This small, rural northern Californian county is the first in the nation to adopt the Zero Waste Plan. Facing an imminent landfill closure, the county would like to export products, not garbage.

By Gary Liss

Key Principles of the Plan
Del Norte Background
Preparing the Plan
Target Recovery Programs
Conclusions

At the dawn of the new millennium, the Del Norte Solid Waste Management Authority began the next generation of planning beyond the concept of integrated waste management. On February 15, 2000, the authority adopted the Zero Waste Plan (ZW Plan) to guide its solid waste and recycling policies into the 21^st century.

The authority first endorsed policies of Zero Waste, End Welfare for Wasting, and Jumpstart Jobs from Design and Discards in 1997. It then obtained a grant from the United States Forest Service to develop a ZW Plan to help implement these adopted policies.

The ZW Plan is the first of its kind in the US. According to Bill Sheehan of the GrassRoots Recycling Network, "This plan is a model for many other communities to follow to stop wasting while creating more jobs for their communities."

Key Principles of the Plan

Tedd Ward, lead staff for the authority on this project, highlights some of the most significant principles and policies included in the ZW Plan:

• Suggestions on how to harness the forces of the marketplace through policies and economic incentives to encourage residents and businesses alike to reduce their wastes and participate to the maximum extent possible in reuse, recycling, and composting programs. The ZW Plan calls for a new role for the authority, shifting from an emphasis on managing waste collection and disposal to "getting the signals right" by developing analyses, regulations, promotions, policies, and incentives to work toward zero waste.
• Development of a Resource Recovery Park as a central facility where the public can bring recoverable materials at one time to the reuse, recycling, and composting businesses at the park.
• Identification of "service voids" of reuse, recycling, and composting businesses that need to be filled to provide a "home for everything" that is currently wasted.

Manage Discards to Conserve Resources. Zero waste is more comprehensive than just recycling or integrated waste management. It seeks to address the fundamental needs to conserve energy and material resources as its overriding concern. The ZW Plan recognizes that most environmental impacts come from the extraction, processing, and delivery of products and packaging and that discarded materials are really strategic resources that could be reinvested in the local economy to create jobs and new businesses. The ZW Plan notes that each product casts a long shadow representing the impacts of mining, logging, refining, manufacturing, and trucking. Environmentally, the biggest problem with waste is not municipal waste disposal, but the need to mine and make new goods to replace those not reused, repaired, or recycled.

Garbage Is an Unfunded Mandate. While we each might pay for a product once at the purchase counter, we also pay for the handling of that object again when we pay for someone to collect and manage our discards, again when mining and extraction impacts degrade the environment, and again for someone else to clean up waste that has been littered, dumped illegally, or improperly managed. Thus, while we might only pay for a product once, we essentially pay for the process at least three times, in the form of an "unfunded mandate" foisted on local governments by those responsible for producing and selling products. The ZW Plan highlights that this is the reason why it is important to hold producers responsible for their products, so that the costs of properly recycling them (or at least of disposing of them) are reflected in the price of the product and so that systems are set up to properly reuse, recycle, or compost them.

The ZW Plan challenges businesses to share responsibility with the authority to take back their products and packaging, to help establish systems that will do so efficiently and effectively, or to see their products banned from the landfill or the marketplace. The plan highlights steps to develop markets for problem materials. If local programs cannot be designed cost-effectively to reuse, recycle, or compost a problem material, the authority will work with businesses that sell and manufacture these materials to address these concerns and/or take back these products from their customers. The authority outlines plans to work collaboratively with industry to initiate innovative alternatives and expand and diversify existing recovery systems. If these voluntary initiatives do not work, however, the ZW Plan calls for the adoption of a local deposit, fee, fine, mandatory program, or ban from the disposal system for the particular problem materials.

Del Norte Background

Del Norte County consists of approximately 32,000 residents in a little more than 9,100 households, including approximately 3,300 prisoners in Pelican Bay State Prison. The area is rural, consisting of the incorporated town of Crescent City and several small, unincorporated towns, such as Smith River, Gasquet, Hiouchi, and Klamath. In the next several years, Del Norte’s only landfill will close, increasing disposal fees by 50-100% to transfer wastes to distant landfills.

