Receiving final approval were special assessments of property owners to help pay for construction of three different sidewalks – on Stone School Road, Barton Drive and Scio Church Road.

The new sidewalk on Stone School Road will be on the west side of the road. This work will be done in conjunction with the Stone School Road reconstruction project from I-94 to Ellsworth Road. The total sidewalk project cost is roughly $128,500, of which about $55,000 will be special assessed. A public hearing on the special assessment took place at the council’s July 7 meeting. Three representatives of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which owns property on Stone School Road, addressed the council about the amount of the special assessment they’ve been assigned. They asked for some kind of waiver, given the nonprofit status of their organization. Mayor John Hieftje indicated that city staff would provide them with options.

The Barton Drive sidewalk project will extend eastward from Bandemer Park at Longshore Drive. The cost of the Barton Drive sidewalk has been calculated to be $80,606. Of that, about $36,000 will be paid from federal surface transportation funds. Of the remaining $44,606, the city’s general fund would pay $42,626, leaving just $1,980 to be paid through the special assessment.

For the Scio Church sidewalk project, the total cost is expected to be $365,100. Of that, about $164,000 will be paid from a federal surface transportation grant. The remaining $201,100 will be paid out of the city’s general fund and by the special assessment of just $1,626.

Several other contracts appeared on the council’s July 7 agenda that were related to infrastructure maintenance and repair. The council approved a $344,600 contract with Cadillac Asphalt LLC for repair of streets after water mains, storm and sanitary sewers are repaired. The city’s public services area does not have the equipment or the staff to perform these types of street repairs, which often involve the replacement of the concrete base or the concrete street surface, according to the staff memo accompanying the resolution.

The city council also awarded a $175,000 contract to replace a clarifier drive in the drinking water treatment plant – to Titus Welding Company. According to a staff memo, the drive to be replaced is original to the plant and was installed in 1965. It had an expected life of 30 years. It has begun to show signs of failure, included seizing, high vibration, and bearing failure. The drive has been assessed by the manufacturer and it has been determined that it is not cost-effective to repair, according to the memo.

Also approved by the council was a $205,055 contract with Renosys Corp. to install PVC pool liners at Buhr and Fuller pools. The city is switching to PVC from Marcite, which is, according to a staff memo, a “cementitous product that covers the pool shell creating a smooth and waterproof surface.” The new product has a smoother surface, and won’t require the yearly patching required due to harsh winters and wear and tear on the pool, according to the staff memo.

Also approved at the July 7 meeting was a $80,836 contract amendment with Tetra Tech Inc. for environmental consulting services at the now-closed Ann Arbor landfill. That brings the total amount on the contract to $624,221. According to a staff memo, for several years the landfill has had a plume of 1-4 dioxane and vinyl chloride contamination offsite primarily in Southeast Area Park, northeast of the landfill. A slurry wall was constructed along most of the boundary of the landfill to eliminate groundwater passing through the landfill, and three purge wells were used to attempt to capture the offsite contamination.

And finally, the council passed a resolution approving $125,000 contracts with Stantec Consulting Michigan Inc. and Fishbeck, Thompson, Carr & Huber Inc. for general civil engineering and surveying services. Those services include a range of activities, according to the staff memo accompanying the resolution: design and management of capital improvement projects; private development construction plan review; private development utility and road construction inspection; traffic engineering; civil engineering design; construction inspection; drafting; and surveying.

This brief was filed from the city council’s chambers on the second floor of city hall, located at 301 E. Huron.

According to the staff memo accompanying the resolution, the city disposes of 62,000 tons of trash in the Woodland Meadows landfill per year. The city’s street sweepings and seasonal wastewater treatment sludge are also disposed there.

In 2002, the city council first approved the five-year contract and then approved a five-year extension in 2007.

This brief was filed from the city council’s chambers on the second floor of city hall, located at 301 E. Huron. A more detailed report will follow: [link]

Tom McMurtrie, left, is the city's solid waste coordinator. Jim Frey, right, is CEO of Resource Recycling Systems, a consultant for the city on recycling.

The two separate resolutions correspond to the two facets of the new recycling system for Ann Arbor, which will be deployed in July 2010.

One resolution revised the contract with Recycle Ann Arbor (RAA) for curbside recycling pickup to reflect the single-stream character of the system. Residents will no longer place paper and containers in separate 11-gallon stackable totes to be hand-emptied by RAA drivers.  Instead, residents will put all their recyclable materials into a single rollable cart with a lid. Drivers will operate a robot arm from inside the truck to lift and tip the single cart’s recyclable contents into the truck.

The other resolution approved by the council authorized a contract with RecycleBank to implement an incentive program for residents, based on their participation in the recycling program and the average amount of materials recycled on their route.

Both the conversion to the new system and its associated incentive program came under criticism  during public commentary. During council deliberations it was the incentive program that was given the most scrutiny by councilmembers – with Stephen Kunselman (Ward 3) voting against it. The contract with RAA was given unanimous support from the nine councilmembers who were present.

The arrangements with RAA for collection and with RecycleBank for the incentive program are separate contracts with separate entities – the single-stream system could be implemented without the incentive system. But it became apparent during council deliberations that the idea that the city council might opt for a single-stream system without the incentive program was not something city staff had planned for: The single-stream carts are already molded with labels “Earn rewards for recycling.” [Clarification: The authorization for the in-molded cart labels had not been made before the council approved the incentive contract.]

Background on City Council History with Single-Stream

Monday was not the first time the city council had contemplated the single-stream issue. The council heard a presentation at its Oct. 12, 2009 work session on the approach, including the incentive program for residents to set out their new single-stream carts for collection.

There was some initial confusion in the community about how the carts equipped with RFI (radio-frequency identification) tags would factor into the incentive program. Trucks will not weigh each individual cart as its contents are collected. The RFI scan simply measures participation of a household on any given day, and that participation is then assigned the average weight of all participating carts when the truck is weighed at the materials recovery facility (MRF).

At its Nov. 5, 2009 meeting, the council authorized upgrades necessary for the materials recovery facility (MRF) – some additional processing will be required to separate the materials, given that items will arrive mixed together. And at its Dec. 21, 2009 meeting, the council authorized the purchase of four new trucks, plus 33,000 carts equipped with RFI  chips.

The authorized total of capital investments – around $6 million – was made with reserves from the solid waste fund, which receives revenues from a dedicated millage. The increased volume of recycling expected from the single-stream system is expected to benefit the city’s balance sheet in two ways.

First, every ton that can be recycled instead of landfilled will save roughly $25 in tipping fees at Woodland Meadows in Wayne, Mich., where the city buries its trash. Second, the more recycled material that the city can collect, the more material it can sell on the recycled materials market. The estimated payback period for the investment is contingent on how the market for recycled materials plays out. The city is projecting that if the market stays in the mid-range for performance, the payback period for the investment will be about six years.

Who’s Who in Ann Arbor Recycling

At the podium at different times during the city council meeting were a range of people representing various organizations. Tom McMurtrie is the city’s solid waste coordinator. He was joined much of the time at the podium by Jim Frey, CEO of Resource Recycling Systems, a consulting firm.

John Getzloff is the representative of RecycleBank, which will have the contract to administer the incentive program. RecycleBank’s parent company is called RecycleRewards, and reference by speakers at the meeting varied between these two entities.

Melinda Uerling is the executive director of Recycle Ann Arbor – its current contract for dual-stream collection was amended Monday night to accommodate single-stream recycling collection. Recycle Ann Arbor is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ecology Center, an Ann Arbor nonprofit.

Single-Stream Public Commentary

Kathy Boris spoke against the adoption of a single-stream curbside recycling system. She said that the true business of the city government is to provide services, which included collection of recycled materials, and that the current system is providing good service. She contended that the current two-stream system is working, and that she was not aware that it was deficient. The cost savings associated with a single-stream system, she said, were offset by the need to purchase new cards, trucks, and add staff at the materials recovery facility. The current economic down time, she said, was the wrong time to undertake this system.

