According to an Associated Press (AP) report, Mexico City is pushing to build the infrastructure to dramatically increase the city’s recycling rate.

From the article:

A newly formed Waste Commission is working to build four state-of-the-art processing centers in the next four years to recycle, compost or burn for energy 85 percent of Mexico City’s trash - compared with about 6 percent recycled today. If it works, it would put this sprawling, polluted metropolis in a league with San Francisco, the Netherlands and other top recyclers, and first among developing cities, where the recycling rates mostly hover around 10 percent.

“The whole concept of recycling is very new in Latin America,” said Atiliano Savino, president of the International Solid Waste Association.

While many places are good at recycling one thing, such as aluminum, Savino said, he’s never seen a city revamp its recycling program on this scale in so little time. U.S. and European cities that now have recycling rates over 50 percent began decades ago.

What do you think? Does such an ambitious plan have a chance in infierno of succeeding?

• The Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA) Applied Research Foundation recently released the following five research reports:

* Curbside Collection of Residential Food Waste

* Benchmarking of Solid Waste Collection Services: FY 2008

* Waste-to-Energy and the Solid Waste Management Hierarchy

* Benchmarking the Performance and Costs of MSW Landfills

* Long-Term Environmental Risks of Subtitle D Landfills

Four of the five reports are currently available for purchase at www.SWANAstore.com. The research memorandum on Curbside Collection of Residential Food Waste is available free of charge to SWANA members at www.swana.org.

Sure your mom loves you. But does she love you enough to wade into a Dumpster in high heels for your educational benefit? Christy Roe of Atlanta did just that after her son’s seventh-grade science project wound up in the trash. Roe had brought the box containing her son’s project, illustrating the principle of momentum, to school. Not wanting to interrupt his class, she left it outside the door of the science teacher’s classroom. She returned 10 minutes later to find the box had vanished.

Roe soon learned that a custodian had mistaken the box for trash and disposed of it in the school’s Dumpster. After failing to convince the custodian to retrieve it, she went in after it herself. She unearthed pieces of the project, but was unable to find the $25 Newton’s Cradle that was the centerpiece of the display. Police had to be called to pacify Roe, who believed the cradle was stolen. She was subsequently asked to leave the premises. Nevertheless, her son got full credit on the assignment. Not that it mattered.

“He doesn’t even care,” Roe told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “All he cares about is video games.”

Source: Atlanta Journal & Constitution

When it comes to escaping prison via transport, the choice comes down to dirty or very dirty: Hide in the laundry or hide in the trash. Cleveland County State Detention Center inmate trustee Andrew Lawarren Johnson no doubt hoped to improve his chances by picking the less pleasant option. All he got for his trouble was an inside look at the facility’s sanitation system.

“He attempted to secrete himself in a trash can in hope of being dumped with the regular trash into the detention center Dumpster located outdoors,” Cleveland County Undersheriff Rhett Burnett told the Norman Transcript. But deputies at the jail quickly sniffed out Johnson’s plan. They played along, allowing him to go out with the trash. But once he was inside the Dumpster, it was quickly surrounded, and the dirty jailbird was taken back into custody.

Johnson, who was originally sentenced on charges of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and marijuana possession, will lose his trustee status and will face an additional charge of attempted escape. He’ll probably need to make use of that laundry service.

Source: The Norman Transcript

After years of acrimony and sabre-rattling by politicians, the Toronto-Michigan trash saga appears to be ending not with a bang, but with something of a whimper.

Toronto officials released a report in early February showing that the amount of trash the city sends each day to a Michigan landfill has been slashed by half since 2003. At that time, the city sent 140 tractor-trailer loads of trash each day to Republic Services’ Carleton Farms landfill in Sumpter Township, Mich., according to a summary of the report in the Toronto Star newspaper. Now that figure is down to 70 tractor-trailer loads each day. The city plans to eliminate its trash exports to Michigan altogether by 2011.

To those who haven’t followed the story or who are new to the industry, it would be hard to overstate the brouhaha these exports have caused over the years. Michigan residents have understandably been concerned about the resulting truck traffic. But state and federal politicians did their best to stoke the passions, sometimes hinting darkly (and inaccurately) that Toronto’s trash was somehow especially toxic or dangerous (actually, if the shipments contained discarded albums by Canadian rock groups BTO and The Guess Who, then they might have a point). Legislators have made repeated attempts to ban or limit the imports. Several years ago, U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., introduced such a bill and claimed the shipments were creating a “U.S. border security weakness.”

Toronto officials credit the reduction in shipments to the city’s expanded recycling and composting programs. However, just to show that no good deed goes unpunished, these expanded programs are now causing the city a bit of a financial headache.

