Transcription of Treasuring our Trash #247
Announcer: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at LoveMaineRadio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Tyler: Now when I’m at an event and there’s no option for where to throw my napkin other than the trash, it’s like holding it above the trash can for the few fateful seconds and then, okay, I guess I have to let it go. It doesn’t feel right.
Kevin: Nobody wants to be a neighbor to a landfill. Landfills can grow in size quite rapidly.
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 247, “Treasuring our Trash”, airing for the first time on Sunday, June 12, 2016.
Gone are the days when we can toss our unwanted items in a landfill or burn them in the backyard. We have come to realize that we live on a planet that has finite space, a space that we want to keep clean for our children and the generations beyond theirs. Today we seek to look at trash as a resource rather than refuse, with our guest, Tyler Frank, founder of the curbside composting program, Garbage to Garden, and Kevin Roche, CEO of Ecomaine. Thank you for joining us.
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Lisa: People who have been listening to the radio show for a while know that I’m a big fan of compost. I can’t deny it. I think that composting is a beautiful thing, and the individual I’m going to talk with next also believes that compost is a beautiful thing, I hope, I think. This is Tyler Frank, who grew up backyard composting in North Yarmouth, Maine. After graduating from Cheverus in Portland, he attended Boston College majoring in economics. After returning to Portland, Frank explored a number of career avenues, starting a web company with a friend, working for a car dealership, and running for the Maine House of Representatives. Shortly thereafter, Garbage to Garden took root, Maine’s first curbside composting program and the most successful program like it in the United States. Congratulations.
Tyler: Thank you very much.
Lisa: This is good stuff. I love that you have done so many different things and they have brought you back to composting.
Tyler: Yes. I’m kind of just a lifelong entrepreneur, which I mean in the broadest sense of the word. I have a lot of different interests. I like to create things, and creating an organization like Garbage to Garden has been definitely the most difficult and most rewarding so far.
Lisa: Tell me about the whole economics major, “I think I’ll work on compost.” It seems like as an entrepreneur, there might be other things, like web design or some of these other things that you’ve done.
Tyler: Yes. Well, economics is just something that I’m personally interested in, economics and history. When it comes to composting, it just seemed to me that it was something that was needed, therefore an opportunity. I had started a web development company with my best friend James, who I grew up with, in 2007, I want to say. That was just because he had the skills. He was a developer and a designer and I thought I could sell ice to an Eskimo, so together, our powers, we could do that and be self-employed. We learned a lot because we grew really quickly, and then we grew too quickly, and then we couldn’t sustain the revenue and kind of blew up the company. We were young and learned a lot of lessons.
I brought some of that to Garbage to Garden, and bootstrapping something from nothing, it was very much like, “Don’t spend money until you’ve earned it.” You were just starting off with a few hundred dollars, buying twelve buckets, and then getting a few more sign ups at a farmer’s market and going out and buying some more buckets and just kind of turning it over and working for free, but the reason that I got into doing that at the time that I did is I had just left a very full-time career at Lee Toyota, moved to Portland, because I had been living in North Yarmouth, and when I moved to Portland, I found myself in a second floor apartment that shared a tiny yard and there was no space to compost at all, so for the first time in my life, something that had just been every day and normal was impossible. We’re buying these blue bags and throwing food in them, and it just didn’t feel right.
It was actually my room mate’s comment that if we could just put it at the curb like recycling, it’d be easy to compost it. It got my gears turning, and having been acquainted with the Portland community, it just seemed like something that wasn’t offered and that a lot of people might appreciate. I didn’t really know if I could do it and financially make it make sense, but I just went after it, and it’s worked out.
Lisa: I had the same experience that you’re describing. If you bend composting, if you have a pile, if you have a rotator, to put it in a bag that’s going to then go to a landfill and then not biodegrade, or if so, not for millions of years, but there’s something wrong. That just seems wrong, not like a sin, but it just doesn’t work.
Tyler: Yes. Now when I’m at an event and there’s no option for where to throw my napkin other than the trash, it’s like holding it above the trash can for the few fateful seconds, and then like, okay, I guess I have to to let it go. It doesn’t feel right, but it was really something that most people in an urban area like Portland had no choice but to do.
