ANOTHER VIEWPOINT Broward’s garbage crisis can be solved together

In 1975, Palm Beach County and Broward County faced a garbage dilemma: How do we deal with the millions of tons generated each year? Palm Beach County went one direction. Broward County went another. Today, Palm Beach County is achieving important fiscal and environmental goals. Broward County has failed and is in a crisis. But we have an opportunity to correct the mistakes of the past if we can work together.

Broward County generates nearly 5 million tons of garbage a year. We rely on landfilling far too heavily, which increases environmental damage and falls short of our mandate to divert, reuse and recycle. Aside from a disposal crisis, we also face a serious and threatening economic crisis because, unlike Palm Beach County, we do not own the trash infrastructure. We ceded our economic strength and destiny to market forces and the trash industry.

The Solid Waste Authority of Palm Beach County is a special district created by the Florida Legislature in 1975. It now owns most of the trash infrastructure, including recycling centers, transfer stations, two waste-to-energy (WTE) facilities, a biosolids processing facility and a landfill that is their last resort for waste disposal. For a mature system, it spends $4 million per year reinforcing educational efforts. As a result, in 2023, it reported an 80% recycling rate. Broward is below 40%.

Unlike Palm Beach’s countywide Solid Waste Authority, Broward chose instead to organize itself through contractual agreement between cities and county designed to expire in 2013. Like Palm Beach County, the residents and businesses of Broward paid for two WTE facilities. However, in Broward, after we paid off the bonds, astonishingly, we handed the keys over to the private operator. We own nothing.

Prior to expiration in 2013, there was interest in trying to extend the agreement. However, because of high pricing offered by the market for WTE, landfilling and recycling, the cities became fragmented and dissolved the agreement, with little to show for the past 50 years. Every trash and recycling metric then headed in the wrong direction.

Realizing the failure of fragmentation, most cities and the county came back together and created the Solid Waste Authority of Broward County, which was tasked with crafting a Draft Master Plan to address this crisis and for the next 50 years. The Draft Plan is the product of accumulated analysis including 11 task-specific and publicly available white papers comprising thousands of pages of information and analysis. We have held public meetings every month and received comments from residents, elected officials, corporate leaders and the trash industry.

The Draft Master Plan is full of details, data and policy choices. In short, it concludes that, because we do not own the trash infrastructure, if we are to divert from landfills and WTE and protect our financial future, we must start immediately with behavioral change in how we process our garbage, and cities must begin exerting maximum economic strength to achieve the best pricing from the market by combining our trash tonnage.

We cannot landfill or burn our way out of this crisis. In fact, the Draft Plan does not call for any new WTE plants or landfills in Broward. As I wrote last year in this paper, it is inconceivable economically, environmentally, socially or politically that we would build a new billion-dollar waste incineration facility on the edge of the Everglades and so close to communities.

But there are things we can do now. For example, we must divert and recycle construction and demolition debris and yard waste. These are the most highly divertible commodities in the waste stream. We can replicate proven strategies from other counties to reduce dramatically the tonnage going to landfills.

We must be focused on changing our behavior, from how our suppliers package goods, to how we take home our goods and what we do with waste streams. Single-use plastic reduction, harmonizing recycling messages and implementing organic composting with existing partners are all initiatives we can start today.

When we exercise our economic strength by combining our trash tonnage, we give the next generation of residents, businesses and policy makers the best potential to achieve not only the paramount public policy mission of diverting from landfills and WTE but also the economic stewardship that was taken away from us 50 years ago.

Mike Ryan is the mayor of Sunrise, an attorney and the chair of the Solid Waste Authority of Broward County’s executive committee. The Draft Master Plan and opportunities for comments can be found at BrowardSWA.org.