In 1994, the last large lumber mill of 43 in Del Norte County closed. With this closure, Del Norte County ended one era and began another. With the establishment of Redwood National and State Parks in the early 1970s and the Smith River National Recreation Area in the late 1980s, more than 75% of the county land area is National Park, Forest Service, or other government-owned land. The US Forest Service Rural Community Assistance Program, Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative was established by the Clinton Administration to address the concerns of this changing economy.

Del Norte County and the Forest Service viewed the development of the ZW Plan as one way to convert from the timber-oriented economy of the past to a new, sustainable economy. Mike McKenzie-Bahr, Del Norte County economic development coordinator, notes, "By using local resources currently being wasted, the ZW Plan highlights how Del Norte’s discards can be used as an economic development strategy to create jobs and rebuild the local economy."

The Authority Board of Commissioners recognized that the plan provides a guide and a vision to work toward for discard management in Del Norte County, and the board agreed in concept with the ZW Plan. The plan will be used as a strategic policy to revise and guide future County Integrated Waste Management Plan updates. Michael Scavuzzo, chair of the board, adds, "The board will also implement parts of the Zero Waste Plan as economics allow."

Preparing the Plan

Kevin Hendrick, director of the authority, explains, "Del Norte County is almost like an island economy. It is more than 300 miles to major regional recycling markets, in San Francisco, California, or Portland, Oregon. The authority recognized that in order to expand reuse, recycling, and composting in Del Norte County, it needed to expand local markets and uses for materials or more efficiently process and transport materials to regional markets. Del Norte County would like to export products, not garbage."

As one of the first steps to develop the ZW Plan, the authority convened the First Border Coast Regional Recycling Market Development Summit in August 1998. The authority invited participants from the Oregon and California counties surrounding Del Norte. The summit reviewed the concepts of zero waste, highlighted the success of new local recycling businesses, and discussed the potential for expanding (1) reuse and salvage, (2) construction and demolition (C&D) materials recycling, (3) organics recycling and composting, (4) scrap-metals recycling, and (5) containers and papers recycling. Small groups with representatives from local experts, businesses, and nonprofit groups identified options and recommended incentives, policies, and programs to help existing local businesses to expand and identify opportunities for new services and businesses in the future.

The authority also conducted a major Discard Generation Study in 1997 to help identify priorities to target for waste reduction, composting, or recycling programs. After two weeklong sorts in winter and summer, the composition was combined with tonnage records and reports from recyclers in the county to determine the tonnages of each material type being discarded and recovered in the county in 1997. The Discard Generation Study found that:

• Residential discards comprised just 28% of all discards.
• Commercial businesses and institutions created 61% of the materials disposed.
• Self-haul customers were 88% of the traffic and 60% of the tonnage disposed.
• Compared to national averages, Del Norte had very little yard debris disposed but a higher proportion of foodwaste than expected. If backyard burning is banned in the future, the amount of yard debris could increase.
• C&D activities produce a large amount of material disposed.

The authority then charged a team of consultants to draft the ZW Plan based on the Discard Generation Study, input from the summit, and a Service Voids Analysis conducted by staff and the consultants.

The Service Voids Analysis was a critical aspect of the ZW planning. This analysis systematically selected and prioritized target materials and their associated waste reduction, recovery, processing, and marketing strategies. It identified materials for which there is no current mechanism for waste reduction, recovery, or marketing. It also identified service opportunities: materials for which there is some waste reduction and/or recovery mechanism available within the region that could be expanded to recover those materials.

After the study was completed, the Service Voids Analysis used a spreadsheet that listed all material types and all waste reduction and collection programs that target those materials. Materials for which there are no waste-reduction or collection programs are labeled "service void." Materials with existing collection programs–yet which still comprised more than 1% of the disposal stream–were labeled "service opportunities." Totaling all these percentages together revealed that more than 91% of the materials disposed are either service voids or service opportunities in Del Norte.

