Transcription of Kevin Roche for the show Treasuring our Trash #247
Lisa: Today it’s my great pleasure to speak with Kevin Roche, who is the chief executive officer of Ecomaine. As a result of the nationwide search, Kevin joined Ecomaine in 2004. He has worked in the field of solid waste management since 1988 and his experience includes positions as the director of solid waste of Broom County, New York, materials recovery administrator for the city of Glendale, Arizona, manager for Metro Waste in Rochester, New York, owners of MRF Incorporated, a recycling facility in Rochester, New York, and the solid waste coordinator for both Monroe County and the city of Rochester, New York. Kevin is a 1989 graduate of the University of Buffalo, where he received a bachelor of science degree in geography and urban planning. He also holds an associate degree in business administration. Thanks for coming in today.
Kevin: Thanks for having me.
Lisa: You have a lot of really impressive credentials behind you. You’ve been in a lot of different places doing this work for a while.
Kevin: Sure have, and those experiences all across the country have worked well in developing good policy in solid waste management and recycling.
Lisa: It’s not a glamorous position, the whole solid waste thing. Just the name, solid waste. It doesn’t seem like it’s glamorous, but it’s very important.
Kevin: It isn’t glamorous, and when I graduated from the University of Buffalo, my passion at that time was computerized mapping. We know it now today as Google, but back then in the eighties, we didn’t have Google. It wasn’t mainstream, but I loved maps, and I struggled with entering the career of solid waste when I really went to school for mapping.
Lisa: How did that happen then?
Kevin: Well, first, I did an internship with the city of Rochester, and my first project was to assist the city in putting garbage routes onto maps, and at that time they were still doing it by hand and we wanted to introduce this computerized mapping, really, Google, Google Earth. That was the start of it. I worked on a project for the city, kind of got in deep into solid waste management. At the same time, they wanted to develop a recycling program, and it caught on and I never left it.
Lisa: You also have this geography interest. How does that play into all this? Is this part of the map thing?
Kevin: It really is. I’ve always been intrigued with maps, and of course now that we have Google Earth, I spend a lot of time on that, but solid waste management has a very close connection to the area of mapping.
Lisa: When you say solid waste management, what types of solids are you talking about?
Kevin: My area is trash. I tell my five-year-old son that I’m a garbage man, and he sometimes looks at me funny, but it’s managing what we throw away in our society and whether we recycle it, whether we digest it, compost it, all of those things is something that we’re very interested in.
Lisa: I can’t even tell you. My heart be still. I love talking about this, because I think what you’re talking about is really so important. We are creating things that we’re putting out into the environment that need to go somewhere, and for a long time we were burning trash or putting the trash in enormous landfills, and that just wasn’t sustainable, so now you’re actually working on making sure that the waste stream is diverted into appropriate places, and this is great.
Kevin: That’s exactly right. The placement, as you call the placement of waste, it’s so important as a civic duty to make sure that the different types of waste end up in the right place. Really that’s what my job is all about is to ensure that happens. We make mistakes. We don’t always get it to the right place, but with good community support, we’re headed in the right direction.
Lisa: Ecomaine was called RWS previously. Why was that an important change to make?
Kevin: It was an important change because Regional Waste Systems was really focused on one technology to deal with waste, and we felt, along with the board of directors, of which there were 29 members of the board, we felt that we really need to focus on an integrated approach to dealing with solid waste with many answers, rather than just having one answer on how to deal with solid waste. There’s really no silver bullet in this industry. It’s really making sure that the particular parts or segments of the waste stream ends up in the right place, and so that’s how we came up with Ecomaine as a more earth-friendly name that really focused on an integrated approach to solid waste management and ensuring that waste gets to its right place.
Lisa: Having lived in Maine most of my life and a good chunk of it in Yarmouth, I’ve been around for the evolution where first, everything went into the trash, and then you could recycle, but you needed to bring your things somewhere, and my parents always had a compost pile, so at least we had that, but now you can recycle and you don’t have to separate things out. There’s actually single sort, where you can have your trash, you can either bring it somewhere and it’s single sort or you can have it by the side of the road. You can have trash and you can have recycling in one. It’s really great, because part of this is the ease of use.