One thing that was interesting was I had the philosophy of fail fast, fail cheap. If it wasn’t going to work, I didn’t want to put all kinds of time and money into trying to make it work, so I launched Garbage to Garden six weeks after having the idea with no preparation at all, no plan of how to pick up buckets or where to compost them or how this was going to work at all. I just sort of made a web site, conceived of a service, picked a number, a price out of thin air that I thought people would maybe pay that would justify the service, and it just was a lot of luck that it worked out. They were bringing food waste to my mom’s backyard in North Yarmouth for six weeks probably, maybe two months, until my mom was like, “Tyler, no more. This is getting out of hand.”
On that note, actually, I at one point had eighteen 55 gallon drums, full, sealed, in her driveway, and she’s like, “Tyler, I said no more of this,” and I’m like, “Mom, I’m not going to empty them. I know. I just need a place to put these. The code enforcement officer’s all over me on Vespa Street in Portland and I’m going to figure something out soon. I’m on it.” It was this one particular Wednesday morning, Wednesday’s our big day, and at this time in September 2012, we already required a trailer to collect all the material from the households that day, and we needed barrels to fill, and they were all full already in North Yarmouth. I had just found Benson Farm in Gorham, and so that morning I was able to go get barrels, bring them to the farm, empty them out, and then go do a collection route and just scraped by there, thanks to my mom’s kindness and generosity. Actually, that area of her yard is very lush. I had a pretty good-sized pile of food scraps, and now it’s all overgrown.
Lisa: I do love the story. I’m just thinking if one of my kids did this to me, I’d be like, “Are you kidding me? Do I really need to have an entire driveway full of barrels or an enormous pile of somebody else’s food scraps in my backyard?” That’s a lot of patience and support of you.
Tyler: Yes. I’m really lucky that my mom has been supportive of just about everything, although at that point I think she didn’t think it was going to work out. She thought she was just going to end up with a huge pile of food waste and be holding the bag so to speak, but yes, we got 174 households in our first month that signed up. It was scrambling for sure, but after partnering with farms and finding a little commercial space we could operate out of, at least the sort of death threats were gone. We were off the ground a little bit, and then it was just a lot of work to build it up and add trucks and keep them on the road. I actually lived in a tent the following summer at the shop just to make ends meet.
Lisa: This is something that I don’t think a lot of people think about. Strangely in this day and age, a lot of us think start-up venture capital, you get a lot of money, you throw it at something, and then you become successful because you get that kind of financial support, but you’re talking about get a little money, invest, get a little bit more money, invest some more. You’re talking about very steady but mindful growth.
Tyler: Yes, exactly. You might call it bootstrapping. There’s a lot to be said for that. Certainly these days all you hear about is the idea of being an entrepreneur is just what you said, get a business plan, get somebody to give you a bunch of money, and then your idea comes to fruition, but there are other ways to do it, and one doesn’t exclude the other. We’re looking at we’re probably going to be raising money in the future as we go to expand and scale into other states, but this was my baby, I suppose. To be able to create it without that outside venture capital help has allowed us to stay true to our mission, to really be able to build an organization and an image that we wanted or I wanted without an outside influence from somebody who’s writing the checks. I think that that’s been important, at least in this endeavor.
Lisa: Tell me about the logistics. I know I was telling you about where I live, I see the little buckets by the roadside, and I’ll know it’s Garbage to Garden day. I live out on Little John Island, but you service a pretty broad area.
Tyler: Yes. We service one in six Portland households, and then also we service a good number in South Portland, in Westbrook, Valmouth, Cumberland, Yarmouth, as you say, and even Brunswick, and then we do commercial service, which is done differently, but the same idea for businesses and schools and bakeries and restaurants from Old Orchard Beach to Freeport. We do colleges. The residential program has definitely been our big claim to fame, and I think we’ve been so successful because of the clean buckets making it so easy. It’s on your trash day. We make it rewarding because you get the finished compost back, so hopefully that encourages more local food production, and also the accessibility piece of it’s free if you volunteer with us, so there’s really no reason not to do it if you care about where your waste goes and you need a way to compost. Logistics, there’s a lot to it. I went from just sort of having an idea to now knowing quite a bit about running a trucking operation, which is a good skill to have. There’s a lot of things you can apply that to. I could take logistics in a lot of directions.
