There’s a new contender for greenest city in America. Seattle’s City Council unanimously passed a new policy that will fine businesses and residents for not composting.
Starting Jan. 1, 2015, all Seattle residents and commercial establishments must separate food waste and compostable paper for recycling — meaning these items can’t get sent to the landfills like regular garbage. With the new regulation, the city’s trash collectors can hand out tickets if they find a trash bin with more than 10 percent compostable waste. “After receiving two warnings, residents and businesses will be fined $50 for dumpsters and a more modest $1 for waste at single-family homes,” CNN reports.
Even though a $1 fine isn’t very much (for comparison’s sake, San Francisco fines its residents up to $100 for failing to compost), Seattle isn’t actually trying to make money off of trash violators. Rather, the city wants to stress to its residents the importance of recycling. As Tim Croll (Seattle Public Utilities’ solid-waste director) tells the Seattle Times, the city has collected less than $2,000 in fines since it outlawed recyclable items from the trash a whole nine years ago.
“The point isn’t to raise revenue,” Croll adds. “We care more about reminding people to separate their materials.”
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Seattle has a goal of recycling 60 percent of waste by 2015 and 70 percent by 2022. However, its recycling rate for 2013 was at 56 percent, which fell a little short of the city’s target, the Times reports. The new law should generate an additional 38,000 tons of compost material every year, hopefully putting the city back on track.
Food and paper waste is a huge, expensive problem for the whole of America. We’ve previously reported that more than any other material thrown away by Americans, paper has the biggest presence in landfills. According to the EPA, paper takes up the largest chuck of solid municipal solid waste at 27 percent. As for our food scraps, a staggering 40 percent of the food in this country is completely wasted, or about 36 million tons of food annually, setting us back $165 billion in wasted costs per year.
Seattle’s continued efforts reduce waste is something that other cities should aspire to.
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Tag: recycling paper
Thirst Quenchers: Step Away from the Trash Can
Milk cartons. Juice cartons. Wine cartons, if you prefer. After you quench your thirst with a beverage, there’s no reason that you can’t recycle that empty container.
In case you aren’t aware, most cartons are made of paper and can be recycled just like any other paper product. Still, not everyone is doing their part. As Earth911 reported, in 2009, at least half a million tons of carton waste ended up in landfills.
But now it’s easier than ever to recycle these containers. According to the Carton Council (yes, there is such a thing!), the growth of carton recycling has boomed in the last five years — from 18 percent to 50 percent since 2009. There are now 58,358,146 of households in the U.S. — half the homes in the country — that have access to curbside recycling programs or drop off facilities.
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And here’s a fun fact for your next dinner party: Carton recycling is probably growing faster than tweeting. If you look at this neat infographic, in the last five years, the increased access to carton recycling (177 percent) has dwarfed the growth of mobile web usage (103 percent) and the number of adults using social media (55 percent).
In a blog post, Jason Pelz, the VP of recycling projects for the Carton Council wrote that this special landmark is only the beginning: “In fact, 50 percent is just one milestone for us. We envision the day when cartons are recycled everywhere and no cartons end up in landfills. It is with this ambition that we are marching full speed ahead.”
To those of you who don’t think and simply toss your empty containers into the trash, you’ve got some work to do. We all owe it to the trees to make this a little extra effort.
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