Kevin: That’s right. When we first started our recycling programs 25 years ago, and recycling has been around a lot longer than that of course, but when it became more mainstream and available to the general public, we started out with newspapers. Back 25 years ago, everybody was still subscribing to a newspaper, and although there’s not many newspapers left out on the curbside anymore, there’s still other types of papers like catalogs and magazines and mail and things like that. They started these programs with just simple newspapers, then they added clear glass and brown glass and green glass and tin cans and aluminum cans, and so these collection vehicles turned into trains having to sort and separate everything at the curb. The job of the collector, they were spending 50-60 seconds, sometimes a couple of minutes, in front of each house with the truck running, and so we needed another way to do this as we were adding more and more materials to our recycling programs, and so it was more efficient to do the separation at a facility, a recovery facility such as the one that Ecomaine owns and operates.
It also allowed for ease of participation, so if you don’t have a garage or you don’t have a basement or you live in a small apartment, you might not have the room for all these different containers for all these different commodities, and so if you can put them all into one bin, that was the approach to go, so that’s how single sort really came to be. There was a wave across the country. It happened very quickly because collection became so much more efficient and you could collect from more households in fewer hours.
Lisa: I remember separating everything out, and I remember one of the problems was always that my children would kind of question the amount of time that I would take. We had all these different bins and I was always out in the garage and I was always kind of maneuvering things around, and so it became almost a barrier. Not to me, I was fine with it, but it became a barrier when I would ask my own children to go out and recycle things in the barn because it just didn’t seem that important. Do you think that making it easier is causing people to recycle more now?
Kevin: Yes. Studies have shown that that’s exactly the case. A lot of people came to me and they said, “Why are you changing to this program? I love sorting my stuff,” but we were focused on the people who weren’t participating. We knew that if you were concerned about what to do with your trash, we knew that you were going to participate in any program that was put in front of you. Our market was the non-participant. How do we get to that next person who may not be participating in the recycling program and we did need to make it easier.
Lisa: What types of numbers are you seeing?
Kevin: Well, in our case, just in the last ten years, we’ve more than doubled the amount of recycled material that comes into our facility. One of the reasons for that is because we’ve made it easier for the public to participate in our recycling programs, but we’ve also made the collection more efficient. A lot of communities before when you had to sort and separate all the materials at the curb couldn’t afford curbside collection, and now that it’s basically one bin, a dump, and then you go on to the next collection stop, it’s become more efficient so that more and more communities can afford curbside collection of recyclable materials.
Lisa: I know that in our town, what used to be called the dump is now called the transfer station, so even changing that name so that people understand that things don’t just go to some magical smoke stack in the sky or they don’t get buried underneath a big heap, but they’re actually probably moving somewhere after that. I think that really was very useful.
Kevin: It was, although I bet you a lot of people still call it the dump.
Lisa: That’s probably true.
Kevin: That is very true. Most of the local small town dumps did close because they weren’t secure, meaning that they had environmental impacts to the surrounding neighbors and the surrounding community. Secure landfills today are engineered so that they don’t have the impact on the surrounding community through a secure landfill. Basically, a liner system protects that from happening, but even so, even with a secure landfill, we still don’t want to fill our landfills up with waste that’s not needed to go there, and that is why reduce, reuse, recycling is so important, composting and digestion, and even waste to energy. You mentioned burning trash. Years ago, they just burned trash without any energy recovery. Today, we burn trash with energy recovery and pollution control, so it’s a much more controlled environment that it used to be, and we get a 90% reduction in the waste volume before we landfill it, so our landfills will last 90% longer than they would have without energy recovery.
Lisa: What are some of the problems with having landfills that rapidly fill up with trash? What are some of the health hazards, what are some of the community hazards? Why don’t we want to keep doing what we were doing for decades?
