City of Miami could eliminate recycling, scale back bulky waste pickup. Here’s why By Tess Riski Updated December 12, 2024

The city of Miami is considering eliminating recycling and scaling back its bulky waste pickup, citing “high contamination rates” for recycling and an aging fleet that needs to be replaced. On Thursday, the Miami City Commission is scheduled to take a preliminary vote to allow the Solid Waste director to “have the power to establish the type, frequency and amount, if at all, of City-serviced recycle pickup in all areas” — a change that could give the city the authority to stop recycling services altogether.

The legislation would also eliminate the requirement that bulky waste — which includes furniture, appliances and large tree trimmings — be picked up on a weekly basis, as it currently is. While the proposal states that “every other week is more than sufficient” for bulky waste pickup, it also allows for the service to be scheduled “in the manner determined by the Department.” In a statement issued Wednesday afternoon, the city said that because the annual trash fee has stayed flat at $380 since 2010, the city is now left with an “aging fleet and outdated machinery,” which has led to “frequent truck breakdowns, impacting our ability to meet weekly service commitments.”

In explaining its reasoning for eliminating recycling, the city cited “high contamination rates, which are causing significant additional costs as contaminated recyclables are not accepted.” “These changes will save residents money by optimizing our resources and avoiding unnecessary expenditures,” the city said in its statement. The city did not directly respond to a question about the percentage of recycling the city collects that’s contaminated versus actually recyclable. The city also did not directly answer questions about whether Miami will provide residents with drop-off sites for recycled materials or how the change would impact trash rates. Miami’s annual trash fee hasn’t gone up since 2010. The fee has increased by less than $150 since 2000. City of Miami The new proposal states that bulky waste pickup in the city “has become a source of abuse by outside entities” like contractors and landscapers who should take their waste to dumps, putting an “inordinate burden on City residents and City finances.” In addition to those changes, the proposal seeks to restrict the size of large residential trash the city is willing to pick up to items up to 5 feet long, 5 feet tall and 4 feet deep.

Large residential trash includes yard and garden trash and other nonhazardous materials that are too large to fit in a container or bin. If approved on Thursday, the proposed changes would need to go back to the City Commission for a final vote at a subsequent meeting, possibly in January. In June, the city sought to address a $20 million shortfall in the Solid Waste Department. At the time, in an effort to lower that deficit, the City Commission voted to increase the cap on the annual fee per household from $380 to $440. Increasing the cap didn’t change the actual fee, but it gives the city permission to raise it at a future date. The city’s annual trash fee has stayed the same since 2010. This story was originally published December 11, 2024, 4:46 PM. Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article296803224.html#storylink=cpy

Massachusetts wants to revolutionize its waste stream. Sweden has some answers. 

As the state looks to be a national leader on the three Rs, officials are considering solutions already at work in Sweden. By Ivy Scott Globe Staff,Updated December 12, 2024, 9:16 a.m.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/12/12/science/massachusetts-waste-stream-trash-system-stockholm-sweden-climate-solutions/?et_rid=1502234607&s_campaign=todaysheadlines:newsletter Interior view of the conveyor belts and sorting technology at the Resursutvinning Stockholm, the city's state-of-the-art waste sorting facility that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by separating food scraps and plastics from municipal waste.MIKAEL ULLÉN

STOCKHOLM — On a chilly autumn morning in the Norra Djurgården district, a woman holding a small garbage bag hustled out of her apartment toward a trio of nondescript metal bins next to her building, each with a different colored door: blue for newspapers, yellow for plastic, and gray for other trash.

Tapping an ID card on the gray bin to unlock it, she pulled the door open and dropped the garbage bag inside the nearly full bin. While the woman went on with her day, her trash began a journey of its own: first sucked into a network of vacuum-propelled underground tubes, then funneled several hundred meters to a trash compressor, then transported via truck to a state-of-the-art sorting facility where cutting-edge technology separates food waste and plastics from the garbage.

In Sweden, a world leader in minimizing municipal waste, the goal is for every possible scrap to be recycled, composted, or turned to biogas.

Three bins lead to pneumatic tubes that suck waste hundreds of meters underground so it can be sorted and recycled in Stockholm. IVY SCOTT/GLOBE STAFF

The need for action is urgent. Massachusetts now exports more than a third of its trash out of state, while its six overburdened landfills are expected to fill by 2030. All those landfills release methane, a potent greenhouse gas, which fuels climate change and heats up the planet: The EPA reports that annual emissions from US landfills were equal to driving more than 24 million gasoline-powered cars.

Related

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While an invisible system of pneumatic tubes running beneath Massachusetts’ cities may sound like a fantasy from a sci-fi future, there are a handful of strategies being implemented in Stockholm and across Europe that experts say the the state could easily adopt to become a national leader on waste reduction.

“There are ways in which they are really far ahead [in Europe],” said Alice Brown, Boston’s environmental quality director, one of a handful of city and state officials who recently visited Europe to study waste reduction strategies. “But there are other ways I think that we are milliseconds behind, if we can just figure out how to get initiatives started.”

For example, officials in Massachusetts said it’s possible to adapt Stockholm’s mix of low- and high-tech sorting mechanisms to separate useful materials from trash. And equally important, municipalities could mimic Sweden’s user-friendly approach to cementing a culture of waste reduction.

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“Because it is relatively easy to recycle, people do it,” said Lisa-Marie Borne, a 27-year-old Stockholm resident. “I would never throw away a plastic bottle. Ever.”

RELATED: The Mass. Senate passed aggressive environmental policy to curb plastic use. Will the House act in time?

Another easy thing to replicate would be Stockholm’s network of reuse and repair hubs.