She cautioned the council that the point of recycling is not to achieve great volume, it’s to be able to sell what you have collected so it can be manufactured into products that people will buy. She warned that even with additional processing of the material that is mixed through the single-stream approach, you will still get contamination. She questioned whether it was in the best interest of the city to sacrifice quality in the interest of increased volume – it jeopardized the city’s ability to close the recycling loop by selling the material.

Rita Mitchell began her remarks on the single-stream recycling system by saying that she had found some money for the budget – she asked the council to vote no on the two resolutions before them concerning single-stream recycling [One resolution authorized a contract with Recycle Ann Arbor to perform the curbside collection, while the other authorized a contract with RecycleBank, the vendor that will be implementing the incentive program.]

Mitchell told the council that they would save up to $6 million by voting no. She suggested using the funds instead for police services and park maintenance. Mitchell acknowledged that adding additional types of plastics to the set of materials that are accepted is a good idea, but not one that is worth the $6 million investment. She also asked what would happen to the batteries and the oil, which are currently picked up curbside. With the $3-per-car entry fee now imposed at the city’s drop-off station, she warned that batteries and oil would wind up going to the landfill.

Mitchell cautioned that the incentives offered through RecycleBank could lead to increased consumption of unnecessary things, which was counter to the goals of recycling. She also objected to the roughly $200,000 annual cost to administer the program. She characterized the incentive program as a marketing project for tracking consumer behavior. Comparing RecycleBank’s slogan of “recycle, redeem, reward” to the one that’s more familiar to recyclers, she asked, “What happened to ‘reduce, reuse, recycle?’” She cautioned the council that they needed to look at the entire waste stream picture and that the goal needed to be a reduction both in solid waste and recycling.

Responding to the idea that the time has come for single-stream recycling, Glenn Thompson allowed that it had come … and gone. After careful study, he said, Berkeley, Calif. decided to retain its two-stream system. The University of Colorado had also recently concluded that the negatives associated with a single-stream system outweigh the benefits and had made a decision to stick with the two-stream system.

Those decisions, he said, were made this year, based on the quality of the resulting materials. Thompson reminded councilmembers that Ann Arbor has a 90% participation rate in curbside recycling for its two-stream system and has a 50% diversion rate. At the same time that the council was planning to spend $6 million on a speculative program, it was considering canceling loose-leaf collection, eliminating holiday tree collection, and had already imposed a $3 fee to enter the drop-off station. Thompson, like Mitchell, characterized the RecycleBank incentive program as a “marketing campaign.” Thompson called on the council to make this the watershed issue, the one where the council says no to an unnecessary “pet project.” He asked the council not to spend $6 million to benefit consultants and contractors.

Lou Glorie during public commentary on single-stream recycling.

[Later, during council deliberations, Sandi Smith (Ward 1) would question the connection that was made by some speakers during public commentary between the elimination of the loose-leaf collection and holiday tree pickup on the one hand, and the implementation of single-stream recycling on the other.]

Lou Glorie made her remarks during public commentary reserved time in the form of a skit in which she played both roles. It was a household conversation about recycling after conversion to a single-stream system. She included a mixing bowl as a prop, into which she dumped various materials. She then mixed them together, symbolic of what would happen to materials in a single-stream system.

RecycleBank’s Incentive Contract

Councilmembers had several areas of concern – from the 10-year length of the contract, to the need to have an incentive program at all. From the staff memo providing the rationale for the incentive program:

Based on data collected from comparable communities around the country, it is estimated that the single-stream program without RecycleBank would increase recycling rates about 28%, from 357 pounds per household per year to 457 pounds. This increase will be due to both the convenience and higher capacity of the new single-stream cart, as well as the additional materials that will be collected in the program. For example, all plastic bottles and tubs (except #3 and styrofoam) will be accepted under the new program.

With the RecycleBank incentive program, it is estimated that those same recycling rates will increase from 357 pounds to 752 pounds, or over 200%. The attached chart compares that 752 pound figure with other similar communities that are currently enrolled in the RecycleBank program.

Even at 752 pounds per household per year– a 200% increase in volume compared to current levels – Ann Arbor would be a fairly middle-of-the-pack RecycleBank client.

Here's how Ann Arbor's recycling performance is projected to stack up against other communities after implementation of the RecycleBank program. Ann Arbor's is the leftmost column. (Image links to higher resolution file.)

A chart supplied by RecycleBank shows five other cities that collect more than 800 pounds per household per year.

Marcia Higgins (Ward 4) led off council deliberations with a question about the length of the contract for RecycleBank: Why was it a 10-year contract for something that’s a new program?

Tom McMurtrie, the city’s solid waste coordinator, explained that it was based on the significant investment in technology and capital equipment required to install the RFID recognition equipment. Higgins also pointed out that the contract was for $200,000 per year over the course of the 10-year contract. She asked, “Why do we feel like we need to have this?” She put her question in the context of the already high rates of participation and recycling by Ann Arbor residents.

McMurtrie allowed that Ann Arbor residents did in fact have a high rate of participation. But he pointed out that communities like Rochester Hills and Westland, which had implemented single-stream cycling together with the incentive program associated with RecycleBank, now surpassed Ann Arbor residents – measured in terms of pounds of recycled material per household.

Jim Frey said that the length of the contract was related partly to the interest in cultivating the long-term loyalty of merchants who participated in the incentive program through coupon offerings. The idea was to use the incentive rewards to lower the cost of living for residents. The idea was also to have a longer-term relationship between residents and merchants.

In terms of Ann Arbor residents’ recycling performance, said Frey, they are no longer in the top 25% – “really not that great, to be honest with you.” The idea was to bring the performance, measured in terms of pounds per household, back into the top 90th percentile. He concluded by saying that Ann Arbor did have good participation rates, but that the performance was not as good as communities that had implemented incentives with RecycleBank.

Higgins asked if those other communities that had implemented RecycleBank, like Rochester Hills and Westland, had also converted to single-stream recycling. Frey confirmed that those two communities had implemented single-stream along with RecycleBank.

Higgins wanted to know if Ann Arbor’s recycling performance could be expected to bump up some anyway, just due to the implementation of the single-stream system, independently of any incentive program. She wanted to know what Rochester Hills’ and Westland’s performance in its two-stream system looked like before implementing the single-stream system, plus the RecycleBank incentive system.

Rochester Hills’ numbers for the two-stream curbside system were around a 30% participation rate, with around 150-200 pounds per household, Frey said. Now their participation rate was around 80%, with around 650 pounds per household. Westland, which previously had no curbside recycling, is now showing recycling levels of 800 pounds per household – roughly double the amount recycled in Ann Arbor, he said.

Higgins responded to an example from Frey of a community going from 30% to 80% participation through RecycleBank by pointing out Ann Arbor’s 80-90% participation rate with the two-stream system. Tom McMurtrie countered that it’s not just about participation but rather the amount of materials. Higgins asked when the 80-90% participation rate had last been measured for Ann Arbor in a two-stream curbside recycling program. McMurtrie told her it had been several years ago.

Carsten Hohnke (Ward 5) focused on the idea that there will be an increase in recycling performance simply due to the conversion to a single-stream system, but there will be an additional increase from the RecycleBank incentive rewards system. McMurtrie confirmed that the conversion to single-stream itself – which included more kinds of materials (plastics), and increased volume of the curbside container – would result in some gains. But the incentive program, said McMurtrie, which really “gives it that shot in the arm.”

Noting that Ann Arbor was not the first to lead the way by implementing an incentive program like RecycleBank, Hohnke asked what that boost actually looked like. John Getzloff of RecycleBank reviewed the Westland and Rochester Hills program and added the example of Cherry Hill, N.J., which had increased its recycling levels from 600 pounds per year to 900 pounds per year. Getzloff told the council that RecycleBank operated in 20 states across the country, including large cities like Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Chicago.

