FEATURE: Solid Waste Management may sound less glamorous than Clean Energy or Organic Food, but it is an equally—if not more—important piece of the emerging “Green Movement.” Based on my experiences working with, well, trash, in the booming metropolis of New York City and a small rural community in Costa Rica, I believe there is an untapped business opportunity just waiting for us in that garbage can.
In 2006, New York City announced an updated Solid Waste Management Plan. Prior to 2006, the state relied on a truck-based system that utilized local private transfer stations to dispose of waste in other states. This system was unsustainable in the long-term because of the trucking industry’s impact on the environment and nearby communities. Under the new plan, nearly 90 percent of the city’s residential trash would be exported via barge or rail rather than by truck. The plan also aimed to improve the City’s recycling program and focused on equitability among the five boroughs with regard to waste storage, transfer and disposal.
This plan was a major step in terms of reducing carbon emissions and expanding the municipality’s existing recycling program to include elements of education and outreach. However, it did not address the fundamental problem of the enormous waste City residents generate per day, which amounted to 12,000 tons when the study was released. It was just being dumped more efficiently in someone else’s backyard.
In Costa Rica, municipalities are also in charge of trash collection, but they generally only go as far as paved roads will take them. In many rural areas of the country, the residents are still burning their trash, which has a detrimental impact on air quality and health. Those who do get trash pickup at home leave garbage bags in front of their houses, where dogs and vermin often get inside and leave the contents strewn on the ground before the garbage truck arrives. The only recycling programs that currently exist in Costa Rica are in wealthy municipalities near the nation’s capital or in communities where foreign volunteers—usually motivated by tourism—have led grassroots efforts to establish a basic recycling system.
In attempting to implement a recycling program in my small rural Peace Corps community, Quebradas, I am realizing that if recycling is not convenient and no one is forced to do it, it is a long and slow process that the earth, frankly, does not have time for. As with any new idea or project, the first step must be educating the people about why it is important as well as its short and long-term benefits. But, particularly here, it is difficult to make the moral or social case for recycling in a way that will really motivate people to change their actions. I have talked about keeping the community clean, running out of landfill space and protecting our water source and wildlife, but people who are concerned with putting food on their plates, getting their kids through school and paying their parents’ health care bills are not going to go out of their way to address what seem to be abstract goals.
On the other hand, more people in Costa Rica already reuse plastic bags and bottles for financial reasons than in the more consumer-oriented United States. So, is there a way to financially incentivize people to recycle their waste? Unfortunately, with today’s commodities prices, the amount small businesses will pay for recyclable materials is minimal. After the first three months of my recycling project (25 volunteer hours of cleaning / separating, resulting in about 50 trash bags full of plastic, aluminum, paper, and carton) we made 16,000 colones, which amounts to about 30 dollars. Enough to keep the newly formed recycling committee self-sustaining, but at this point, neither the community nor individual households are going to see any monetary benefit.
Therefore, in order to address the problem of our fast-filling landfills and the high cost of waste transfer, we need to incentivize waste reduction and discourage waste creation. One option is for municipalities to charge more for trash collection or to design a model where every household is allotted a certain amount of trash per week based on the number of members, and above that they are penalized. Or, if this proves politically difficult, the government could impose an excise tax, similar to cigarettes and alcohol, on products that create a lot of unnecessary waste (i.e. packaging materials, hazardous waste, etc). Ideally, this additional revenue, as well as the cost savings from reducing waste transfer, would go to recycling infrastructure and education so that households are rewarded in some manner for their efforts.
There is a business opportunity in this scenario as well. While city governments are getting their acts together to pick up household recycling, which we all know could take an eternity, why doesn’t some savvy green business (wo)man jump in and make everyone’s lives easier? Per my example above, on a small community scale, it is currently impossible to create a profit-making recycling program. But on a larger, regional scale, with thousands of bags of recycling rather than 50, a business looking to do good could simply buy a big truck and some storage space and set up shop in a developing country, going house to house or community to community collecting recyclable materials, or even paying people small amounts for them. They could then turn around and sell the materials to a major company with a recycling plant in the country’s capital city, such as Florida Beverages or Coca Cola Bottling.
One company that has embraced this strategy is ReciclePlanet, a for-profit organization that collects recycling in over 30 communities surrounding the regional hub city of San Isidro in southern Costa Rica. The ReciclePlanet model may not work in more isolated rural communities in which the costs and environmental impact of trucking would offset the benefit of recycling, but there are plenty of marginal urban and semi-rural communities only a few minutes outside of major cities that are entirely ignored in terms of trash collection, let alone recycling.
There is an opportunity for similar businesses in the developed world as well. One creative model in New York City is a company called Recycle Bank which offers households spending points at retailers like Target in exchange for their recycled materials. Recycle Bank has earned the right to collect recycling in certain communities through agreements with local municipalities. This arrangement benefits local governments in two ways: it saves them the gas and manpower of having to visit individual communities themselves and it reduces the overall waste produced in those communities because people are incentivized to recycle in order to earn retailer points. Recycle Bank ultimately sells its collected recycled materials to various private manufacturers for cash. It is progressive private-public partnership models like this that hold the most promising solution to reducing and reusing our solid waste.
