Georgia has unveiled a new license tag as part of the state’s “Recycle 4 Georgia” program, which also includes a popular series of temporary tattoos.

The tag must receive 1000 pre-orders by December in order to permanently join other charitable tags offered by the state. $10 of each order will go to the Keep Georgia Beautiful Foundation.

The New York Times shines a spotlight on Houston, home to the nation’s largest waste handler in Waste Management, as well as to the worst recycling rate of any major metropolitan area in the nation.

Cheap land, a lack of political will, and an “independent streak” among the Houston populace translates into an anemic 2.6 recycling rate. Compare that to San Francisco at the opposite end of the spectrum, which recycles close to 70 percent of its waste, or New York, which is just above the national average at 34 percent.

“But city officials say real progress will be hard to come by. Landfill costs here are cheap. The city’s sprawling, no-zoning layout makes collection expensive, and there is little public support for the kind of effort it takes to sort glass, paper and plastics. And there appears to be even less for placing fees on excess trash.

‘We have an independent streak that rebels against mandates or anything that seems trendy or hyped up,’ said Mayor Bill White, who favors expanding the city’s recycling efforts. ‘Houstonians are skeptical of anything that appears to be oversold or exaggerated. But Houstonians can change, and change fast.’”



They’ll have to, lest the rest of the nation leave them behind.

Just three weeks after Republic agreed to buy Allied, the solid waste industry once again finds itself firmly in the media spotlight with yesterday’s announcement that Waste Management is seeking to scuttle the Republic-Allied deal by buying Republic. Here’s a brief round-up of what some major media outlets are saying about the offer:

Reuters: “Republic shares had been off 17 percent since word leaked of the company’s plan to bid for Allied, which created the opening Waste Management needed to offer a competing proposal, JPMorgan analyst Scott Levine wrote in a note to clients.

Republic’s strong business in Las Vegas is an especially compelling asset, said [Waste Management CEO David] Steiner, who said Waste Management hadn’t yet started to figure out how many landfills the combined company would have.”

Forbes.com: “Speaking at a Forbes conference several months ago, CEO Steiner said that one key to Waste Management’s future — and a possible driver of the Republic deal — is cornering the waste-to-energy business. With 227 landfills, the company already produces 2 gigawatts of ‘green’ power for 2 million homes. Waste Management burns trash to produce electricity, by tapping the methane produced in burning to create natural gas.”

Bloomberg.com: “Waste Management would likely borrow to pay for Republic, ‘adding considerable debt to the capital structure versus where they are today,’ Fitch analyst Stephen Brown said today in a telephone interview. ‘Equity investors are looking at the overall cost and having some concern about that.”’

The Wall Street Journal: “The three largest U.S. waste companies control more than two-thirds of the nation’s permitted landfill capacity, according to a February 2007 report by the Solid Waste Association of North America, a group of mostly municipal trash officials. A merger of $13-billion Waste Management and $3-billion Republic, in sales, would leave just under half the country’s permitted landfill capacity in the control of the combined company.”

Business Week: “A Republic-Allied deal would create a company with a market share of 17% to 18% in North America, a credible rival to Waste Management’s 24% share, according to Stewart Scharf, an equity analyst at Standard & Poor’s. But Waste Management’s Republic bid would boost its market share to 30%, putting even more distance between Waste Management and its second-place rival, Allied Waste, with a market share of 10% or 11% … Robert Lande, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and a director of the American Antitrust Institute, says by itself a 30% market share wouldn’t raise concerns—at least judging by the record of regulators in the Bush Administration. However, garbage hauling is a very local business, and the competitive landscape would need to be analyzed metropolitan area by metropolitan area, Lande says.”

Yesterday, NPR’s All Things Considered featured a remarkable story about Tijuana, Mexico resident Miroslava Enciso Limon, who after visiting one of the city’s notorious dumps at age 17 and seeing the families who lived there, dedicated herself to improving the way trash was handled in the city. After obtaining a degree in industrial engineering, she designed a machine to sort waste and recycling, convinced the city’s leaders to adopt it, and hired the dump’s former residents as employees. Well worth a listen.

Last week, Discovery Networks launched Planet Green, a new channel devoted to “eco-tainment.” If this sounds like a crass commodification of environmental concern … well … it is.

Early returns have not been kind. Troy Patterson, television critic for Slate, offers a particularly harsh review, saying the network “embarrasses the Earth.” Ouch.

Do we really need a 24/7 network peopled with Hollywood spokesmodels telling us to us to recycle, ride a bike and (for the 847th time) adopt compact fluorescent light bulbs? Don’t we risk reducing common sense admonitions to white noise?

I’m of mixed opinion. On one hand, it seems like this brand of glib environmentalism is just asking for a backlash. On the other hand, there is a place for a channel focused on genuine environmental awareness. And Planet Green certainly wouldn’t be the first channel to launch with a questionable focus. Here’s hoping the channel eventually finds its footing and that we eventually get more “eco” and less “tainment.”

Garbage blogging, a trend we have reported on before, continues to gain momentum. Witness this Fiji Times report on Oakland, Calif. resident Beth Terry, who takes a photo of the carefully organized plastic she’s used or come across each week and posts it on her blog, “Fake Plastic Fish.”