Frey suggested that in analyzing Ann Arbor’s situation, they estimated that 500 pounds of recycling per household could be attributed perhaps to just having a bigger container. There were many communities that had implemented single-stream recycling with carts only, and generally they achieved between 450 and 550 pounds of recycled materials per household. Hohnke then concluded from that discussion that the city could be confident there would be some additional boost from having the RecycleBank incentive program.

But he noted that the incentive program came with a cost – $200,000 per year. Against that cost had to be weighed the savings in tipping fees for the landfill. Asked Hohnke, “If you do the math, how do they compare?” Frey indicated that for every additional ton of material that was recycled, a savings of $25 would be realized. Through the sale of the material, there would be a benefit, as well. They projected that over the next five years, the incentive program would cover its costs.

In addition to that, Frey said, the value of the incentive rewards to each household would average around $250 worth of rewards a year. With 28,000 carts, that reflected a $7 million benefit to the community, he said. Hohnke concluded from this that implementing the incentive program over the course of five years would save the city money.

Higgins wanted to know what the ratio of renters to homeowners was in the communities that had been used for comparison, noting that there were 45% renters in Ann Arbor. Getzloff explained that the benefit of the rewards program came to the resident, not necessarily the property owner. If people moved within the city of Ann Arbor, they would take their accounts with them.

Higgins also came back to the fact that it was a very long contract. What if, two years into the contract, it is not working for the city, she wondered? McMurtrie replied that RecycleBank had been around since 2004 and therefore they had a history. Higgins came back with the point that it was not as long a history as the contract the council was being asked to sign. McMurtrie noted that the city had the ability by the terms of the contract not to fund the program.

Sandi Smith (Ward 1) noted that on the chart that had been provided to councilmembers, curbside recycling levels increased dramatically but flattened out rather quickly over the five-year period that was estimated. Frey accounted for that by saying that there was a built-in conservatism in the estimates.

Smith asked about the possibility that utilization rates did not improve over time. Getzloff indicated  in that case, they would do additional outreach in the community. Frey pointed out that it could be a very targeted outreach because they would know exactly which households were not participating in the program. Smith elicited from Getzloff that the merchant partners for the incentive program would be a combination of national and local partners and that there would be a $540 cap on benefits to any one particular household. The cap is a way to prevent people from trying to cheat the system – by loading their carts with materials other than recyclables.

Mayor John Hieftje said he was intrigued by the incentive program and wondered if it would be possible for the community to use the coupons to support local nonprofits like Food Gatherers. Getzloff indicated that RecycleBank’s main focus was on their Green Schools program and other national charities. Support for local charities was not in the contract that the council was considering. Hieftje characterized the incentive program as a good investment.

Stephen Kunselman (Ward 3) asked who collected the data on recycling tonnage. McMurtrie clarified that it’s collected by trucks and is then uploaded to RecycleBank’s system.

Kunselman reflected on the fact that the roughly $200,000 per year over the life of the 10-year contract represented $2 million. He established that the escape clause for not funding the program was slightly less than $200,000 a year – to cover the under-appreciated capital investment in the trucks. In light of that, Kunselman wondered why it was necessary to have a 10-year contract. Getzloff indicated that there were a variety of term lengths for RecycleBank contracts and that the best price came with the longest one – a 10-year contract.

Kunselman returned to the topic of Ann Arbor’s already high 80-90% participation rate. Based on the chart that had been handed out to councilmembers, Kunselman wanted to know how much of the doubling of recycled tonnage could be attributed just to the implementation of the single-stream system independently of the incentive program.

Frey went through a chart that showed how estimates of the current level of 5,084 tons – for single households in Ann Arbor – would rise to 10,708 tons in the second year of the program. Of those 5,624 extra tons, fully 4,201 were attributable to the incentive program.

Kunselman also questioned whether the city would in effect be paying twice for the educational efforts of both Recycle Ann Arbor and of RecycleBank. McMurtrie replied by saying that “We’re all in this together.” RecycleBank, McMurtrie indicated, is simply a new layer.

Kunselman then asked whether there were examples of RecycleBank in other college towns. Kunselman said that he was not sold on the idea that the city needed incentives as opposed to more education. Getzloff said that the incentive program educated people by keeping the idea of recycling foremost in their minds. Kunselman responded by saying that he had a difficult time believing that with a 80-90% participation rate by people who were conscientious about recycling, that a dramatic gain like Getzloff was describing could be possible.

Frey indicated that he’d been in the business of recycling almost 30 years and that communities spend millions of dollars in education, and that it’s different for each person and different for each household. What’s different about the incentive program, he said, is the common interest that it defines. He stressed that it works, and it’s amazingly effective.

Frey indicated that there were University of Michigan students who were really interested in doing a pre-test and post-test of the system. So Kunselman asked if it was possible to delay implementation of the incentive system for one or two years to see how well the conversion to single-stream worked with just the educational efforts of Recycle Ann Arbor.

McMurtrie responded by saying that the city council had already approved a purchase order for 33,000 carts and that the carts have in-molded labels saying that there would be rewards. Kunselman expressed his objection to the idea that they were putting advertising for RecycleBank on the carts. McMurtrie indicated that it was not advertising, but rather the phrase: “Earn rewards for recycling.”

Christopher Taylor (Ward 3) clarified that the escape clause in the contract was designed to cover an investment that had not yet depreciated. He wanted to know how much that investment was. It boiled down to $20,000 per truck, plus installation of equipment at the materials recovery facility (MRF) – a computer that would download data to Recycle Ann Arbor. The cost of recruiting incentive rewards merchant partners, sending a team to educate people and funding the Green Schools program is just the cost of doing business, confirmed Getzloff.

Taylor then segued into a discussion of what exactly RecycleBank’s business model is. He wondered how they could offer $7 million in benefits based on a $200,000 per year payment from the city. Getzloff clarified that the $7 million reflected a co-spend, and that it was essentially costless to them. The parts of the incentive program that cost RecycleBank money are gift cards, movie tickets and the Green Schools program, Getzloff said. Taylor concluded from Getzloff’s remarks that the primary benefit to RecycleBank is from having the contract with the city. The heart of RecycleBank’s business model was the customer satisfaction of the city of Ann Arbor, Taylor said: “We are your customer.”

Marcia Higgins (Ward 4) offered an amendment that stipulated that in three years after implementing the program, the city administrator would report back to the council on its effectiveness. Higgins’ amendment was unanimously approved.

Mayor John Hieftje asked McMurtrie if there was any reason to believe that the incentive program would cause people to buy more stuff. McMurtrie said he could not see that happening. He noted that there is a cap on how much you can earn from the rewards program. He stressed that the city’s first message was to reduce.

Outcome: The contract with RecycleBank for an incentive program for recycling in connection with the city’s new single-stream program was approved, with dissent from Stephen Kunselman.

Recycle Ann Arbor Contract

Also before the council was a contract revision with Recycle Ann Arbor, which currently collects recyclables curbside in a two-stream system. The key revisions to the contract are as follows:

The contract currently pays $19.30 to $102.58 per ton (depending on the annual tons), as well as $2.41 per service unit, with a total of 48,886 service units.

The proposed amendment modifies the provisions for compensation to RAA and extends the contract for an five additional years. The amendment will pay a revised rate of $18.74 to $30.00 per ton, as well as $3.25 per cart, which will replace the per service unit fee. The number of carts in the city will be lower than the number of service units because most multi-family service units will share carts. It is estimated that the new program will start with 32,800 recycle carts.

Carsten Hohnke (Ward 5) led off the counci’s deliberations by reading a statement of support for the resolution from Margie Teall (Ward 4), who could not attend the council meeting.

