Every day, about 60 semi trucks head east on Interstate 84 to the Columbia Ridge Landfill in Arlington. They’re offloading almost everything you throw away.
Sixty trucks a day isn’t bad — Portland is rated as one of the least wasteful cities in America. By comparison, Las Vegas, with about as many residents as the Portland region and ranked 33rd out of 50 cities in the same study — sends about 400 trucks to its regional landfill daily.
Operations at Metro's transfer facilities will be evaluated as part of the Solid Waste Roadmap to 2020. But in a region obsessed with environmentalism, where garbage disposal is managed by an agency focused on sustainability and smart urban living, is sending a truck of trash out for a 360-mile round trip every 24 minutes a great idea?
The clock’s ticking on finding an answer. Time’s up in 2020.
Metro manages the region’s solid waste contracts, which are halfway through their 20 year lifespan. With nearly a decade lead, agency solid waste planners hope they’ll have enough time to design a better waste disposal system, one that could include dramatic changes to the way Portland residents and business owners think about their trash.
The biggest hurdle? Many of the agency’s green ambitions, including its land use and transportation planning and its recycling information center, are funded from what is in essence a trash tax, paid by the amount of tons dropped off for dispatch to Arlington.
If Metro wants to live up to its sustainability ethos as it implements its Solid Waste Roadmap, it’s going to have to ignore the reality that the trash pays the bills.
The changing world of trash
Market forces are changing trash. Everything you dump out is picked through at various points along the waste stream, as the companies with the contracts to manage the waste look for value in what you’ve thrown away.
“If they can get some rocks or some gravel out of a trashbag, they’ll separate that and it’ll go into ‘rubble,’” said Paul Slyman, the director of Metro’s Parks and Environmental Services departments.
Those same market forces brought the end of the era of separating your recycling and have recently brought about the Columbia Biogas proposal, which the Metro Council approved earlier this month. Eventually, technologies like plasma-based waste-to-energy plants could cleanly convert garbage into electricity.
But for all of Oregon’s environmental street cred, it’s still a state that struggles economically, a state with a relatively high cost of living index and a state with a lot of empty land on which to bury trash.
The market isn’t yet at a point where it’s economical to stop making so much trash. Slyman points to the waste hierarchy, a pyramid-shaped graphic explaining the order of preference in waste management, with prevention of waste being at the top.
With the market seemingly in no hurry to reduce cheap to produce, expensive to toss product packaging, the cost burden of disposal might need to shift from garbage bills to the checkout counter, as Slyman explained at a December Metro Council worksession.
“There will begin to be a subtle shift of costs off my garbage bill and yours and onto the price of goods at the point of sale, such as is already the case for electronics and latex paint,” Slyman said. “Other toxics should follow, then maybe packaging, and the remaining electronics not already covered by the state’s e-cycling program. Eventually, everything with a cord or a battery will go back to manufacturers or their agents for recycling.”
The Metro region might not be ready for that robust of a system by 2020. But the Solid Waste Roadmap, which Metro staff will be developing in the coming years, looks at how to get the region as close as possible to a world with minimal deposits in Arlington or other landfills.
Green at a loss
Columbia Biogas has been hailed as a model for the region’s waste disposal. The facility, proposed for the Cully neighborhood of Northeast Portland, would take about 200,000 tons of food waste a year and turn it into about 5 kilowatts of electricity daily.
Solid Waste Roadmap to 2020
Click here to download a copy of the Solid Waste Roadmap to 2020 (PDF)
The proposal involved several hours of staff time and regulatory review as Metro sought to mitigate impacts to neighbors.
Columbia Biogas paid $500 for its permit review.
“That takes a tremendous amount of resources… oversight, onsite inspections, being responsive to the neighborhoods,” Slyman said. “But since we don’t treat that as disposed tons, they don’t pay anything.”
The situation will get worse for Metro’s bottom line as less solid waste is loaded into the trucks bound for Arlington and other landfills. The agency pays for its solid waste operations, as well as other programs like planning, with money collected from fees and taxes for dumping trash.
"If we're really, really successful in our policy outcomes, we work ourselves out of business from an excise tax perspective on tonnage," warned Metro Chief Operating Officer Michael Jordan at a Jan. 11 council worksession about the budget, "Quite frankly, how we support the solid waste system needs to be revamped."