Lisa: Well, yes. When I was interviewing the guy from Ecomaine, who talks about solid waste, and he doesn’t mean solid waste like human waste. He means stuff that goes to possibly landfills, possibly recycling, that sort of thing, but he talked about the ick factor of composting. He’s a big fan of composting, but there is the ick factor. Talk to me a little bit about that.
Tyler: Yes. So someone’s thinking about joining our program, they’re like, “Well, is it going to smell? I’m going to have this bucket full of all these food scraps that’s degrading in my house.” It’s like, “Well, yes, but you’re going to have that in your trash.” You already, in fact, have that in your trash bag, so in one sense, being able to take all that smelly stuff out of your trash and put it in something else that’s sealed that gets picked up every week allows you to maybe keep your trash around and not put that bag out every week and stuff it full. Some people can go six weeks with one trash bag, so in that sense, you’re making it cleaner, but there’s the perception that it’s gross. It would be if we didn’t wash the buckets, for example, and we just dumped that thing out and you had this bucket with grime smeared all over it, then that might turn you off to it a bit. It’s a bit of work, but I think that that has allowed us to make a very effective program for everybody.
The compost that you get back is certainly not gross. It has a little earthy smell. The home composting even, to do it right, you’ve got to get in there. You’ve got to turn your pile around, you’ve got to flip it over. There’s other challenges that maybe aren’t the ick factor, like just getting out in the snow to dump it somewhere or just the space or the time. There’s a lot of reasons why it’s tough for people to do it on their own, and the ick factor is a major one.
Lisa: I think there’s also sometimes convincing the other people in the household that they want to be a part of this. I know that my children, who for many years, I made them do the compost run, because my parents made me do the compost run. There’s the compost day, you go put the compost in the compost pile. They were reluctant, because it’s not necessarily a fun job in January when you actually have to shovel a way out to the compost pile. The convincing of people sometimes can be tricky.
Tyler: A lot of people don’t like change. I think you need at least one member in the household who’s really dedicated to the change. It’s like, “Honey, no. We’re doing it this way. You’re just going to have to deal with it.” That’s sort of how change happens in the real world. You mentioned seeing a bucket on the street and then seeing another one, then a couple months later, another one. I think that that probably goes a long way to legitimize a new way of doing things. You’d think that, we’ve been doing this four years, that maybe everybody that wanted to do it joined in the first year, and the truth is, our last year, we’ve grown the fastest rate so far. I think we can only attribute that to people continuously coming around to accepting a new way of doing things.
Lisa: You also make it very easy. The way that you are doing this, I don’t think that it could be easier. People just put the stuff in the bucket, the bucket goes out to the curb. You already have to do it with your trash. It’s not even that expensive, because I’ve looked into this, and it’s almost worth not having my own compost pile. Of course, then I’d miss the morning trips out there, so I probably won’t ever do Garbage to Garden, but it’s only because of my own spiritual need I guess to commune with the compost. This seems, at least from a consumer standpoint, it seems seamless.
Tyler: Yes. That was my intention from the beginning was how can we make this as simple, as convenient as possible. I don’t know. If someone has any idea, then I’m always looking for that information. You put it out there and it just magically turns into a fresh, clean bucket and a bag of finished product. It takes a year to turn that food scraps into good compost, but you set it out, a couple hours later, bam. Everything’s magically as it should be.
We also find ourselves answering a lot of questions, not just about what can compost and what can go in the bucket and how we can break down meat and how things that aren’t organically grown can make compost that’s good for growing organic food, and we answer questions about how to use this finished product, how to cut it with topsoil, how to use it for planting. We do a lot of compost deliveries. We’re installing raised beds for people this year, so we’ve really kind of branched out into educating people in a lot of ways and kind of participating at all levels of the loop of the life of food scraps.