Sandi Smith (Ward 1) raised the issue of the connection that some of the public speakers had drawn between the implementation of a single-stream system and the possible elimination of the city’s loose-leaf collection program and its holiday tree drop-off. She asked for confirmation of her understanding that the leaf collection program was simply inefficient.

Tom McMurtrie, the city’s solid waste coordinator, confirmed Smith’s understanding of the loose-leaf collection system. Sue McCormick, public services area administrator, said the loose-leaf collection system was something the city had talked about for a number of years – it generated a very large number of complaints, due to the fact that there were challenges inherent in timing the collection to coincide with the dropping of leaves from trees in any given season.

The unpredictable first snowfall was also a factor, said McCormick. Raking leaves into the street for pickup – a key feature of the loose-leaf collection program – in areas where there was on-street parking was particularly problematic, McCormick said. [At the council's budget retreat in December 2009, McCormick had said about the loose-leaf collection program: "We cannot do it well."]

A second reason for eliminating the loose-leaf collection program, said McCormick, was to contain costs – the city expected around a $450,000 reduction from the solid waste millage revenues in the coming year. It would be somewhat cheaper – by about $100,000 per year – to move to a containerized system for leaf pickup. Smith drew out the fact that the city would continue to pick up leaves, but simply require that they be placed in paper bags or in one of the city’s compost carts. McCormick said that some residents had found it useful to place leaves in the compost carts over several weeks, instead of the all-at-once approach inherent in the loose-leaf collection program.

The rationale for the single-stream system, said McCormick, was to provide a higher degree of service with a payback period of around six years for the capital investment. Each of the programs – loose-leaf collection and single-stream – stood on their own, she said.

Stephen Kunselman (Ward 3) said the initial approvals for the switch to single-stream recycling [authorization for the MRF upgrade, for example] had come in November 2009, before he served on the city council, so he wanted to get a clearer understanding of the general issue.

How do we have employees of a private vendor driving a city truck with a mechanical arm to pick up recycling, and also city workers driving city trucks with mechanical arms to pick up solid waste, Kunselman asked. He said he was a former driver for RAA and just wanted to get a clearer understanding. Kunselman also wanted to know: When did the contract actually end, given the five-year extension?

Tom McMurtrie, the city’s solid waste coordinator, said that until 1991, when he first began working for the city, the contract with RAA was sole-sourced. In 1991, the two-stream system was implemented – McMurtrie said he went out to bid for that system. In the time from 1991 to 2003, that contract was bid out three times. In 2003 they converted to the current performance-based contract, which ends in 2013. The extension for five years would put the end date in 2018.

The compensation for RAA drivers compared to city workers, McMurtrie said – once the better benefits for city workers were factored in – worked out roughly as follows: $19-20/hour for RAA drivers; $35/hour for city workers. McMurtrie said that the city was looking at the idea of privatizing the solid waste collection system as well. Melinda Uerling, executive director of RAA, confirmed McMurtrie’s information on lesser benefits associated with RRA driver compensation – there are health benefits, but no retirement system.

Melinda Uerling, executive director of Recycle Ann Arbor, and Tom McMurtrie, the city's solid waste coordinator.

Hohnke addressed the concern about the possibility that RecycleBank incentives would cause greater consumption, so he drew out the fact that RAA’s message continued to be to reduce, reuse, and recycle, with recycling one of a three-part strategy. Uerling confirmed that this was part of RAA’s message. They focused their message on recycling, she said, whereas RecycleBank would be focused on their rewards system.

Hohnke said there were financial, environmental, and quality-of-life benefits to the single-stream system and he would be supporting the move.

Prompted by Hieftje to explain the change in compensation in the RAA contract, McMurtie said that there was previously a rapid step-up in the per-ton compensation after 10,000 tons, with the idea that RAA would need to add staffing after that tonnage level. With the new single -stream system, he said, they will have already achieved those efficiencies, and it would not be necessary to ratchet up the compensation rate at such a fast rate.

Hieftje also elicited from Frey the fact that the market for recyclables was starting to recover and that Ann Arbor was able to move all of its collected material on the market.

As an example, Frey said, cardboard was in the low 100s [dollars per ton] before the market crashed, and now it was in the 150s.

Hieftje also elicited from McMurtrie and Frey the fact that batteries would no longer be collected curbside under the single-stream system. This is a function of the fact that drivers will no longer be climbing outside of the trucks to pick up batteries and oil.

Hieftje said that one of the advantages of the carts for recycling, as opposed to the two-stream totes, would be an improvement in the “clean look” of the city. He said that in his neighborhood, residents had started setting out their two-stream totes for collection that evening, and there was already cardboard that was starting to blow around.

Mike Anglin (Ward 5) asked about the fact that around 35% of the materials that go through the MRF come from the city of Ann Arbor. The other 65% come from other communities. Frey indicated that in the future the city’s tons would amount to a greater percentage and that the merchant tons would need to find another facility. The MRF would continue to be a regional facility, Frey said, but the relative proportion of the city’s material would increase.

Kunselman asked if monthly data on the materials collected could be provided so that the city could “see how we’re doing.” McMurtrie indicated that more frequent reports on the data was an issue he’d been thinking about – currently the figures are reported annually as part of the city’s State of Our Environment Report.

At the conclusion of the deliberations, Kunselman and Hieftje engaged in a bit of recycling one-upmanship. Kunselman had previously cited his experience as an RAA driver. Hieftje cited his service on the RAA board. Hieftje then quoted an unnamed person who had helped to start RAA – to the effect that recycling needs to be as easy as putting out the trash. Kunselman noted that the unnamed person was his ecology student teacher at Pioneer High School – he’d been inspired by him at a very young age.

Outcome: The contract revision with Recycle Ann Arbor for curbside recycling was approved unanimously.

A Question To Be Recycled

Publication of this part of the meeting report was delayed while The Chronicle sought the answer to a question related to the incentive program – which is still not answered, but we plan to cycle back to it at a future date.

The question relates to how well Ann Arbor residents stack up against other communities that have a RecycleBank incentive program. While the 90% participation in Ann Arbor’s curbside program is high, Ann Arbor’s per-household figure of 357 pounds per year doesn’t stack up favorably with the more than 600 pounds that Rochester Hills residents are achieving.

What was not part of the council deliberations, or in the information that city staff provided to them, however, was the pounds-per-household data for material that goes into the landfill.

When comparing Rochester Hills to Ann Arbor, the 600 pounds versus 357 pounds is part of the story. The other part of the story is the X pounds per household that Rochester Hills throws into the landfill, versus the Y pounds per household that Ann Arbor throws in the landfill.

Our question, currently being handled by city staff, is this: What are X and Y?

To see that getting the answer to the question is not just a matter of diversion rates, consider two communities, City A and City B. City A recycles 500 pounds per household and throws 1,000 pounds into the landfill. City B recycles 750 pounds per household and throws out 1,250 pounds into the landfill. City B outperforms City A in terms of its pounds recycled per household (750 is more than 500) and also outperforms City A in term of diversion rate (37.5% is better than 33%).

Yet there is some sense in which City B is doing a “better job” with resource management – there’s only 1,500 pounds of material carted away from the curb in City A, versus 2,000 pounds in City B.

From Rochester Hills we obtained the roughly one year’s worth of data since April 2009, when the city implemented its RecycleBank program: 6,054 tons of recycling, 16,261 tons of landfilled trash, and 6,397 tons of compost. Those amounts are collected from 19,350 households.

In the most recent article for The Chronicle written by Matt Naud, the city’s environmental coordinator, on the city’s environmental indicators, the breakdown for Ann Arbor’s residential waste only was 28% recycled, 46% landfilled and 26% composted.

Based purely on that breakdown, it looks like Ann Arbor’s performance on diversion rates might be better than Rochester Hills, even though its pounds-per-household recycling numbers are not as good. What we’re still checking is whether the Rochester Hills data we have and the numbers from Naud’s article really reflect an “apples-to-apples” comparison. To the extent that Rochester Hills data might include commercial waste, along with the residential, its diversion rate would be skewed lower.