About $4 out of the average $26.40 monthly trash bill in the city of Portland goes towards Metro's programs. All told, about $68 million of Metro's $254 million in revenue in 2010 came from trash fees. By comparison, Metro collected $48.5 million in property taxes last year.
Theoretically, the excise tax rate (about 50 cents of the aforementioned $4) will adjust so that 50 cents stays stable even as people throw away less.
But as more and more waste is diverted from the trucks bound for Arlington, one key question remains – as asked by former Metro Councilor Rod Park: "When does the (excise tax) rate get too high per ton that it's no longer reasonable?"
Decoupling the finance question
Park was generally the lead council member on getting his hands dirty with garbage issues. Sitting in an office at his Gresham nursery a week before he left office, Park's hands were covered in grime as he took a break from repairing equipment to talk about Metro's waste disposal issues.
His main message – don't worry about the cash issue yet.
"By making it the centerpiece, it detracts from what we're really trying to accomplish," Park said.
The proposed Solid Waste Roadmap has 13 bullet points, ranging from getting food waste out of the trucks to Arlington to rethinking the mission of the Metro South Transfer Station in Oregon City. Bullet point No. 7 is to "Align fiscal policies with system objectives and desired outcomes."
In other words, make sure there's still money to run the shop.
Slyman said the council has instructed him and his staff to try and keep the conversations separate.
"In a policy development sense, that's a very pure way to look at things," Slyman said. "In practice, that's much more difficult, and I don't want to kid myself in thinking that we can just only look at the highest policy choices without any eye toward the fund implications of that."
But John Charles, CEO of the Cascade Policy Institute, compared the excise tax on waste to a cigarette tax. If smoking is eliminated, so is the revenue for a program that uses cigarette tax money as a base funding source.
"I think that will be a factor for Metro. I don't know if it's a dominating factor," Charles said. "The more dominating factor is just the culture of all the local activists. They're never content with what they have. If they ban one more thing, if they increase the mandatory rate or the goals to some higher goal, if they get another fee tacked on, it's a temporary victory and they're always back for more."
Is regulation the answer?
A few years ago, a new system began in Oregon – when you bought a can of paint, you also paid for the disposal of unused paint in the state. A hazardous waste, paint can now be taken to collection points and disposed of (or recycled) in a safe manner.
"Everything has a place. You don’t just put it in a can and it disappears," Slyman said. "There's not some magic garbage machine that sorts it." He points to food that could go to a biogas facility or a compost bin, and the aforementioned rubble that's sorted at the transfer stations.
"If we start thinking about everything as a commodity, it will change how we view this," he said.
But in some cases, the market needs a push to change consumer behavior, Slyman said. He gave the example of a child's toy car. Much of the waste generated from purchase of that toy is in the packaging, designed solely to make it more eye-catching at the store. He pointed to Germany's Green Dot program as an example on how to deal with those scenarios.
Under that program, the toy manufacturer would be responsible for collection of the product once it's disposed of, be it the packaging, the instructions or the toy itself.
"When I get the car's manufacturer responsible for all the stuff I didn't want to begin with, and I didn't really have a choice as a consumer, they have a vested interest in making that stuff a heck of a lot smaller," Slyman said. "That's the way things are going. People need to get comfortable with that."
Charles, a former director of the Oregon Environmental Council and a veteran of Metro waste disposal committees, said it was unrealistic for the government to decide what trash is superfluous.
"If that's going to be your measure of things, if they're not necessary, maybe we should ban the symphony and the opera and all sports," he said. "No one needs them. They're just kind of fun."
Consumer choices
Charles wants consumers to be able to choose what they do with their garbage. He called ambitions of the roadmap part of Metro's mission-creep from waste disposal into behavior change.
"There's no reason for Metro to worry about 'getting the organics' out or creating more 'product stewardship' schemes," he said. "The Pacific Northwest has a vast surplus of landfill space; Metro should focus on simply getting garbage from the region to landfills as cheaply and efficiently as possible."
But for Slyman, the key is getting people in the region to think differently about their waste. If Metro is the agency to make that happen, so be it.
“I would like all of us to think that everything is a commodity,” Slyman said. “We can’t just keep producing stuff that doesn’t have an ultimate home. If people start viewing things as a commodity they’ll start to get smarter about what they buy in the first place, and how they use it."