A staff member worked at "ReTuna," a shopping center dedicated to second-hand objects, in Eskilstuna, Sweden, in 2019. The center is similar to the free reuse and repair hubs located around Stockholm.JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Southwest of downtown Stockholm, people trickled in and out of a massive warehouse positioned just opposite a shopping mall. A fluorescent arrow made out of old ceiling lights pointed to the entrance of the Återbruket, or reuse market. Inside, people with shopping baskets or pushcarts scanned the aisles of free dishes, toys, books, and games.

The market, one of two in greater Stockholm, is the city’s way of giving a second life to products — furniture, playthings, and other household items — that would otherwise be discarded. The city’s first objective is to redirect those items back onto the market, said Karin Sundin, a reuse project manager with Stockholm’s waste department. When secondhand vendors won’t take them, the next best option is to give them away for free.

“Our hope with this kind of thing [is] that if you keep products as products, rather than destroying them, products can be used [or] repaired,” Sundin said. “We’re just trying to keep things alive basically. . . . It’s like CPR.”

The market also has a woodworking shop and textile repair annex, where visitors can receive help mending or making clothes and wooden items.

Inside the market's woodshop, a volunteer helped a woman turn an old cutting board into a small bench on Oct. 3, 2024.IVY SCOTT/GLOBE STAFF

Åsa Lindhagen, vice mayor for environment and climate and head of the city’s Green Party, said the city is expanding its reuse initiatives to include building materials from construction and demolition sites to be reused in new construction, a strategy Boston’s climate chief, Brian Swett, said he also hopes to adopt.

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“We are in the beginning of that journey . . . but we want to take new steps in this,” Lindhagen said, adding that the city’s three municipally owned construction companies will soon have access to a center where they can share recycled building materials.

RELATED: Massachusetts’ climate and housing crises are intertwined. Some architects are looking to tackle both with green renovations.

Stockholm has also turned to technology to better track and sort residents’ waste, another area where Massachusetts is looking to make strides.

On Oct. 1, Stockholm launched a high-tech sorting facility designed to separate out recyclable and compostable materials that have accidentally ended up in the trash. Inside the facility, a network of dozens of near-infrared scanners mounted atop conveyor belts sort passing trash by everything from color and shape to chemical composition.

A steady industrial whirring sound filled the massive facility as waste was shuttled from the back of garbage trucks through various machines mounted on brightly colored ramps. At one juncture, a scanner programmed to divert plastic sent packaging scraps whooshing upward along one pathway, while the rest of the waste fell down into another. A screen mounted onto the machine projected the material composition of all the trash it had scanned that hour: 30 percent paper, 24 percent textiles, 2 percent tetra, and 44 percent plastic.

Hans Lundkvist, the facility’s head, said it is projected to decrease the city’s carbon output by 33,000 metric tons each year, about the same amount of energy required to power 4,000 US homes for a year.

“We have sent off 50 tons of plastics for recycling just today,” he said. “So it does have an impact.”

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Trash moved along conveyor belts at Stockholm's new state-of-the-art waste sorting facility. IVY SCOTT/GLOBE STAFF

Massachusetts does not have robust mechanisms in place to sort errant recyclables once they’re off the garbage truck. John Fischer, solid waste director for the Department of Environmental Protection, estimated roughly 200,000 tons of cardboard end up in the Massachusetts trash stream each year.

The state isn’t looking to pivot away from single stream recycling to Stockholm’s system, where residents are expected to separate their own paper, plastic, glass, food, and metal, but Fischer said better sorting for recyclables is a priority.

Then there’s the culture.

Residents from across Stockholm said they consider the “3Rs” — reduce, reuse, and recycle — an ingrained behavior. Borne, who lives in southern Stockholm, said she’s routinely held accountable by friends and neighbors who don’t hesitate to chastise her when she fails to put celery scraps in their designated food waste receptacle.

“It would feel extremely unnatural not to try and reuse,” said Borne, and “you would be shamed into oblivion if you left stuff outside.”

RELATED: Living a low-waste life offers a business opportunity 

That culture is maintained not only by impassioned community members, but also by readily accessible systems. Reverse vending machines at grocery stores give customers the rough equivalent of 10 to 20 cents back for every bottle they drop off — a step up from Massachusetts’ 5-cent deposit available only at select retailers or designated redemption centers. A city-run “leisure bank” loans sports equipment such as skis and skates to residents for free. And earlier this year, the city launched a Re-Tour recycling truck, which travels around the city to collect bulkier items like broken electronics that don’t fit into the regular sorting receptacles, as well as pop-up reuse hubs to help residents redistribute items within their community.

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Officials in Stockholm said that even the solutions that seem the most far-fetched could likely be adapted in Massachusetts. Lars-Olov Andersson, head of the city’s pnuematic waste collection system, said the system — and accompanying monthly trash reports sent to residents — has helped reduce the amount of plastic, paper, and packaging mistakenly tossed into the trash by nearly 20 percent over the past year.

State Representative Michelle Ciccolo, cochair of Massachusetts’ zero waste caucus, said these kinds of solutions could be a good fit for upcoming development.

“We are trying to build a lot more dense housing with the MBTA Communities Act,” she said, “and so maybe those are some wonderful ideas that can be incorporated.”

RELATED: Nearly 200 towns must rezone under the MBTA Communities law. Has yours complied?

At the sorting center in southern Stockholm, Lundkvist said he felt confident the technology in Europe could work in Massachusetts. But he stressed that the most important factor in building a more sustainable waste stream is the human element: a society of people who value what they own, and are well informed about how best to dispose of it when its useful life is up.

“The things you see here, it’s not rocket science,” he said. “You can build whatever machines you want — AI, robots — but in the end, it will depend on if people are motivated enough to participate.”

A family in suburban Stockholm collected recyclables in their basement to drop off at neighborhood recycling bins.IVY SCOTT/GLOBE STAFF