Present: Stephen Rapundalo, Mike Anglin, Sandi Smith, Tony Derezinski, Stephen Kunselman, Marcia Higgins, John Hieftje, Christopher Taylor, Carsten Hohnke.

Absent: Margie Teall, Sabra Briere.

Mayor John Hieftje announced that councilmember Sabra Briere (Ward 1) and Margie Teall (Ward 4) were absent due to the flu. Later Carsten Hohnke (Ward 5) had to leave the meeting somewhat early to tend to a sick family.

Next council meeting: April 5, 2010 at 7 p.m. in council chambers, 2nd floor of the Guy C. Larcom, Jr. Municipal Building, 100 N. Fifth Ave. [confirm date]

Recycling totes and a trash cart await collection in Ann Arbor. The totes will be replaced with bins similar to the blue trash cart in mid-2010. (Photo by The Chronicle.)

Although Matt Naud, the city’s environmental coordinator, is listed as the author of this piece, he received “a boxload of help” from Adrienne Marino, Tom McMurtrie, and Nancy Stone.

The SOE report is developed by the city’s environmental commission and designed as a citizen’s reference tool on environmental issues and as an atlas of the management strategies underway that are intended to conserve and protect our environment. The newest version of the report is organized around 10 environmental goals developed by the environmental commission and adopted by the city council in 2007. This installment focuses on responsible resource use.

All installments of the series are available here: Environmental Indicator Series.

With the closing of the 2009 holiday season, and many of us surrounded by lots of new “stuff” – including the associated boxes and packaging – and even a few of us with New Year’s resolutions to “simplify” our life in the coming new year, it seems like a good time to talk about all of the stuff we buy, use, reuse, recycle, and then throw out in Ann Arbor.

This year, coincidentally, is also the start of our 40th year of recycling in Ann Arbor, starting with a drop off station at Arborland in 1970, some curbside collection in 1978, and in 1991, an environmental bond that brought curbside collection to all Ann Arbor residents.

This installment of the series summarizes our environmental indicators on municipal solid waste (MSW) – the total amount of waste that is landfilled, composted, or recycled in our community.

Putting waste into a landfill has financial and environmental costs. So we look to recycling and composting rates as a measure of success, because recycling and composting divert waste from landfills. Recycling is also one of the least expensive ways for the city to reduce its carbon footprint. The energy used to recycle materials is typically far less than the energy used to create products from virgin materials.

Achieving our current goal of 60% diversion, and our ultimate goal – to produce zero waste – will require more hard work.

Overall, Ann Arbor diverts a large proportion of its total waste compared to other communities statewide as well as nationwide. We begin with a look at national and state patterns, before focusing on Ann Arbor’s indicators.

National Diversion Efforts

Let’s start by taking a look at the national level. The EPA reports that, “In 2008, Americans generated about 250 million tons of trash and recycled and composted 83 million tons of this material, equivalent to a 33.2 percent recycling rate. On average, we recycled and composted 1.5 pounds of our individual waste generation of 4.5 pounds per person per day.”

National municipal solid waste (MSW) recycling rates from 1960-2008. In green is the total tonnage recycled. In orange is the percent of the total stream that is recycled. The divergence of the graphs after 1990 means that even though total recycling has gone up, the U.S. has generated an even greater amount of waste.

(Source: USEPA, Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2008)

Overall in the U.S., 54% of total Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) is discarded in landfills – the rest is recovered through recycling or combusted (i.e., burned) with some energy recovery. [Ann Arbor does not burn any of its waste.]

In the U.S., 54.2% of waste is discarded in landfills, 33.2% is recycled, and 12.6% is burned.

How does Michigan compare to the rest of the U.S.?

State Of Michigan’s Diversion Efforts

The following is taken from Expanding Recycling in Michigan, April 2006, a report prepared by Public Sector Consultants Inc. for Michigan Recycling Partnership:

Ironically, while Michigan is nationally recognized as a leader in conservation and environmental protection, the state is woefully behind its neighboring states and the nation in its MSW recycling efforts.

• Michigan’s recycling rate of 20 percent is lower than the other Great Lakes states (30 percent) and the U.S. (27 percent) averages.
• Michigan’s recycling rate decreased by 20 percent from 1994 to 2004, while every other state in the region had at least a marginal increase in recycling.
• The per capita recycling rate (0.38 tons/year/person) has remained almost stagnant and continues to be below the regional and national averages (0.44 and 0.46, respectively).
• Unlike many states, Michigan does not collect or require reporting of MSW recycling data; therefore, Michigan does not have the ability to measure the state’s recycling performance or its handling, collection, transport, and marketing of recyclable materials.
• Michigan’s recycling program is funded at a fraction of the level of other Great Lakes state programs and ranks 41st out of 48 states that reported their allocations for recycling.
• Only 37 percent of Michigan residents have access to curbside recycling, the lowest percentage of all the states in the region.
• Michigan has not invested in developing or sustaining markets for recycled materials, and some businesses have to import recycled materials from other states because of the inconsistency in local supplies.

So the Michigan story is pretty sad. A recent press release by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and Environment reported on the decline in solid waste disposal in Michigan and the financial effects:

DEQ Interim Director Jim Sygo warned that the sharp decrease in solid waste disposal would impact the state’s ability to ensure that its waste stream was safe and protective of the environment.

“Michigan’s solid waste program is funded from a 21-cents-per-ton fee on solid waste disposed in Michigan landfills,” said Sygo. “This continued decline in disposal means fewer resources available to our department, and has serious implications for Michigan’s ability to continue the current level of permitting, inspections, and oversight of solid waste management in the state.”

Michigan’s 21-cents-per-ton fee is the lowest in the Great Lakes Region. Based on the capacity used during FY 2009, the reduction of waste disposed, and additional permitted landfill capacity, it is estimated that Michigan landfills have approximately 25 years of remaining disposal capacity.

Maybe it’s just me, but using Michigan land to store trash ought to be really expensive.

Ann Arbor’s Diversion Efforts

Here in Ann Arbor, the story is happier for a number of reasons. Most important is the millage that provides sustainable funding for residential and commercial recycling, including the infrastructure to collect, sort and process these materials for resale. That’s a millage that the city council can enact under state enabling legislation – it appears as “CITY REFUSE” on Ann Arbor property tax bills.

Ann Arbor also has a long history of public education by local government and nonprofits highlighting the benefits of recycling. The Ann Arbor recycling program started in 1970 with a grassroots effort that has continued to today. We have over a 90% participation rate in our single and multi-family recycling program.

Where do we want to be?

One of the city’s 10 environmental goals – responsible resource use – is to produce zero waste. Zero waste is an ambitious goal, but it effectively captures the idea that as a community we don’t want to be wasting resources. While we are not close to meeting the goal of zero waste, every five years we develop a solid waste plan for the city that sets intermediate targets. As we implement the solid waste plan, we move closer to meeting that larger goal.

The goals set in the most recent solid waste plan are:

Achieve a residential waste diversion rate of 60%, equivalent to 31,000 tons/year (for reference, the 1999/2000 recovery was 50%, equivalent to 26,000 tons/year), and an overall diversion goal (including the entire commercial sector) of 60%, equivalent to 40,200 tons/year for both residential and commercial locations.

Our residential waste diversion rate in 2008 was 54%.

In Ann Arbor 46% of solid waste is landfilled, 28% is recycled, and 26% is composted.

Overall we are doing very well compared to measures at the national and state levels. There are several indicators we can use as we look at our overall waste, composting, and recycling initiatives.

Total waste per capita

Landfilled Waste Per Capita

One measurement the city uses as an indicator is the amount of landfilled waste per capita: How much stuff are we each generating on average and how does that compare with some national average?