Kevin: Well, nobody wants to be a neighbor to a landfill, and landfills can grow in size quite rapidly. We’ve seen them in Maine. We probably have seen them from the highway, and they often have impacts on the surrounding communities, not so much on the ground water side, but on the odor side, on vectors and seagulls and those types of things. We really want to limit the size of our landfills. We still need landfills, don’t get me wrong. We’re going to need landfills for quite a long time, I predict, but we have to minimize the amount of waste that go to our landfills because it’s a sheer vine metric, because the bigger they are, the harder they are to manage. Eventually, we’re going to run out of landfill space.
If you go to Europe, they don’t have landfill space anymore over there, and they’ve done a very good job at managing their waste in other ways. Here in North America, we still have a lot of land relatively speaking, and you’re still seeing most of the waste stream still ending up in landfills. We do a pretty good job in Maine here, but there’s room for improvement, and so we have to still dig away at the waste stream, what’s left in the waste stream, and remove as much as possible and get it recovered.
Lisa: You talked about landfills not impacting ground water, but hasn’t that been a problem in the past?
Kevin: Well, unlined landfills certainly had an impact on the surrounding groundwater, and that was an issue, but newer landfills today are built and engineered in such a way that they don’t have an impact on ground water, at least for the foreseeable future. However, land filling is a storage of waste strategy. The waste doesn’t go away. Some of it does decompose, but not much of it, and so it’s important that we, again, minimize the amount of waste that’s going into these landfills so that we don’t have to live with this storage of waste for decades to come.
I look at landfills as deferring the true cost of dealing with the waste to future generations, so we generate the waste, and if we landfill it, all we’re saying is, “My kids will take care of it someday,” and, “Their kids will take care of it someday.” I think a better solid waste strategy is to deal with that waste today, process it today, recover what you can, and then, yes, you’re going to have to landfill a little bit at the end of the day.
Lisa: What are your thoughts on composting? I know that there are some cities that are actually doing recovery of food scraps, food waste, and creation of compost that can then be used for soils. That’s something that we’re not quite doing yet on a larger scale here in Maine.
Kevin: Right. We had some pockets of good recovery programs of what I would refer to food waste or yard waste. There’s kind of two components of what we classify as organic waste. Of the waste stream right now, 40% of it is organic material that can be either composted or digested in a digester, and you’re seeing programs being developed across the country, across the world for that matter, and it’s becoming more and more popular to recover this organic waste stream. I think there’s tremendous opportunity to reach our recycling goals by adding food waste recycling to our programs. Each and every day you’re seeing more and more, particularly on the commercial side and even on the residential side. You mentioned that you’ve composted in the back yard, and if somebody can manage their own waste in their own backyard, you’re doing the environment a huge favor. Hopefully you’re seeing the rewards of doing backyard composting by using that compost, and so we want to encourage that as much as possible, but not everybody has a backyard to do their own backyard composting in. We want to make sure that there’s an infrastructure that is a solution to recovering this portion of the waste stream, 40% of the waste stream right now, and remove it from the waste stream and get it recovered to a usable function.
Lisa: The reason I started composting was because my parents composted, and I suspect that my father’s father also composted, but I still get a little flack. I still get a little flack from my family. They make a little fun of me because I am so not wanting to put that apple core into the trash. It actually has to become something that is important to you because otherwise, it’s easy enough to just say, “There’s the trash. I’ll just put it in there.” What’s your experience with that?
Kevin: I think life is cyclical, and years ago, they’ve been recycling for many, many years. Back in the day, they used to send their organic waste to pig farmers and place it back into the earth if it wasn’t going to feed animals. I can appreciate what you’re saying is that it’s kind of coming back once again, because I think what happened over the years is we relied too heavily on straight land filling, and it’s caught up with us because these landfills are becoming giants. When you see them, all you have to do is take a quick look. We’re talking within 30 seconds, you can see the crisis that is happening when it comes to land filling. I call it a crisis because if you don’t see it, then you don’t know it’s a crisis, but eventually this waste is going to come back and we’re going to have to deal with it.