According to another report in the Toronto Sun, with the market for recyclables in the tank, the city is facing a $10 million recycling revenue shortfall. Thankfully, the city appears committed to their diversion programs for the long haul. “We’ve certainly lived through these kinds of cycles before,” Geoff Rathbone, general manager of the city’s solid waste management services, told the paper. “I have no doubt the long-term future for recycling is strong.”

Toronto officials have consistently handled the Michigan controversy with maturity. They are to be commended for working so hard to bring this issue to a close — and helping the environment in the process.

The New York Times touches on the environmental efforts of Tampa Bay’s Raymond James Stadium for the Super Bowl, including waste handling:

Recycling and composting are also being deployed on game day. Plates, napkins and even forks and straws are supposed to be biodegradable — and cooking grease is to be recycled. Plastic drink bottles will also be recycled, stadium officials said.

The challenge in this environment seems to be getting fans, who are single-mindedly focused on the big game, to spare a thought for proper waste disposal. Given the amount of trash simply thrown on the ground at sporting events, coaxing people to use a receptacle at all seems a victory, much less getting them to delineate between recyclable and compostable waste.

On a related note, check out our recent report on FanCans.

Mecklenburg County Solid Waste Services in North Carolina is partnering with Coca-Cola and Harris Teeter grocery stores to encourage residents in and around Charlotte, N.C. to recycle more and be more aware of what can and can’t be recycled. According to a News 14 Carolina report, the program will give away $26,000 in prizes as the Coca-Cola Prize Patrol randomly polices recycling bins in the area and rewards exemplary recyclers with $50 Harris Teeter gift cards.

“We’ve seen many people move into this community from other areas that had not so well established programs and haven’t participated the way we should,” Solid Waste Services Director Burce Gledhill said in an interview with News 14. “All of these materials would otherwise go into a landfill, and landfills are preciously few. Mecklenburg County has its own landfill, but it will eventually run out of space.”

Programs like this and RecycleBank, which similarly rewards residents with retail gift cards based on the volume of recycling, are innovative ways to generate interest in recycling, especially in communities that are struggling to get programs up and running. Do you have examples of similar reward-based programs?

New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin announced cuts to a range of sanitation services in the city’s historic French Quarter to compensate for a projected $7.5 billion dollar budget shortfall this year. According to the Times-Picayune, Nagin proposed the cuts in services — provided through a contract with SDT Waste & Debris Services — in direct opposition to the city council, which today announced plans to take the mayor to court.

The services Nagin has proposed eliminating — daily street flushing, mechanical street and sidewalk sweeping, and round-the-clock maintenance of litter cans — are among new services that have drawn rave reviews since the SDT contract began in 2007. They amount to $2.05 million of SDT’s $8.9 million annual contract, city records show.

Many of the services to be cut were instituted in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, to make the French Quarter more welcoming to tourists. Though there is technically enough money in the budget to cover these services, Nagin has previously emphasized the need to set aside some of that money for what amounts to a “rainy day” fund, for use in the event of future hurricanes.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that, effective Jan. 18, the Office of Solid Waste (OSW) has been reorganized and renamed as the Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery (ORCR).

The reorganization consolidates complementary functions in order to achieve efficiencies in operations. This reorganization consolidates the four major areas of the Resource Conservation Challenge (RCC) under one division; combines data collection and data analysis activities thus streamlining operations to better coordinate EPA’s efforts to analyze and present the benefits of its program; and consolidates waste-to-energy activities in one division and branch.

Whether this change represents a fundamental shift in how the former OSW does business — perhaps in concert with the new administration — or is just a superficial make over remains to be seen. We can only hope that it reflects the federal government’s intention to make recycling and conservation a national priority.

We’ve heard a lot about the tanking value of recyclables of late, but there still has been a sense that regular old garbage would continue to flow as usual, despite the slumping economy. Not so. A Los Angeles Times report details the pinch being felt by California landfills as they see less and less waste coming in and diminishing income from tipping fees.

“There always have been three givens in life: death, taxes and garbage,” said Evan Edgar, a civil engineer and a regulatory advocate for the California Refuse Recycling Council. “Since the 1970s, that’s been a mantra in our industry. But what this recession has shown is that we will have death and taxes, but garbage is no longer recession-proof.”

Of course, looking at the big picture, the fact that Americans are producing less waste is essentially a good thing. It wasn’t too long ago that many were fretting (rightly or wrongly) about dwindling landfill space. But, as the article points out, it also leaves a gaping hole in the budgets of many municipalities and waste companies, a hole exacerbated by the lack of income from recycling. What to do?