This number is calculated by weighing the contents of the solid waste residential trucks and dividing by the current census population (excluding the University of Michigan). Looking at the chart below, the amount of waste we are generating per person in Ann Arbor is pretty steady. The good news is that it is lower than the national average. The bad news is that our residential waste disposal is slowly going up instead of down.

Annual Waste Per Capita in Ann Arbor is significantly lower than the national average.

So Ann Arbor’s indicator for total waste per capita is green (our current state is pretty good), with a level arrow (we’re not getting better and not doing dramatically worse).

But this isn’t the whole story.

Looking at annual waste by pound includes all the solid waste we put out to the curb in trash carts. Ways to make our landfilled waste numbers drop include reducing waste at the source (by selecting products in recyclable packaging and purchasing items in bulk) and recycling and composting more.

It is possible to compost food scraps at home (or use your sink disposal) so that heavy organic material that really doesn’t belong in a landfill never makes it into the “waste” stream. In addition, the city expanded our seasonal composting cart collection program this year in fall 2009 – residents can now put uncooked fruits and vegetable food wastes into the compost carts.

Total amount landfilled

Total Landfilled Waste

We’ve already looked at the per-person numbers for landfilled waste. So now let’s take a look at the total amount of waste we landfill.

This is an important measure to look at because it quantifies the amount of material that is now a pure expense to the city and won’t provide any further value – that is, until the economics of mining landfills for materials starts to make sense.

These landfill tons include residential curbside, multi-family, and commercial locations. Data for 2002-2003 are estimated based on 2001 and 2004 data.

Ann Arbor's total amount of landfilled waste is more now than it was in the early 2000s.

This chart shows that we are landfilling less now – in the late 2000s – than we were in the late 1990s. And unfortunately, we are landfilling more than we were just a few years ago.

So Ann Arbor’s indicator for total amount landfilled is yellow (fair) with a downward arrow (we’re doing worse than before).

One thing to note is that landfilling in Michigan is incredibly cheap and not for very good reasons. The true cost of landfilling in Michigan is still pretty high when all of the costs are considered – especially the potential for contaminated groundwater and soils, methane creation, and transportation costs (most recycling facilities are much closer than the landfilling sites).

Past state legislators permitted so much landfill capacity that the beautiful state of Michigan has become a cheap dumping ground for dozens of states and Canada, because Michigan now has a huge over-supply of landfill space. Competition among huge landfills makes the cost for burying trash – the tipping fee – one of the lowest in the U.S.

Even though it makes no sense for Toronto to ship trash to Michigan, Michigan has artificially made it economical for Toronto to send their garbage to us. In FY 2008, Michigan residents sent 39,913,636 cubic yards of waste to Michigan landfills. Canada gave us another 10,722,164 cubic yards, and 6,484,096 came from other states for a grand total of 57,119,896 tons buried in the state of Michigan in just one year.

There are costs that Toronto and other states are not paying that will someday be paid for by Michigan residents.

Tons recycled

Recycling

Recycling is one way to reduce the landfill numbers we’ve already looked at. In Ann Arbor, curbside recycling is provided by Recycle Ann Arbor through a contract with the city. Currently, residents use two stackable totes – a green one for containers and a gray one for paper material.

Ann Arbor’s indicator for total recycled material is green (good) with a level arrow (steady). So what kind of numbers does that indicator reflect?

After a steady rise through the 1990s, the total tons of recycled material in Ann Arbor has leveled off or dropped a bit through the 2000s.

We have dropped a bit in the total amount of material recycled since a high in 2001, but overall our recycling rate has been steady for the past nine years.

To get that arrow for the indicator pointing up is one of the reasons we are looking at single-stream recycling to start in mid-2010 as a way to make recycling easier – toss everything in one cart – to boost our recycling rate and overall amount of waste we are diverting from landfills.

The city currently collects 357 pounds of recycleables per household (HH) per year. Single-stream recycling is expected to raise that amount by 100 pounds to 457 lbs/HH/year. Based on other communities, the addition of the RecycleBank rewards program is estimated to increase recycling to 752 lbs/HH/year – more than doubling the recycleables collected in Ann Arbor. These estimates also account for the expected drop in our total tons recycled because of the loss of the local daily newspaper in 2009.

Tons composted

Composting

Keeping organics that could be composted out of landfills is another way to reduce our landfilled waste numbers.

Ann Arbor’s environmental indicator is green (good) with an upward arrow (improving). What are the numbers that support Ann Arbor’s composting indicator?

Ann Arbor's total tons composted had an upward trend through the 1990s, leveled off, then dropped.

Like recycling, the amount of composted material rose steadily through the 1990s. But composting rates then leveled out, with a big drop in 2007. The numbers for 2008 show us heading back in the right direction. The recent drop is because of a city council ban on grass clippings. They made manually-emptied cans very heavy – but grass clippings are now accepted in the new automated compost carts.

Composting rates are variable and depend on weather – if the year is wet or dry, along with other climatic factors such as ice storm damage, that influences the amount of vegetation collected.

Also, the loss of all the city’s ash trees over the past decade due to the Emerald Ash Borer took a toll by eliminating an estimated 11% of the city’s entire urban forest. Beginning in July 2008, residents began using carts or paper yard waste bags for their compostables. In the fall of 2009, pre-consumer uncooked vegetative food wastes began being accepted in the compost carts’ seasonal pickups.

Percent Diverted

Total Solid Waste: Landfilled, Recycled, Composted

Looking at the individual components of the waste stream – what gets landfilled, recycled, or composted – is definitely useful. But it’s also important to look at the big picture.

When you take a look at the overall picture of waste that is landfilled, recycled, or composted, you get a composite that looks like this.

Total annual solid waste (landfilled, recycled, composted material) has been creeping upward.

It appears that the total amount of waste is down from the high in 2001 but our total waste has been creeping up since 2004.

The measure we look at for an indicator is the percentage of the total waste that is diverted – that is, either recycled or composted. This percentage of diversion is also known as the “recovery rate.”

Ann Arbor’s indicator for total amount of waste diverted is green (good) with a level arrow (stable).

Waste diversion is still fairly high at 41% (citywide, including both commercial and residential) and well above national and state averages. However, it is still lower than our previous high of 46% and well under our intermediate solid waste plan goal of 60%. When we look at just the residential waste stream, we are diverting 54% of the waste stream from landfills.

In 2000, a survey of comparable university communities was developed to benchmark Ann Arbor with peer communities.

       Boulder  Champgn  Madison  Minnpls  OrgnCty  Portlnd  AnnArbor
Pop.   110,700   64,280  200,800  358,785  107,000  505,000  112,000
HH      37,500   24,500   59,200  114,000   48,200  132,000   46,000
SW/day    3.00     3.00     2.53     2.46     3.79     2.75     2.70

PctDiv   36.40    28.20    46.30    29.40    32.20    50.30    39.60
PctRcy   30.40     5.90    19.10    16.60    25.00    27.40    21.60
PctCmp    6.00    22.30    27.20    12.70     7.20    22.90    18.00

ReCurb     513      155      501      384      479      661      727
ReTot      983      203      567      471      345      889      511
Yard       193      771      809      360      401      742      521

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It’s About More than Garbage: Climate

Diversion of material from landfills helps with the management of our solid waste, but it also has a positive impact on reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Emissions of GHGs is an environmental indicator that’s classified by the city as a part of a different environmental goal: stable climate. We’ll take a look at that goal later in this series.

But it’s worth taking a brief look at the relationship between solid waste management and greenhouse gas emissions.

The following is taken directly from USEPA, Methodology For Estimating Municipal Solid Waste Recycling Benefits November 2007:

The disposal of solid waste produces greenhouse gas emissions in a number of ways. First, the anaerobic decomposition of waste buried in landfills produces methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Second, the incineration of waste also produces carbon dioxide as a by-product. [Note: Ann Arbor does not currently burn any of its waste.] Additionally, in transporting waste for disposal, greenhouse gases are emitted due to the combustion of fossil fuels. Finally, fossil fuels are also required for extracting and processing the raw materials necessary to replace those materials that are being disposed with new products.

