. In addition, the City has failed to develop the necessary modern recycling processing plants, such as that planned in the 1992 Solid Waste Management Plan, which would make processing less costly. Despite these missteps, a recent analysis by the Independent Budget Office found that the costs of recycling in New York City have been dropping, and the costs of waste disposal increasing (New York City Independent Budget Office, 2004).

When it comes to costs, more focus should be placed on studies that have compared the cost and benefits of recycling to disposal. The economic merits of investing in recycling were examined in a study by David Folz of 158 cities in the US, published in Public Administration Review. In the study he found after comparing recycling costs to disposal costs that "the cost per ton declined as city size and the number of tons recycled increased." The conclusions state, "Data indicate that a persuasive economic case can be made that the investments communities made in their recycling programs were prudent ones compared to the costs they incurred for collecting and disposing of solid wastes either by landfilling or incineration." Greater participation and greater quantities of recyclables collected led to lower overall recycling costs, with the mean net cost per ton for recycling $85, compared to $131 for waste collection and disposal (Folz, 1999). This study tells us that growing our recycling and other zero waste programs are likely to decrease costs as the tonnage diverted increases. Finally, if the City of New York, one of the great cities of the world, cannot make its recycling program as economically beneficial as 158 cities in the US, something is seriously wrong with existing management and we must make the needed corrections to turn it around.

Reaching for Zero recommends that we turn the City away from its focus on waste disposal to adopt a zero waste model, with its significant economic and social benefits. The City is proud of what it accomplished with Visy Paper. As a result of those efforts, the City does not pay for garbage export of its paper, but rather earns a minimum of $10 per ton for paper it provides to Visy. Now the City needs to build on this economic development model to address other components of the waste stream. As the City completes its 20 year solid Waste Management Plan, we recommend adoption or incorporation of as much of this "Citizens Plan for Zero Waste" as possible.

Background on Solid Waste Planning in NYC

What is the SWMP? When will it come out? What will it do?

New York State’s Solid Waste Management Act of 1988 required various jurisdictions within the state to conduct comprehensive solid waste management planning at least every 10 years with updates on a regular basis and modifications when there are significant changes in the system. The Act set goals of 10% waste reduction and 40% recycling by 1997. As a result, NYC prepared its first Solid Waste Management Plan (SWMP) in 1992, a huge effort encompassing many volumes of material. A new comprehensive Solid Waste Management Plan is currently overdue, because of the large changes in the City’s management of waste related to the closure of Fresh Kills. The City is expected to issue a new SWMP in September of 2004. One important missing element in the 1992 plan was the failure to study the commercial waste system in the City. As a result, the City Council passed a law, Local Law 74 of 2000, requiring a commercial waste study for NYC. The City just released its first comprehensive Commercial Waste Study in April 2004. Its findings should be addressed in the upcoming 20 year SWMP, which must include plans for handling New York City’s commercial waste.

The City recently released a Draft Scoping Document for the preparation of the 20 year Solid Waste Management Plan. Based on the scoping or outline for the City SWMP, export for disposal and the retrofit of the City’s marine transfer stations to compact and containerize waste are the primary focus of the Department of Sanitation. The City needs to do more. It must do comprehensive solid waste management planning that maximizes alternatives to disposal — waste prevention, reuse, recycling, and composting–to meet the requirements of state law and for the good of the City.

The City has not really engaged in comprehensive planning since the announcement to close Fresh Kills, the City’s last remaining landfill. Under the New York State Solid Waste Management Act of 1988, a comprehensive plan addressing the closure of Fresh Kills and examining all reasonable alternatives for handling the waste stream should have been produced. Instead the State agency, the Department of Environmental Conservation, which enforces the Act’s requirements, allowed the City to complete only an Export Plan in 2000, thus negating the entire purpose of a Law, which required comprehensive solid waste planning to increase diversion from disposal to 50% by 1997. Part of the City’s rationale for completing only an Export SWMP was the need to act quickly so that the principal facility in Linden, NJ could proceed through permitting.

