30 Years at Zero Waste (or pretty darn close)

 

In 1970 our nation celebrated its first Earth Day. Its purpose was to celebrate the richness and beauty of our planet and to raise awareness about the need to protect the planet and preserve its ability to sustain life. Many used the opportunity to protest and to demand that the government enact legislation protecting the environment and requiring that businesses act more responsibly. My wife and I did not disagree, but upon reflection, we thought: shouldn’t we be taking responsibility for our own actions? Then we asked: What was the biggest personal impact we had on the environment? The answer, we felt, was the waste we produced and the non-renewable energy we consumed.

 

So we made two commitments: 1) We would not buy anything that we were unwilling to take responsibility for (disposal was not an option since it shifts consequences to someone else), and 2) We would strive to become more energy efficient and use renewable energy whenever possible. We did our best, and by 1978 we had built an energy efficient, all electric home powered by passive geothermal along with passive and active solar and supplemented by an Energy Supply Company (ESCO) specializing in supplying renewable energy. Recently we purchased an electric vehicle to cover our transportation needs.

 

The problem is that close to 40% of the energy we use comes in the form of the “stuff” we consume. Over half of this “embedded” energy is used to mine and refine the virgin material used to make the products we bring into our lives. This makes a powerful argument for buying with the intent to reuse, recycle, or compost what you purchase and avoiding what you can’t reuse, recycle, or compost, which is precisely what our family has been doing for close to 30 years.

 

We started a compost pile in our backyard, but back in the early 70’s very little recycling was taking place. There was paper recycling done through paper drives. Scrap metal dealers and glass manufacturers would take your metal and glass, but you needed to get these materials to their sites. Most communities have scrap metal dealers, and we were fortunate to have a glass manufacturer in a friend’s hometown, so we took our glass there when we visited. Plastic was not being recycled, but then again, there was far less of it back then and we could usually find alternative containers.

 

That said, we wanted to make it more convenient. We were members of a food co-op at the time that already had a clothing and book exchange. Some of us got together to form a community drop-off recycling program as well. This worked to some degree, but it was not community wide, and it was difficult to sustain with volunteers. It made me realize that our government would have to step up and develop the necessary recycling infrastructure.

 

As luck would have it, in 1980 our County Executive developed a consensus for moving away from landfilling. Unfortunately his alternative was incineration. When I asked how much recycling was planned for, the response was 5% ferrous metal to be pulled out of the bottom ash at the end of the process. I served on our local Environmental Management Council at the time, and we proposed a robust recycling program to “augment” the incinerator. There were very few successful recycling efforts at the time, so, I think the County Executive, along with the County Legislature gave their blessing, expecting us to fail. In the meantime, they went ahead with plans to build the incinerator, sized to the full waste stream. 

 

We wrote a recycling plan and implemented it in 1987, the same year the incinerator project released their draft EIS. We grew the recycling program while criticizing the incinerator project. Recycling rates were higher than our projections. Many citizens felt that if we recycled, we would not need the incinerator and they were right. In 1991, I testified at the incinerator permit hearing, suggesting that the incinerator would undermine our recycling efforts. The DEC Commissioner agreed and ordered that either a smaller incinerator be built or importation of waste into the County be allowed.  The company that was to build the incinerator insisted that it could not economically downsize, so the County Legislature held a vote to allow importation. That vote failed, effectively killing the project.

 

In 1992 on Earth Day, local, national, and international film crews captured our family (my wife, two daughters, and myself) taking a single 32 gallon can of waste to the landfill. Not out of the ordinary but for the fact that it had taken us six years to fill it. What I did not share at the time was the fact that we were already at zero waste, or pretty darn close. What we have generated since fits in a paper grocery bag. A robust recycling program has made our family recycling efforts much easier while more and more people are moving toward zero waste. We are no longer unique, but perhaps hold the record for the longest time at zero waste: 30 years this spring.