The national MSW recycling rate in 2006 was 32.5% (or 82 million tons). Using a WAste Reduction Model (WARM), the EPA has estimated the impact of that 82 million tons of recycling on total GHG emissions: It’s the equivalent of 1,288 trillion BTU – enough to power 6.8 million American households.

In 2003, a team of master’s students from the University of Michigan developed a climate action plan for the city. Using the EPA WARM model, they estimated the emissions avoided in Ann Arbor for the 10-year period from 1991-2001. Note: We have not updated these numbers (yet) using the latest recycling and composting numbers. Here, MTCO2e is the metric ton carbon dioxide equivalent:

Year      Recycling     Composting   Total MTCO2e
1991      20,983.02        977.45      21,960.47
1992      22,075.72      1,356.75      23,432.47
1993      25,630.61      1,530.75      27,161.36
1994      28,098.70      1,737.45      29,836.15
1995      28,254.14      1,973.70      30,227.84
1996      35,740.40      2,184.40      37,924.80
1997      35,997.50      2,865.00      38,862.50
1998      33,570.73      2,302.80      35,873.53
1999      35,247.17      2,262.00      37,509.17
2000      37,713.29      2,397.40      40,110.69
2001      42,086.72      2,536.20      44,622.92

TOTAL    345,398.00     22,123.90     367,521.90

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Following the EPA’s conversion, the 20,000-45,000 range of MTCO2e would translate to a range of savings equal to the energy needed to power 750-1,500 households.

Paths to Contribution

One of the goals of this series is to present some information about who’s already working on improving the city’s indicator scores, and to suggest some specific ways that members of the community can contribute to achieving the city’s environmental goals.

All solid waste, recycling, and composting efforts by the city of Ann Arbor are summarized on the city’s website: “Solid Waste and Recycling”

What can you do on a personal level? First, if you have less stuff, there is less to manage.

Second, reuse the stuff you have. The Reuse Center on South Industrial Avenue is one of several local groups that take items that are still in good shape. You get the tax deduction for your donation, and someone else gets an item they need (or just want more than you do) at a pretty good price. It also doesn’t end up in a landfill.

Personally, I have a new mantle over our fireplace that came from the reuse center, a series of low voltage halogen lights along our entry way, and a Rube Goldberg canoe carrier made from two recycled golf bag carriers. Other local reuse locations are listed online on the city’s website: “Reuse Options”

Third, what you can’t reuse, recycle. That should get easier soon. In mid-2010 the city’s residential and commercial weekly recycling collection program will be expanding to a single-stream program. As part of the upgrade of the city’s materials recovery facility (MRF), Ann Arbor will add and recycle clean plastic bottles and household rigid containers marked #1, #2, #4, #5, #6, and #7. Bulky plastic HDPE #2 items such as buckets, crates, trays, outdoor furniture, and many toys will be accepted.

Three types of plastics that will not be included in the expanded program include items marked with a: #3 (PVC for polyvinyl chloride), polystyrene foam (aka Styrofoam™), and plastic bags or film of any sort.

The city will continue to accept and recycle: glass bottles and food containers; tin/steel cans; aluminum cans, foil, and trays; metal scrap (such as pots and pans up to 1 square foot and 20 pounds/piece); milk cartons and juice boxes; newspapers; magazines and catalogs; corrugated cardboard (including pizza boxes free of food); paper bags; junk mail; office paper; boxboard (e.g., flattened cereal boxes); telephone books; and gift wrapping paper. Clean freezer food boxes will also be recyclable.

What about that old appliance you’d like to get rid of? Effective July 1, 2008, until further notice, the following electronic items are accepted at the Drop Off Station at Platt and Ellsworth at no additional charge beyond the per-vehicle charge of $3/visit: VCRs, stereos, microwave ovens, desktop computers, laptop computers, printers, fax machines, and copiers.

Other interesting efforts:

• Video on Recycling in Ann Arbor
• Ann Arbor Street Art Fair – Zero Waste Events
• Recycling at the University of Michigan

The purpose of sharing this indicator through The Chronicle is to share the State of Our Environment Report with the community and hear what you think. As the city’s environmental coordinator, I will be following any comments readers leave here.

Readers who’d prefer to send an email can use MNaud [at] a2gov.org. An easy chance for an in-person chat would be when the city’s environmental commission meets – the fourth Thursday of each month at 7 p.m. This month’s meeting is today, Jan. 28. Although meetings are typically held in the city council chambers at city hall, the January meeting will be a working session in the 6th floor workroom. City hall is located at 100 N. Fifth Ave.

Styrofoam baler with gates open, and the masher in the "down position." In this position, the operator can slide wires through slots in the top and the bottom to wrap the bale securely, before releasing the pressure on the masher. (Photos by the writer.)

About once a month, I load up my bicycle cargo trailer with an assortment of gallon jugs – plastic and glass – plus a mountain of rigid Styrofoam, then pedal off to Recycle Ann Arbor’s drop off station at the corner of Platt and Ellsworth.

When I drop my load of recyclables there, I’m not wearing my Ann Arbor Chronicle editor’s hat. Rather, I’m working as the sole-proprietor of a (very) small bicycle-based business called HD Hauling and Delivery.

I bring this up mostly to establish some sort of credibility as a friend of the environment.

That way when I reveal what I’ve been thinking about recently, there might be a brief hesitation before readers reach into their recycling totes, retrieve a well-rinsed artisanally-crafted mayonnaise jar, and chuck it at my noggin. Not that it will do those readers any good – I generally wear my bicycle helmet, even when I’m just typing.

Now, when I say I’ve been “thinking about” the idea of turning Huron Hills Golf Course into a landfill, I’m not saying that I advocate creating a landfill there. I’m not even saying that it’s a good idea to research the question. I’m just saying that the idea crossed my mind, okay? Why?

It’s because of a recent decision by Recycle Ann Arbor to charge a $3 entry fee for their drop off station, starting Jan. 2, 2010. How do you whack a rhetorical ball all the way from that $3 fee to a landfill at Huron Hills Golf Course? Believe me, you need a lot of club. Fore!

Why a Fee and Who Pays?

The sign posted at the drop off facility gatehouse indicates that the $3 charge is “per vehicle.” In any other context, I’d want to contend that my bicycle plus cargo trailer is a vehicle – as such, it’s entitled to its place on roadways, alongside automobiles. Here, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be lumped in with cars and trucks – if it would save me $3.

A recycling load hauled by HD Hauling and Delivery: Styrofoam, gallon jugs (glass and plastic).

So when I rolled up to the gatehouse on Tuesday this week, I asked one of the two people working the gatehouse what would happen after the first of the year: Would I be charged the entry fee?

The guy asked for clarification: “You’re asking if I’m going to charge you for bringing that stuff here on your bicycle?” His answer was no. On account of the much smaller carbon footprint of a bicycle, he said.

Okay, but what if I get a different guy at the gatehouse?

That’s when the guy revealed who he was: Steve Sheldon, operations manager for Recycle Ann Arbor. He’d be setting that policy, he said, by defining what a vehicle is. The idea of not charging the entry fee for bicycles, Sheldon told me, was consistent with Boulder, Colorado’s CHaRM (Center for Hard-to-Recycle-Materials) policy, which he was looking to as a model.

Although the new $3 fee at Recycle Ann Arbor is identical to the CHaRM entry fee, the price point, Sheldon said, was determined by how much revenue would need to be generated to cover a $100,000 drop in municipal funding. Sheldon said that when Boulder implemented their fee, there was a reduction in visits to the center. And he figured that Ann Arbor would experience a somewhat greater drop given the worse economy in Michigan as compared to Colorado.