Lisa: Food scraps have become a big issue.
Tyler: Yes. It’s 40% of what we throw away is biodegradable, and nationally, 3% of that material is composted, so 97% nationally is actually going to landfill. There’s a few issues with that. I like to think of composting as the most important issue of sustainability because it’s got three pillars to it. One is obviously waste reduction. Forty percent of what we throw away is the largest single component of municipal garbage, but also when food scraps break down in a landfill, there’s no oxygen, and in that environment they release the most methane and carbon dioxide, and methane is 20 to 30 times stronger than C02 as a greenhouse gas, so it all adds up that food waste in landfills is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, so if you’re cutting that back, you’re reducing that in a major way.
The third pillar is our whole food system is somewhat unsustainable. It’s based on importing a lot of chemical fertilizers. You’re just sowing the ground with liquid nitrogen and NPK. I don’t know exactly what they do, but I know that they’re not putting the actual organic material back in the soil. They’re just adding the liquid fertilizers, and over time, you’re pulling the organic matter out, and that’s what holds all the water in the soil, so that’s why soils get harder and dryer and require more fertilizing to be able to produce the same amount of food. It’s just sort of a long-term path to being able to produce less food and having a less productive soil if we don’t return those nutrients. There is a carbon cycle, and there needs to be a cycle in order for it to work for thousands of years. [inaudible 00:19:25] about the importance of it. I just think that it is the most important issue of sustainability in our time.
Lisa: They’re doing this at an international level, as well. They’re thinking about food waste on an international level.
Tyler: Yes. I get kind of focused in on what we’re doing here on the ground, but you hear about it from all directions. There’s a documentary out there, Just Eat It, that I just saw recently. It’s about people that survived growing all around the country. I think it was some amount of time, like a month or several months, that they ate nothing but food from dumpsters that was being thrown away that was totally good, and it was trying to educate you that sell by dates are not when food goes bad. That’s just something that is on there that doesn’t necessarily mean the food’s bad. You’ve got to use your senses to determine if something’s good to eat or not. I think something like one third of the food that’s produced on the planet goes to waste before it ever is potentially consumed by someone, so there’s more to the issue than just what to do with food that’s wasted, but how can we cut back on the waste of food. Have a little bin in your fridge that is an “Eat Me First” bin and put things there that are going to go bad.
I think that once people start separating their food scraps and putting them in a different bin, you see how much you do waste. You know that that’s money. People start to find ways to reduce the amount they’re throwing away and find ways to actually eat it before it gets to that point. I hope that we’re helping to encourage that change. Internationally, I think it’s like the UN’s theme for the year was food waste reduction. I don’t know much about their initiative, to tell you the truth, but I do know that I mentioned that 3% of the food scraps nationwide are composted, in Maine, I’m proud to say that’s extremely different. In Portland, it’s about 25% thanks to us, and now even other companies that have come in to help get that stuff out of the waste stream.
Lisa: You work with local farms. I’m just kind of curious. Is there a giant compost pile somewhere that you’re constantly turning and moving?
Tyler: There’s a few of them. Our first farm we worked with is Benson Farm in Gorham, and that’s still where a lot of material goes. That’s a huge compost pile. They have wind rows, which is just another fancy word for a long pile, that are probably 15 feet tall and 15 feet wide and 200 feet long, and there’s just dozens of them, and they get turned periodically. Nature does all the hard work. All you really do is monitor piles, make sure you’ve got the right balance of carbon and nitrogen material, and turn it when the temperature starts to drop. It might mean that it’s not getting enough air. It’s an enormous pile, and that’s actually the reason we can accept meat and dairy and bones and paper towels, stuff you can’t really do in your backyard, just because when it gets that big, the bacteria that live in that pile heat it up to higher temperatures and then new bacteria, thermophilic bacteria, will come in and can break down more complex proteins.
Actually, when I was at the farm once recently … Well, I guess it might have been a little while ago, but there was a whale that had been found on the beach. I want to say maybe it was a beluga whale, but they put that whale in a compost pile, give it a month or two, go back, open it up when the flesh is degraded but not the bones, then can exhume the bones for students, so that was pretty cool.