The Linden proposal never came to fruition, and because of the exclusive focus on export, the City has essentially wasted a total of 8 years (from 1996 — 2004), which could have been used to develop waste prevention, reuse, recycling and composting alternatives to disposal. In fact, in 1997 each of the Boroughs, working with the Borough Presidents, produced Borough Solid Waste Plans, which all recommended pursuing alternatives to disposal and export. The City Council also prepared its own recommendations for expanding programs in waste prevention, reuse, recycling and composting in 1997. Instead, under the Giuliani administration, the Borough plans and the City Council plan were ignored in favor of pursuing an Export Plan.

The City administration will likely produce a new multi-volume 20 year Solid Waste Management Plan in August or September of 2004. The public and City Council may have only 30-60 days to review and comment on the Plan. The City Council should not wait until the City Draft SWMP is produced to begin to consider what the plan should contain. This Zero Waste plan, as well as the recently released Recycling Returns report, by Natural Resources Defense Council and supported by 10 other environmental organizations, provide core recommendations for setting us on a zero waste future. The recommendations in the OWN/CPI report, Taking Out the Trash, which also dealt with the problems of commercial waste in NYC, should also be considered. Collectively, these plans and reports represent considerable public input. Therefore, the City Council, starting with the Sanitation Committee, should develop its position and start negotiating with the Administration as soon as possible, in order to achieve a Solid Waste Management Plan with a zero waste approach.

What is Zero Waste?

Our current waste systems are based on a premise that waste is an inevitable burden that must be managed. "Zero Waste" is a new approach, a creative and comprehensive one that says waste is a byproduct of poor planning, bad design and inefficient markets. The zero waste approach can sound radical and idealistic; however, it rests primarily on real, practical programs that have been around a very long time.

A Zero Waste Plan for New York City should be:

An ambitious goal that can spark the kind of creativity and innovation that is needed to solve our mounting waste problem.
A planning framework that seeks to create an economy where products are reused, repaired and recycled; an economy that minimizes and ultimately eliminates waste.
A whole system approach to redesigning the way that materials and resources flow through our economy to eliminate waste and inefficiency at all phases of a product’s life cycle.
The next industrial revolution — a system that goes beyond the three R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle) to address the three E’s (efficiency, economics and ethics).
An investment in the local economy, and creation of local jobs, to reclaim materials that would otherwise become waste.

Zero Waste is not a literal target. It may not be possible to eliminate every item from the waste stream — but we will not know how far we can get unless we try. If we do not strive for zero, we will continue to make only incremental progress to stem the tide of waste.

A zero waste approach in NYC would mean that NYC should reduce its waste exports for disposal to very close to nothing. This can be done by intensive attention to the four Pieces of Zero–waste prevention, reuse, recycling and composting.

The California Integrated Waste Management Board, which sets policy for the entire State, has adopted a zero waste goal for 2020. As of 2002, 143 jurisdictions in California have exceeded a 50% interim waste diversion goal. Given New York City’s budget woes, it is perhaps worth noting that probably no state in the nation has a worse budget situation than California-- yet their accomplishments in the waste arena are leading the nation (Moulton-Paterson, 2002).

San Francisco has adopted a zero waste goal for 2020, with an interim goal of 75 percent diversion by 2010. To get there, the City is rolling out large scale organics composting. The City collects food and other organics and delivers them to a farm west of the City where they are composted and the compost is sold as a soil amendment. San Francisco’s recyclables are delivered to a state-of-the-art processing facility. The facility was developed by NorCal Waste Systems on land owned by the City’s Department of Ports and Trade with favorable financing from the City’s economic development office. The programs are financed primarily through a Pay as You Throw system (Haley, 2002).

The City of San Francisco supplements these programs with educational efforts like its "Shop Smart" consumer campaign that combines shelf labeling and advertising to encourage consumers to purchase less wasteful products and packaging. The campaign has resulted in measurable reductions in the sales of targeted products and packaging and increases in sales of products sold in bulk (Liss et al, 1999).

Facing escalating waste disposal and export costs, the City of Toronto, Ontario, adopted a goal of zero waste by 2010, with interim diversion goals of 30 percent by 2003 and 60 percent by 2006. Toronto is on track, with a 32 percent diversion rate last year. This is challenging because, like New York, Toronto is a city of high-rise buildings — almost half its population lives in high-rise or multi-family buildings and speaks many languages.