By my back-of-the-napkin arithmetic, to get to $100,000, the drop off station will need to average a little more than 130 entries each day it’s open – the winter schedule is Tuesday-Saturday. On Tuesday of this week, there was a line of cars filled with folks who apparently wanted to get their stuff dropped off before the fee was imposed.

Sheldon clarified that the entry fee is added on top of any item-specific fees that might apply. For example, a computer monitor costs $15 to drop off – with the entry fee, that will now cost $18.

There are some discounts available for frequent flyers, though. A 10-visit punch card will be available for $25 – that’s a $5 savings. And a yearly pass will cost $75. Holders of the yearly pass will also receive a 5% discount on trash disposal at the drop off station. Sheldon said he’s already had interest expressed by several people about the yearly pass.

People who come to the drop off station to purchase compost will not be charged the entry fee.

What Does a Fee Say?

The fact that it’s necessary for Recycle Ann Arbor to apply an entry fee for the drop off station says something about the economic viability of recycling per se. It says that the activity of recycling – for many materials – still requires a subsidy.

Besides the drop in municipal funding, the other reason cited by Recycle Ann Arbor’s CEO Melinda Uerling in the press release explaining the entry fee is “the dramatic decline in market value for recyclable materials.”

The "container" bin at Recycle Ann Arbor's drop off station.

In our chat by the gatehouse, Sheldon recalled the heady days when they commanded $600/ton for paper. That’s dropped to $60/ton. Sheldon allowed that plastic and glass actually cost money to have removed from the station. Some of my load is plastic and glass, but most of it is Styrofoam.

Just as an aside, the variable market for recyclable material is one reason for the wide range of years for estimated return on investment for the remodeling of the materials recovery center (MRF) – from 4.3  to 7.8 years, depending on the market. That project will be undertaken in connection with the city’s single-stream curbside recycling initiative, which is set to begin next summer. The city council approved purchase of the new carts at its Dec. 21, 2009 meeting.

Here it’s worth drawing the distinction between the drop off station, which is operated by Recycle Ann Arbor, versus the MRF, which is operated by Resource Recycling Systems FCR. Recycle Ann Arbor contracts with the city to collect curbside recycling, which it delivers to the MRF.

Back to my typical load. Styrofoam is not accepted in the current curbside program – and won’t be in the new single stream system, either – because it sticks to everything else via static charges.

So what about the rigid Styrofoam that I bring to the drop off station? There’s no fee for the Styrofoam – was I costing the drop off center money by dropping off the Styrofoam there? Nope. That’s a material they get paid for, Sheldon told me.

It Ain’t Peanuts

The rigid Styrofoam – along with glass and plastic gallon jugs – is part of a load I haul for Kaiser Optical, located out west of town on Jackson Road. I connected with them through Washenaw County’s Waste Knot program.

Their recycling materials stream also includes prodigious amounts of packing peanuts. The drop off station will accept packing peanuts – but it basically works as a clearinghouse. That is, they count on people who want the packing peanuts to come scarf them up.

Sign at Recycle Ann Arbor's drop off station gatehouse announcing the new $3 entry fee to start on Jan. 2, 2010.

Rather than use the drop off station as a middle man, I funnel the peanuts straight to people who can use them: Carol Kamm’s iSoldIt, which sells items through online auctions on consignment; The Mail Shoppe, which provides shipping and mailing services, on Division Street across from the Kempf House.

And that, it seems to me, is the direction that we need to head with more of the materials we use. It’s not a novel insight. It’s the second “R” from the now cliché “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.”

But that’s a mantra really designed for consumers – it tells us how to deal with the crap we wind up with. There’s nothing explicit in that formula that says to the producer of goods: Make stuff that puts zero material into that 3-R stream.

Yet there are some producers who do that anyway. One of them lives here in Ann Arbor – Jeremy Lopatin, who operates ArborTeas – he imports and packages organic tea, and sells it online. I know Jeremy through HD Hauling and Delivery. The tea purchased by his online customers makes its way to the post office and UPS drop off on my bicycle trailer.

Jeremy is already using a custom-designed, eco-friendly, cardboard container, but will soon introduce the gold standard in packaging – a “backyard compostable” material. It’s also perfectly air-tight, which means greater shelf stability.

You can bury the new packaging in your backyard, and know that it will actually degrade without posing hazards to animal and vegetable life.

Golf Courses as Landfills?

That $3 entry fee for the drop off station suggests to me that burying all our trash would be at least as economical and more energy-efficient than our current path of maintaining two separate waste-collection operations – one for the landfill and one for recycling.

So why do we not just bury all our trash? Why are we even bothering with this huge effort to recycle?

Part of it has to do with the fact that we don’t really trust that landfills are truly safe – despite the layers of clay and plastic liners that are required to meet modern standards. But part of it, I think, has to do with the idea that we hate being “wasteful.” We’ve convinced ourselves that burying trash in a big vault is wasteful. Maybe it’s even true that it is wasteful.

But the alternative – recycling materials – is currently not across-the-board any less wasteful. If it were across-the-board less wasteful, it wouldn’t require subsidy.

However, our recycling activity at least confronts us with the stuff that we’d like to get rid of, and that confrontation could cause someone to innovate a way to eliminate whole categories of items from that set. Ann Arbor’s upcoming move to single-stream recycling will shift that confrontation a bit from individual households to the people at the MRF who sift through the stuff (aided with automated equipment), but a confrontation will remain.

The part that can’t be recycled, though, gets buried – currently at Woodland Meadows in Wayne, Michigan. But here’s why it’s functionally (if not politically) plausible and useful to think of dumping it at Huron Hills Golf Course instead.

Huron Hills Golf Course requires a substantial general fund subsidy – whether it’s operated as a golf course or just maintained minimally to standard to ensure public safety. As the city faces tough budget decisions, one possibility is to think outside the recycled cardboard box. So there’s a functional plausibility to this kind of scenario.

But you don’t need to read tea leaves to know that Ann Arbor is not actually going to turn Huron Hills Golf Course into a landfill. The state of Michigan is unlikely to authorize construction of a municipal landfill, and there’d be no appetite to engage in that losing local political battle.

Now would be a good time to note that I have not spoken to any city councilmembers or city officials about the idea of turning Huron Hills Golf Course into a landfill. And I have not heard of any plan to do so. I also do not suspect, even a tiny bit, that there is a secret plan to do so.

The vision I’d like to conjure, though, for Ann Arborites who wheel their blue trash bins out for collection, is this: After the operator has used the automatic arm to empty the trash into the truck’s belly, he heads to the eighteenth hole of Huron Hills, where Stew Nelson is lining up a putt, and disgorges all that trash right there on the green.

It doesn’t matter how much you recycled, the rest of the trash is going to keep Stew from finishing his round.

If we don’t think of that trash landing on the 18th green of Huron Hill’s Golf Course, we’re going to keep thinking it’s heading off to someplace innocuous, and we’re going to forgive ourselves for that trash, because we did such a great job recycling all that other stuff. But that $3 entry fee is a reminder that recycling all that other stuff isn’t something to be all that proud about, either, because it’s not as economical as just burying it at a landfill.

So I see the Huron-Hills-as-landfill scenario, plus that $3 entry fee for the drop off station, as useful tools to focus on community measures of how well we’re doing in this whole trash plus recycling equation. Those measures can be found in the city of Ann Arbor environmental commission’s Responsible Resource Use environmental indicator, which is a part of the commission’s State of the Environment report.

One key indicator: total waste per capita – the sum of recycling plus trash per person. We’re at around 1,000 pounds per person per year, which stacks up pretty well against the national average of around 1,700 pounds.

Matt Naud, the city’s environmental coordinator, will be focusing in far more detail on those indicators in the next installment of a series of articles, written for The Chronicle, on environmental indicators. In that treatment, which will appear in the next week or so, Matt is guaranteed not to indulge in images of golf courses as landfills.

Dave Askins, editor of The Ann Arbor Chronicle, does not golf.