We are diverting 50 tons per week now of food scraps, and so we need more than one outlet. We’re proud to support local farms, but also we work with an anaerobic digester up in Exeter, Maine that makes electricity from food scraps, so a good several tons every day go up there. That’s pretty neat because it’s far away, but they are making energy from it, and they’re still getting a fertilizer product out of it. The energy is produced by burning the methane, but you can also condense that and make a renewable bio gas that is basically the same thing as natural gas, and so one day we hope to be able to power any gasoline vehicle you can convert to run on natural gas, so we can run our fleet on bio gas one day and basically have zero footprint in terms of fuel that we’re using, so the future’s pretty cool I think in this industry.
Lisa: How many households do you currently have?
Tyler: We’ve broken 5,000, so it’s quite a few, and then we’ve got 150 probably commercial locations that we compost with.
Lisa: What’s your goal? What would you like to see happen?
Tyler: Well, when I started out I had a goal of 5,000 households just as an arbitrary, “That would be a lot,” kind of number. The goal is to get all the food scraps out of the landfill, and how far do we extend that. Certainly, I consider southern Maine as our target area right now, but we think we have a program that’s successful enough that we can replicate that in other urban areas. We’re aiming to do that very soon, actually, in Massachusetts. Vermont and Mass and Connecticut and soon Maine all have organic waste bands, landfill bands, so they’re phased in and they start with just large generators that make one ton or more per week, and they say that you have to send it to a composting facility or an anaerobic digester. That’s going to step down closer and closer to the household level, and so it’s sort of making the market in those areas, and a lot of towns and businesses are really struggling to figure out how they’re going to comply with this, and really they need us down there. We’re going to be trying to replicate our model.
I mentioned James, who I started the web development company with that I grew up with. He’s on our team now, and he’s built a proprietary software that manages our whole operation, so soon drivers will actually just be able to use tablets in the trucks to complete the route, and everything’s just managed all live and very seamless, and it will also enable us to communicate with trucks in other states so that we can start these satellite operations and still have our home office here in Portland. That’s where we’re trying to go with it.
Lisa: Who would have ever thought that garbage could be so glamorous?
Tyler: Yes.
Lisa: That’s good stuff, actually. How do people find out about Garbage to Garden?
Tyler: How do they find out about it? Well, there’s a lot of information on our web site, GarbageToGarden.org. We’re at 57 Industrial Way in Portland. It’s a pretty cool area. They call it Industry Ale Way, because that’s where all the breweries are. People can come by for a tour and visit with us and stop and have a beer somewhere afterwards if they like.
Lisa: I’m really interested in what happens in the future of Garbage to Garden. I’m kind of fascinated by all this. It does my heart good knowing all these years I had to fight with people to talk about the importance of composting, even people of my own households, like, “Composting is so important.” It makes me feel happy that I’m now along with 5,000 other households that are at least participating in your program, and I’m sure countless other people who are doing their own composting. I’m so glad it’s become a thing. I know that our audio producer, Spencer, he’s a big fan of composting. We’re all on your side, Tyler. I give you a lot of credit for hanging in there and finding something that really works and making it a really practical solution.
Tyler: Yes. I mentioned we’re branching into other areas. This summer, we’re doing all kinds of events. Events are very wasteful, and that’s not just food, but all kinds of waste, so we partner with event planners to provide a zero waste event service and try to incentivize the food trucks and things coming in to use recyclable and compostable materials, and we make compost and recycle stations available all over and just try to make it as close to a zero waste event as possible with volunteers and such. You’re going to see us at these concerts and Fourth of July and different places. As much as possible, we want to connect with the communities that we’re in to help foster that social change.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Tyler Frank, who is one of the originators of Garbage to Garden. He’s the founder. I’m excited to hear about what’s going on. I probably should be less excited about composting because it doesn’t seem that exciting, but I am. I love what you’re doing. I’m really appreciative that you came in and you talked to us about this today.
Tyler: Yes. Well, I’m really glad to be here, and I’d love to be back sometime.
Lisa: Absolutely.