Food waste is an easy way … I say easy, relatively easy way to help divert material away from landfills. The problem with food waste is it comes with what I call the ick factor. If you have a counter top little container for food waste and you put your banana peels in there and your cucumbers and leftover lettuce and things like that, you have to manage it because you don’t want fruit flies and you don’t want odors, and so it’s a little bit harder than just recycling because if you recycle your newspapers, you don’t have to worry about fruit flies, or your laundry detergent containers aren’t going to have an odor. Definitely it takes more participation when it comes to recycling food scraps than yard waste or recyclables or any other fraction of the waste stream.
Lisa: Is it also important to be careful with what we actually purchase to eat, to wear, to use? Aren’t some things, if send them out to be … Well, I think about for example, prescription drugs. I prescribe medications in my medical practice, and some people have for decades been flushing things down the toilet. That seems like it’s going to cause a problem later on for whatever’s on the other end of that toilet flush, and at the same time, putting them into the landfills is also a problem, so being a little mindful of whatever it is we’re buying to actually use and being appropriate with it.
Kevin: We call that using your purchasing power to make the right decisions at the point of purchase, and so very important. Actually, manufacturers of products have reacted to that over time. We call it light weighting of packaging. For example, the water bottles these days don’t use nearly the amount of material or plastic to make those bottles as they used to. They’re so thin now that sometimes they don’t even stand upright when they’re half full, so certainly you using your purchasing power is important, and when it comes to prescription drugs, we have an answer for that. We have collections for those materials and we send them through the waste energy facility, so they’re destroyed, and with all the packaging that comes from prescription drugs, because it’s usually more packaging than it is the actual drugs themselves, and so we do recover energy from that waste and it is destroyed. In our case, I think we have a pretty good solution for processing that particular material, and that’s where you always have to find the right place for every item in the waste stream.
Lisa: One of the reasons we had you on the show, and I told you this story already, so forgive me for repeating myself, but one day I was behind an enormous recycle container that said Ecomaine and there were these lovely paintings on the side. It just seemed so friendly. I think it was like a Starry Night, almost like a Picasso kind of painting. It made me want to participate. It made me want to bring my recycling down and put it in the container. Is there some sort of strategy behind this?
Kevin: We’re drawing attention to ourselves. We feel that it’s very important to have an outreach campaign that’s effective, because we can’t operate in a bunker. We need participation from our businesses and residents and our communities, and without that, our programs won’t be successful, not even a chance, so we spend quite a bit of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, on outreach and awareness, but we feel that that investment has a return for us. The return is good participation from our communities in the programs that we offer, and so that’s one example of getting the word out and making people question, “Okay, what’s happening to that container? What’s in that container? Is it recyclable materials?”
We have been doing commercials. We have a full-time educator that all he does is go from school to school, and if the schools are willing, almost on a daily basis we have tours of our facility because we feel if you spend a half hour, 30 minutes, 60 minutes at our facility, that you become an advocate for good solid waste practices, and so now you become our outreach coordinator and help spread the word and advocate on our behalf, so thank you very much.
Lisa: As I said, I love this stuff, and people actually make fun of me because I think that all of what you’re talking about is so important. It’s the inputs, it’s the outputs, it’s the placement, it’s the mindfulness of the choices that we make, and really I think it’s important. The way that you’re talking with me about it is very welcoming and appropriate. I don’t feel as if Ecomaine is doing finger wagging and saying, “People need to do this because they’re bad if they don’t.” I feel like what Ecomaine is saying is, “Hey, we’re all part of this and we can all make an impact.”
Kevin: Yes. I think Ecomaine as an organization which is publicly owned by our member communities is unique when you look at it in North America, because of its very deliberate, organized way of managing solid waste and recyclable materials.
Lisa: Kevin, how do people find out about the work that Ecomaine is doing or some of this outreach that you are willing to have people participate in?
Kevin: We encourage you to visit our website, Ecomaine.org, and we try to keep it fresh and current with all the latest and greatest information. If you’re not finding what you’re looking for, let us know. We have staff to make sure that the information is available to our member communities.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Kevin Roche, who is the chief executive officer of Ecomaine. Thanks so much for coming in, and thanks so much for all the great work that you guys are doing over there and that you personally are doing for the state of Maine.
Kevin: Thanks for having me. I very much appreciate it.