Building on its current curbside recycling program, the plan Toronto created includes:

Source separated organics recovery: Collection programs have been launched in low-density districts and two collection strategies are being tested for multi-family buildings; one uses an automated chute system and the other involves drop off sites with underground storage containers that reduce odor. Additional organics programs include subsidized backyard composting bins, a leave-it-on -the lawn grass clippings program and separate yard debris collections.
Public space recycling: There are more than 3,000 "silver box" recycling bins in the city’s public spaces that collect paper, beverage containers and waste. A firm supplies the bins free to the city. Advertising revenues are shared by the city and the company and cover the cost of servicing the bins.
Innovative collection strategies: The city uses dual compartment trucks and collects organics and recyclables one week and organics and residue another week. It has improved collection efficiencies by 25 percent by transitioning its collection force to a workweek of four ten-hour days to enable collection on longer routes, or two routes per day (Center for Economic and Environmental Partnership, 2002).
Household hazardous waste reduction: A program enables residents to drop off left over but usable toxic materials, like paint, for use by others who need them.
Reuse: Recommendations include city-wide yard sales and "amnesty days" when residents would be encouraged to put unwanted materials on the curb for others to take.
Education: This includes written materials in many languages, special programs and materials targeted at building superintendents, and community based education through the "Waste Watchers" program.
Financing: Initial expenses in the zero waste program, including organics collection containers, were financed through a special assessment and the city is considering implementing Pay as You Throw in both multi-family and single-family areas for long-term (Toronto Task Force, 2001).

Xerox adopted Waste-Free Factory environmental performance goals in the early 90s, which include significant reductions in waste, emissions, and energy consumption. Worldwide solid waste recycling rates reached 88% and savings amounted to $45 million by 1998. Xerox has embraced extended producer responsibility and implemented design for recycling, disassembly and reuse. It also set environmental requirements for its suppliers worldwide, to design products that are durable and reusable, in factories that make dramatic reductions in air, water, and solid waste. Xerox is asking all of their facilities and suppliers to achieve a 90% reduction in all emissions from a 1990 baseline (Liss and Associates, 2000, and Xerox, 2003).

Achieving zero waste, or close to it, is possible using a mix of currently available methods. The Zero Waste goal may be ambitious, but the methods to reduce the waste stream and divert large amounts of material to reuse, recycling and composting have been proven to be quite practical over the long term in communities around the nation and the world.

Reaching for Zero: A Citizens Plan for Zero Waste in NYC

In Part II of this report, Pieces of Zero, we discuss the principal methods that can be used to achieve zero waste: Waste Prevention, Reuse, Recycling and Composting.

To date NYC has devoted most of its resources to disposal, rather than any of these alternatives. Of all available waste diversion methods, recycling has received the lion’s share of attention. Recycling is of course essential, since recyclables account for 44% of the waste stream. However, ignoring waste prevention, reuse and composting will lock us into failure; it will be impossible to achieve zero waste or even 50-60% diversion by focusing exclusively on recycling. We must use all of the Pieces of Zero if we are to achieve success.

In this plan we discuss composting as separate from recycling. However, composting is actually nothing more than the recycling of food scraps and yard debris into soil amendments or fertilizers. Public officials often forget about the organic portion of the waste stream when recycling is discussed. We therefore discuss it separately.

In Part III of Reaching for Zero, there are seven chapters devoted to programs that support zero waste programming: Economic Development, Education, Enforcement, Transportation, Financing, Legislation and Regulation, Research and Data-gathering. We are recommending an entire comprehensive program for adoption by the City. Proper management is the glue that can integrate all the component parts into a comprehensive system with success as the outcome. The remainder of this section summarizes the programs necessary for "Reaching Zero."

Management

A Zero Waste future will require strong and authoritative management structures. The City’s progress on recycling, waste prevention and composting to date has been hampered by the management of these programs being housed within an agency whose primary mission is to keep the city’s streets clean and clear. While the Department of Sanitation does a superb job of its operational tasks, such as garbage collection, snow removal, and lot clearing, its vision and creativity in planning for waste prevention, reuse, recycling and composting has been lacking. The upper management of this agency is made up almost exclusively of people whose tenure in the Department is marked in decades and whose work experience has focused on waste collection and disposal, rather than embracing opportunities to reduce and recycle.