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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.
Announcer: Join Dr. Lisa in celebrating the sweet start of summer, high fashion, Maine Makers, fine craft food and brews, June 18, 2016 at the third annual Biddeford Ball Black and Tan Charity Event. Designer Roxy Sugar presents Maine brands on the runway, including Nuthatch, Chart, Sea Bags, Angel Rocks, LL Bean, Boots and more. Proceeds will benefit Mainers Feeding Mainers Harvest for Hope Farm to Pantry program through Good Shepherd and other local food banks. DJ Baby Blue, New York City’s veteran of mash-up will keep you moving all night long with his legendary vinyl sounds. More information and tickets available at www.BiddefordBall.org.
Lisa: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 247, “Treasuring our Trash.” Our guests have included Tyler Frank and Kevin Roche. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit LoveMaineRadio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa, and see my running, travel, food, and wellness photos @bountiful1 on Instagram.
We’d love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our “Treasuring our Trash” show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Announcer: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of Berlin City Honda, The Rooms by Harding Lee Smith, Maine Magazine, Portland Art Gallery, and Art Collector Maine. Audio production and original music have been provided by Spencer Albee. Our editorial producer is Kelly Chase. Our assistant producer is Shelbi Wassick. Our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Susan Grisanti, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our hosts’ production team, Maine Magazine, our any of the guests featured here today, please visit us at LoveMaineRadio.com.
Here’s a clip from our interview with Lael Couper Jepsen from next week’s program.
Lael: I literally walked into this leadership retreat that I had done many times before, and for the first time I just saw this. It was the top 150 leaders of the company, and I just saw this sea of white men in their 50s and 60s primarily, and a few women, but all I could see was the predominantly white men, and at the same time I looked down and I was ten months pregnant. I probably should not have even been at this retreat, but I loved it, so I was very sort of ripe with child, so much so I couldn’t even see my toes from underneath my belly, and it just struck me in that moment, that visual of I’m a woman. It sounds so simple and basic to say that now, but it clicked for me in that moment, and that was the moment that began everything, that changed everything, because I started to see myself as different and I started to get curious.
The first part of my journey was to get curious of how that happened and how was I culpable, how did I allow that to happen at the age of 34, how did I get to this place. There was the unraveling of that, and there was rage and anger that came up behind that and processing through that. It began with curiosity. It moved into anger. It had me start to look outward into the world and say, “Where are the women? Where am I out there? What’s happening?” At that time, I had an advanced degree and I knew the statistics of the disconnect between women who are getting advanced degrees and actually accelerating into the C suites, in the board rooms, and it wasn’t really working. I surprised myself and realized that I wanted to dedicate my work in the world to working with women, which took me by surprise because I did not see that coming. That was not a dream I had growing up. I didn’t identify as being a feminist. I didn’t really identify as being a woman, so here I am dedicating my professional life to this and forming She Changes, which I went on to do.
It was a journey. I worked with a lot of men who I love and still love, who were like, “You’re cutting off half your market share by just working with women. You really should think that through,” and I did, and I was thinking, “Oh my god, what am I doing?” But something wise within me has governed all of my work with She Changes, this book, and I’ve invested in that. I’ve often joked that that’s the key stakeholder in my business, that wise voice in me, and it’s served me well. The book that you hold in your hands is really the culmination of my journey the past ten years that has taken me to this point, and it began as a conversation about being a woman, and then as I teased it out further it became about the range of who I am as a woman and making space for the masculine energy in myself, which I had shamed a lot, and so asking myself where I participated in that shame, and then the feminine energy. What did that even mean? It was quite an inside out, thrashing around … I call it a street fight on the cover, and an aria, because it was totally inspired. It’s such an honor to have gotten that. I’m so glad it’s out.
Lisa: It’s interesting that you would talk about feminism because looking back through the book in preparation for today, I really was struck by anger and the quote that you gave by Gloria Steinem, “Anger is energizing. The opposite of anger is depression, which is anger turned inward,” and then you ask the question …
Announcer: Thank you for listening to Love Maine Radio. We hope you can join us for next week’s program.