Terry’s blog stood out for two reasons: 1) She’s managed to maintain her garbage watch consistently for an entire year, and 2) While other garbage bloggers I’ve seen approach the endeavor almost as anthropologists, with curiosity, Terry’s blog is borderline confessional. She’s determined to rid the world of plastic, and uses the blog as a forum to publicize her weekly transgressions.

How many of us could stand up to the same scrutiny?

From Time.com comes news that the Isle of Wight in Great Britain will flick the switch this summer on a $16 million, 2.3-megawatt gasification plant. According to the article, the plant, the first of its kind in the United Kingdom, will take in 30,000 tons of trash — or “rubbish,” as the Brits would say — a year to provide electricity for 2,000 households.

Of note from the article: “When it comes to trash, Britain, like much of the world, needs help. Its reputation as a green and pleasant land is at risk from the 16.9 million tons of trash it tossed into landfills last year — that’s more than any other country in the European Union. The Local Government Association recently warned that despite devoting 109 square miles to burial, Britain may run out of landfill space within nine years.”

Also: the Institution of Civil Engineers says that the trash that Britain landfills could provide up to 17 percent of its energy needs.

And finally, to help spread the gasification concept, the plant will feature a visitors’ center. Start planning your vacation now.

Several years ago, former Vice-President Al Gore appeared on Saturday Night Live and, in a skit based on the premise that he won the 2000 election and was addressing the nation from the Oval Office, said that he had mandated that cars run on trash. The joke got a big laugh from the studio audience, surely in part because the idea seemed a little wacky.

Well, wacky may be getting closer to reality than we could have imagined then.

According to this report from a Northwestern Medill School of Journalism newspaper, Lake County, Ind., may soon be home to the “first commercial-scale plants in the country [that] turn garbage into ethanol.”

Indiana Ethanol Power LLC has submitted a proposal to the county’s Solid Waste Management District for a facility that would use a process called “weak-acid hydrolysis” to convert trash into roughly 20 million gallons of ethanol a year, the paper says. Meanwhile, Genahol-Powers 1 LLC is seeking the county’s permission to build a facility that would burn trash to produce approximately 30 million gallons of ethanol annually.

If the district approves the proposals at a June meeting, then the plants could conceivably be up and running within two years, according to the paper. However, the local Sierra Club is voicing concerns about the technology that would be used in the Genahol plant.

“It’s still kind of an old-fashioned technology,” Sandy O’Brien, chair of the Dunelands Sierra Club, told the newspaper. “They’ll be burning things they could be recycling, like plastic.”

The Lake County news comes nearly a month after Waste Management announced that it has partnered with Linde North America to develop a Northern California facility that will convert landfill gas into liquified natural gas (LNG) to fuel area collection trucks. The facility is slated to open next year and Waste Management says it will produce roughly 13,000 gallons of LNG a day.

So, what’s your take? Will this prove to be a viable end use for trash?

While recycling materials is still more expensive for New York City than landfilling them, the cost difference is shrinking, according to a study by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) that is summarized in today’s New York Times. And recycling could even be cheaper for the city than landfilling within half a decade, the report adds.

The study, which was released by NRDC on Wednesday, says it costs the city $284 a ton to recycle glass, plastic, metal and paper, and $267 to landfill the materials. According to the Times, the cost difference was between $34 and $48 in 2004.

“Here is proof positive that recycling is cost-competitive with other waste disposal, to say nothing of cutting the city’s contribution to global warming,” said Eric Goldstein, a senior lawyer at NRDC, in the Times’ article.

And, so far at least, the city appears to be comfortable with the figures cited in the report. “We have no big disagreement with how they want to look at the numbers,” said Lorenzo Cipollina, deputy commissioner for financial management for New York’s Department of Sanitation.

Everyone more or less concedes that phone books have long outlived their usefulness. And yet they WILL NOT GO AWAY. A great (and highly amusing) article published today in Slate looks at some of consequences of continuing to produce a massive stack of paper that almost nobody uses.

Of particular interest:

That waste is a truly weighty issue. In Portland, Ore., alone this year, the Dex directories tipped the scales at 10.5 pounds per pair, consumed the equivalent of 49,779 trees, and could be stacked nearly 12 miles high into the stratosphere. And that’s just one of several directories that Portlanders receive. On a national level, the figures become mind-boggling. If we assign the not-terribly-scientific figure of just more than three pounds to the average directory, then the 615 million volumes produced last year come out to 1 million tons of phone books. Still, the Yellow Pages Association claims that phone books produce only 0.3 percent of the household waste stream—while “newspapers, in comparison, represent 4.9%.” Alas, customers ask for newspapers, and they do offer an opt-out—it’s called canceling your subscription.

It doesn’t help that the phone book industry’s history of recycling has been … well, nothing to call home about. NYNEX, for instance, once worked with wastepaper merchants to recover about half of all directories but gave up in 1959, with the onset of throwaway consumerism. After New York’s attorney general inquired about recycling plans in 1971, NYNEX responded that it was looking into the matter. They must have looked very hard, since they didn’t start again for another 19 years. Even today, phone books, with their bindings and low-grade paper, make a tough sell for recycling plants, and many areas lack substantive recycling options.

I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking phone book fort.