There are at least four essential elements in a desirable zero waste management structure:

An administrative structure that fosters cross-agency collaboration to develop ideas, activities, and programs.
A long term, future oriented commitment to Zero Waste
The authority to recommend and implement changes in multiple City agencies at the same time.
Dedicated and consistent funding that attracts and retains qualified personnel to develop and ensure the success of the Zero Waste Programs.

In order to achieve zero waste (or darn close to it) New York City needs to place planning for waste prevention, reuse, composting and recycling within a structure that approaches these program elements as tools for environmental improvement and economic development, not solely as waste management strategies. This can be accomplished through a variety of specific means, including but not limited to:

Elevating the Bureau of Waste Prevention, Reuse and Recycling to the Deputy Commissioner level, on par with other DSNY divisions;
Expanding the role of the Mayor’s Office of Environmental Coordination to include zero waste planning;
Creating a new entity, either directly under the Mayor or in the Economic Development Corporation to plan for and manage a zero waste system;
Developing a new agency that combines the environmental activities in both the Department of Sanitation and the Department of Environmental Protection. (Several cities, such as Portland, OR, and San Francisco, CA, have joined recycling and waste prevention with energy efficiency and other environmental planning functions under the direction of the Mayor in a city Office of Sustainability or Department of the Environment.)

Regardless of the structure ultimately chosen, it is critical that the staff planning for zero waste have the authority to work closely with and influence the activities of other city agencies. Many waste prevention, reuse, recycling and composting initiatives, most notably recycling market development and procurement, will require cross-agency collaboration. As a result, any management structure adopted must enable zero waste planners to work closely with other agencies and must give them sufficient authority to ensure implementation of zero waste initiatives. In addition, consistent planning and implementation activities would be greatly enhanced by developing a dedicated funding source outside the conventional tax base (See Chapter 9, Financing).

Finally, reaching zero waste (or very close to it) will require that the City commit staff and resources for the long haul. In this context, annual or semi-annual budget changes that scuttle plans and reduce staffing are intolerable. Zero waste and economic development plans can be implemented and goals realized only if sufficient and experienced personnel are attracted and retained. Inconsistent funding and commitment will lead to zero waste programs with the least qualified staff. The importance of a long-term commitment also applies to the commercial sector, where investments in facilities are more likely to occur when it is clear that the City is committed for the long haul.

Implementation of the Zero Waste Plan

We have created a plan for achieving zero waste that is divided into three time periods: the first five years, the second five years and the final ten years. This summary provides a picture of the goals and objectives to be accomplished in each of three time periods through 2024 -- the Near-Term Period through 2009, the Intermediate Period through 2014 and the Long Term Period through 2024— including the diversion achieved in each period. Below we provide tonnage estimates that each "zero waste" method diverts from the residential/ institutional waste stream. These are necessarily rough estimates given that only poor data are available on the composition of the waste stream. The last NYC waste composition study was completed in 1990 for the 1992 Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Plan. We don’t attempt to present commercial figures for two reasons–one, we don’t have an accurate estimate of commercial waste composition because there has been no study of this, and two, the tonnage that the City is responsible for directly affects the City budget and is of more immediate concern. This plan makes recommendations to increase commercial waste diversion, but recognizes that we need to have a better monitoring system in place to accurately document the handling of commercial waste in New York City and to identify areas, where zero waste efforts should be targeted.

We have prepared an "Implementation" chart that summarizes all the milestones or accomplishments that should be achieved in each program and in each time period. The Implementation chart follows this Overview. However, all the programs are described in much more detail in the individual chapters. For the Pieces of Zero-- waste prevention, reuse, recycling and composting — tonnage and percentage estimates are included showing what will be achieved in each period for the residential/institutional waste stream.

While it will certainly be useful to establish other objectives along the way, such as those related to market development or educational awareness, the overall waste goal will be measured by what we accomplish with the core Pieces of Zero. The City currently produces nearly 23,000 tons per day of trash or 6.9 million tons per year from all sectors. We estimate that for the 13,000 ton per day of the residential and institutional portion of the waste stream- waste prevention and reuse each represent 15% of the waste stream, compostable food and yard waste represent 26% of the waste stream and recyclables represent 44%. A commercial waste composition study would assist us in targeting future programs for this sector.

