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A widespread overdependence on centralized, far-away and large-scale composting facilities persists, making it harder to return finished compost and the many benefits it provides back to the community for use. Fortunately for us, composting is something that we can start doing immediately at home, schools, institutions, community gardens and farms to start rebuilding our soils —as long as we do so thoughtfully. … Read More
Mary Lou Van Deventer, Urban Ore, Berkeley, CA reports: The city of Orillia, Ontario, is making financially sensible Zero Waste resource system choices, and it focuses its PR on telling citizens what they need to know, not what they want to hear. The tone is excitement, shared responsibility, and getting in the habit of responsible behavior. … Read More
The nature of US discussions on EPR in general and for packaging have changed significantly in the past year. The California Product Stewardship determined to focus on EPR for toxic and hard to recycle materials. The Berkeley City Council and the Global Recycling Council of the California Resource Recovery Association passed resolutions calling for public control … Read More
The Global Anti Incineration Alliance (GAIA) has summarized the impact that President Obama’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) will have on incineration. In a nutshell: The CPP allows for only the biogenic portion of the waste burned in a municipal solid waste (MSW) incinerator to be counted as renewable. Only incinerators with electricity capacity built after 2012 … Read More
Recycling advocates had stopped any ideas of building a garbage incinerator in the District of Columbia. Now, we are trying to stop the city from sending its garbage to Fairfax County for incineration. Mike Ewall of Energy Justice Network, coordinator of this latter effort, describes the recent victory as the city has tabled a proposal to … Read More
The ILSR Composting for Community Project is working with WasteCap Nebraska’s Zero Waste Programs to develop a Nebraska-focused advanced community-level composter training based on the Neighborhood Soil Rebuilders Composter Training Program, a partnership between ILSR and ECO City Farms. This collaboration is helping to build a community of trained composters in Nebraska.… Read More
ILSR co-director, Brenda Platt, gave a presentation at the Maryland Recycling Network’s 2015 Annual Conference. Her talk, State of Composting in the US: What, Why, Where & How, provided and update and overview of ILSR’s report that documents what is currently happening in organics management across the U.S. View or download Brenda’s presentation to the Maryland … Read More
Neil Seldman – Letter to Editor Dear Editor, The Washington Post’s feature “American recycling is stalling” (June 20), correctly points to problems caused by large single-stream recycling bins. But clarifications are needed. Avoided costs: Cities do not make money from recycling. They reduce their overall costs of solid waste management because recycling costs less than managing … Read More
The Greys Paper Company, Edmonton, Canada will build the first two small-scale high grade recycled paper mills in the US in Texas and Kansas. ILSR recommended this company to ILSR’s long time working partners the MId America Regional Council of Governments (MARC), Kansas City and the Department of Resource Recovery, Austin, TX. Both agencies followed through … Read More