Target Recovery Programs

After additional sorting and analysis as part of the Service Voids Analysis, the ZW Plan recommended the following Target Recovery Programs for Del Norte County, in order of priority:

1. land application of sewage sludge;
2. establishment of drop-off areas for ferrous metals, mattresses box springs and furniture, and nonferrous metals;
3. recovery of recyclables from commercial loads both through commercial recyclables collection programs and through picking recyclable materials from targeted commercial loads delivered to the transfer station/materials recovery facility (TS/MRF);
4. establishment and promotion of mechanisms to expand recovery of metal appliances and textiles from thrift stores;
5. after demonstrating the viability of a local market for the finished product, establishment of a facility capable of composting yard debris, food, and paper;
6. establishment of a salvage, reuse, and resale facility for construction materials;
7. establishment of periodic collection events or a drop-off mechanism for collecting electronic equipment.

The ZW Plan then recommended that the authority identify a pool of experienced local business owners and work with them to expand, modify, and diversify their businesses to recover and use these materials. The plan noted that those facilities unlikely to be developed by the private sector must be spearheaded by the authority to establish a viable regional recovery infrastructure.

At the same time, the authority directed staff to create a TS/MRF as a result of the imminent closure of the Del Norte Landfill. The board directed that the TS/MRF should "offer the same types of services as the landfill now offers county residents." Those services include:

Phase 1: Before 2002
On-site:
Scale/scale house
Self-haul refuse drop-off
Wood and brush drop-off
Animal drop-off/storage
Sludge processing and storage (skimmings, screenings, and sludge)
White goods, refrigerators, bulky-item processing
Administration offices
Tire drop-off/storage
Household hazardous waste (oil, batteries, paint, antifreeze)
Facility for transfer trucks
Onsite private options:
Household hazardous waste facility
Salvage
Other Phase I facilities:
Composting
Auto wrecking
Oil buyback/resale

Phase 2: After 2002
Operator recovery
Recyclables processing
Potential private, location uncertain:
Drop-off/buyback
Construction material recovery and resale
Textiles recovery
Paper shredding
Composting
Baling and grinding
Sorting line
Volume reduction
Additional on-site, if not done in Phase 1:
Household hazardous waste facility
Salvage/resale

The ZW Plan suggested that, over time, many of the reuse, recycling, and composting activities be centralized away from the TS/MRF because of concerns about traffic impacts on neighbors. Instead, the ZW Plan suggested the development of a Resource Recovery Park that would be a central facility where the public could bring recoverable materials at one time to decrease wastes (at a lower tipping fee than the TS/MRF), recover some cost from the sale of valuable materials, and buy other items of value at discounted prices from retail stores at the park. The RR Park would be designed to receive source-separated recyclables, organics, C&D debris, and reusables to process, reuse, recycle, and sell.

The RR Park is designed to have a variety of reuse, recycling, and composting businesses collocated in one area, which will derive efficiencies from working together. For the public, this would be a one-stop service center. For the businesses in the park, it would be a way to simplify expanding or starting new services (e.g., by having a master environmental impact report approved in advance to cover most anticipated park activities) and provide an opportunity to share the overhead, equipment, and operating risks. For the authority, this would be an opportunity to decrease the self-haul traffic to the TS/MRF, directing people to the RR Park first with all their recyclables and encouraging the public through the rate structure at the TS/MRF to keep their materials separated for reuse, recycling, and composting rather than paying increasingly costly disposal fees.

Conclusions

The Del Norte ZW Plan provides a model and methodology for other communities to follow. It highlights some fundamental concerns about the current system of integrated waste management and the need to focus on conserving resources, not landfills, to drive the next generation of policies and programs. The ZW Plan also provides a vision of a world without waste, which could be achieved incrementally over time through new partnerships among government, industry, and consumers. The ZW Plan highlights a process for others to develop ZW Plans and work together with Del Norte on problem materials to hold producers responsible for the impacts of their products and production.

For more information, contact Tedd Ward, Del Norte County Solid Waste Management Authority, 707/465-1100, recycle@cc.northcoast.com.

Gary Liss is president of Gary Liss & Associates in Loomis, CA, and a zero-waste consultant.