Near Term Goals 2004- 2009

Overall Diversion 30% or 1.175 million tons annually with a combination of Waste Prevention, Reuse, Recycling and Composting

(This tonnage applies only to the DSNY-managed residential/ institutional waste stream. Additional tonnage would come from the commercial waste stream)

In this period, we recommend laying the groundwork for all the zero waste programs, getting them established for the substantial diversion in the next two time periods. This is the period in which massive changes in the way we handle waste will have to be devised, planned, and set in motion. However, there will not be a dramatic improvement in diversion in this period, nor considerable savings to the City. Building these zero waste programs requires investment. We project that achieving a 30% diversion goal is achievable in the near term through a combination of waste prevention, reuse, composting and recycling. During this period we will heavily rely on recycling because it is an existing program, while the other programs will be starting almost from scratch.

At the end of 2009, if this Zero Waste Plan is adopted by the City, most of the necessary infrastructure will be planned or built. All the support programs described in these Chapters –Economic Development, Education, Enforcement, Financing, Research and Data-gathering, Legislation and Regulation, and Transportation–will largely be in place. This means that we should have expanded market development activities; more comprehensive and transparent information in order to make decisions; sounder, goal-directed education programs; and most important of all, the long term commitment of the City to a Zero Waste Future. The Implementation Chart provides a summary of all programs to be accomplished by the end of 2009. However, a weak commitment or failure to find dollars for important programs will delay the achievement of the overall zero waste goal. As experience has shown, landfilling costs only go up. Only a zero waste course will provide us with the needed diverse outlets to insulate the City from rising disposal costs.

Waste prevention programs in this first, Near Term period should prevent 89,212 tons per year of waste, or 15% of total preventable materials in the DSNY managed waste stream. Given that banning grass clipping collection could alone prevent 78,000 tons of waste for disposal, this goal should not be difficult to achieve.

The City must put the following programs in place to reach our goals:

Zero Waste Coordinators in each of the City’s 59 Community Districts
Technical assistance offices and staffing that will provide waste audits and waste prevention assistance to agencies and institutions, hospitals and businesses
School-based waste prevention coordinators and cafeteria conversions to reusable trays and serviceware
Revolving Loan programs to enable capital expenses aimed at waste prevention

Note: Each chapter contains much more detail about programs.

Reuse should divert 59,475 tons per year or 10% of available reusables. Given the limited existing reuse infrastructure, this plan is calling for the construction of reuse complexes and reuse recovery facilities in order to achieve this objective–diverting almost 200 tons per day of reusables such as furniture, appliances, carpeting, textiles.

Programs that must be put in place in this period include:

Four Reuse Complexes and four Reuse MRFs operating in four boroughs with supplementary truck fleet
Municipal curbside collection of durables and reusables–in non-compactor trucks
On-line trading of reusables
Technical assistance and financial support for reuse businesses
Forty Neighborhood swap shops

Recycling should divert 872,300 tons per year or 50% of available recyclable material. This goal is not unrealistic–the City was recycling over 762,000 tons of recyclables before the recent cuts to the program in 2002.

Programs that must be put in place in this period include:

Adequate recycling processing capacity under long term contract or planned
Market development office created and development plan produced
Curbside recycling collection efficiency improved. Various pilots should inform the efficiency improvements
Recycling that reaches problem areas and participants–public spaces, multifamily dwellings, agencies and institutions

Composting of organics should divert 155,000 tons or 15% of available food and yard debris (this additional tonnage does not include the grass clippings, banned and listed under waste prevention above). An expansion of the City’s existing yard waste programs should be able to triple the compostable organics recovered from the waste stream, which were recently at 47,000 tons per year.

Programs that must be put in place in this period include:

Grass clippings banned from collection
Technical assistance for on-site composting for agencies, institutions and businesses
One or more commercial scale food scrap composting facilities providing 900 tons per day of capacity
50,000 backyard bins distributed to households
Spring/summer yard debris collection citywide
Public task force created to advise City on compost facility siting and operational issues

Transportation

Programs to be put in place in this period include:

Vehicle miles traveled (VMT) have been reduced as municipal route efficiency improvements were made subsequent to pilot tests
Commercial collection franchise system makes significant reductions in VMT
Clean fuel vehicle implementation strategy including for marine vessels developed and implemented
Existing rail lines evaluated for their potential to move recyclables

Research and Data-Gathering

Programs to be put in place in this period include:

Full waste composition analyses including toxic components of the waste stream
Detailed and transparent data including costs available to the public on all zero waste programs and disposal.
EPA-recommended standardized full cost accounting methodology used.

