Can we put 5 million tons of trash in your yard?

ANOTHER VIEWPOINT

What would you do with 5 million tons of solid waste annually?

This is how much Broward County generates every year. It is a growing crisis that the Solid Waste Authority of Broward County and its predecessor have been grappling with in public meetings for years.

I’ve watched our elected leaders overcome heated disagreements and sharply diverse local perspectives to produce a draft master plan that is now available for public comment (BrowardSWA.org) and requires approval by our cities.

Broward residents and neighbors have been loud and clear. We do not want growing mountains of trash, nor do we want more incinerators. The master plan provides a coherent countywide path forward that can achieve economies of scale for managing our solid waste and better serve the health and well-being of our communities.

A uniform focus on waste reduction and diversion of trash from the waste stream can reduce our landfill and avoid the need for an expanded incinerator.

The plan does not call for building a new incinerator in Broward. Instead, it outlines thoughtful, proven market-based solutions to reduce and reuse our trash.

But we must do our part to educate ourselves.

We must also inform our elected city representatives that we want our city to participate in this countywide effort to reduce and recycle our trash, precisely because we don’t want another trash mountain or new incinerator in our backyard.

How? The 40-year master plan goal is to increase our recycling rate (currently less than 40%) at least to the state-mandated rate of 75%.

We can no longer just throw away our trash. Several cities in Broward already have exemplary public education and recycling programs underway. With a comprehensive plan, cities throughout Broward can create one, unified recycling program with the same messaging to reduce confusion, improve our recycling rate and decrease the pressure on our landfills and incinerator.

As Solid Waste Authority co-chair, Sunrise Mayor Mike Ryan, highlighted at a recent forum, “this depends upon us sticking together” so that our cities can realize the economies of scale.

As Broward mayor and Authority co-chair Beam Furr reiterated, with comprehensive waste reduction, composting, recycling and recovery, the valuable commodities now filling our landfill — many emitting toxic waste and greenhouse gases into our environment — can be recovered and reused.

One way to quickly reduce our landfill is to increase recovery of construction and demolition materials (C&D) from our waste stream. Approximately 600 million tons of C&D was generated in the U.S. in 2018, according to an EPA study. With 90% from demolition and 10% from construction, these materials could be diverted from the landfill and sold.

In Broward, C&D materials are at least half of our total waste stream, and 80% of it can be reused or recycled. This is an enormous opportunity to realize value from these commodities, but currently less than 40% of these materials are being recycled.

C&D diversion could jumpstart major advances in Broward with programs that have been highly successful in other parts of Florida. Lee County, for example, has a permit deposit program that achieves a 95% C&D recovery rate. Broward, and our cities, need to pass C&D ordinances now to move forward with market-based solutions to divert these materials headed for our landfills.

Another example: glass recycling. Broward cities do not have a uniform policy on glass recycling and it’s costing taxpayers in multiple ways.

Glass collected from some cities is shipped across the state for recycling because the sand we could recover from it was deemed to be readily available and “without economic value.” Glass is heavy, yet taxpayers are paying to ship it across the state rather than recycle it locally into sand for construction, or sandbags for flooding.

If it is ground to proper refinement, this could be used for beach renourishment instead of costly sand extraction. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) estimates that 6 billion tons of sand are extracted annually from oceans. Yet this same extraction exacerbates beach erosion and smothers the coral reefs that taxpayers are also spending millions to restore.

Our mayors, commissioners and expert consultants have worked hard to address diverse city, county and public concerns. They have developed a plan with economies of scale that can make the marketplace work for us, instead of to divide us.

Their dedicated public service has been a heartening example of what democracy at work can look like. Now, we the people must do our part.

Linda Thompson Gonzalez, a Lauderdale-By-The-Sea resident, is a retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer and a former Assistant Inspector General at the U.S. Department of State.