Education

Programs to be put in place in this period include:

Zero Waste advertising campaign
Consumer shopping campaign focused on waste prevention
Reuse public awareness campaign
Mandatory zero waste curriculum in schools
Block and Building Leader volunteer programs to promote zero waste programs
Targeted education campaigns for key constituencies- i.e., building superintendents
Ongoing research to evaluate all programs

Economic Development

Programs to be put in place in this period include:

Technical and financial assistance for zero waste businesses
A capital fund for zero waste infrastructure investments
Focused market development efforts on materials in our waste stream
Planning for Reuse/Recycling Industrial Parks and one established

Enforcement

Programs to be put in place in this period include:

Educational enforcement strategy with collection and enforcement crews trained
More attention to multifamily dwellings and agencies and institutions
New commercial recycling laws enforced
Greater enforcement of operating facility violations

Legislation & Regulation

Legislation to be put in place in this period include:

Grass clipping disposal ban
NY State Bigger Better Bottle Bill
Comprehensive City procurement legislation aimed at waste prevention, recycling, reuse and composting
Zero Waste Resolution
Updated and improved City Recycling Law
Lower commercial carting rates for recyclable/reusable materials
Market development stimulated with minimum content laws
Some extended producer responsibility legislation developed and passed, with other bills being considered

Financing

Programs to be put in place in this period include funding mechanisms for zero waste programs:

Waste Disposal Surcharges for Commercial and DSNY managed waste
Commercial franchise fees established
Grants Unit established
Charging "Fees for Service" has been evaluated and implemented
Partnership with Industry to fund certain programs
The Bigger Better Bottle Bill
PAYT, Pay as You Throw, systems in place for institutional waste, a similar system for City agencies, and pilot tests being conducted in the residential sector in conjunction with deliberation of a PAYT Task Force
Extended Producer legislation enacted to shift waste handling and disposal costs back onto the producer.

The Intermediate Term Accomplishments (2010-- end of 2014)

Overall Diversion 50% with a combination of Waste Prevention, Reuse, Recycling and Composting (Tonnage figures are only for the residential/institutional waste stream.)

By the end of 2014, all needed new infrastructure should be built. Most of the pilot programs should be completed and evaluated so the rollout of the final programs can be accomplished. Ongoing evaluations and improvements to all programs are taking place in order to achieve the more ambitious goals of this period. However, unlike in the previous period, where the City needed to invest heavily in zero waste programs without seeing savings benefits right away, in this period these programs are claiming a bigger share of the waste stream and saving the dollars that would have been spent on disposal. This is largely because of more efficient recycling collections and reductions in unnecessary waste collections.

Waste prevention programs should prevent 208,000 tons or 35% of total available preventables. Technical assistance programs for NYC agencies and institutions will begin to have a real impact, as will the special consumer shopping days and the on-the-ground community zero waste coordinators. Evaluation of existing programs as well as the 2009 waste composition analysis are used to hone this phase of waste prevention programming.

Reuse should divert 237,900 tons or 40% of available reusables, with all of the needed reuse infrastructure completed and functioning. Reuse should divert four times as much waste, 800 tons per day, as compared to the Near Term period. More importantly, reuse provides tremendous value for non-profits, schools, government and small businesses. All five boroughs now have Reuse MRFs and Reuse Complexes, and possibly more depending on capacity needs.

Recycling should divert 1.22 million tons or 70% of available recyclable material by the end of 2014. This achievement includes the expansion of the targeted materials for recycling. As determined by analyzing needs, additional recycling processing capacity is added.

Composting of organics should divert 464,000 tons or 45% of available food and yard debris. Additional composting or anaerobic digestion facilities will be constructed as identified by capacity needs analysis. Expanded food and yard waste collections will accomplish this diversion goal.

Transportation