<body><div><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=2qmUZz_1GwLYjPI00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=2qmUZz_1GwLYjPI00" width="1200" height="600" >There are a handful of visual shorthands to help folks comprehend the massivity of a ton: It’s about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. One fifth an adult African elephant. Two grand pianos.Now, multiply any of those by 1.3 million. That’s how much garbage Philadelphia makes in a year: 1.3 million tons.Only a fraction of what we put on our curb gets recycled or reused. Philadelphia’s recycling rate is around 14 percent, down from a high of 21 percent during Mayor Michael Nutter’s tenure. Faith in our city’s recycling system plummeted first because the City briefly burned about half of its recyclables at the Reworld incinerator in Chester in 2012 after China stopped importing U.S. waste. Then, sanitation workers rattled people’s confidence further when they tossed trash and recyclables into the same truck during the pandemic (a practice that didn’t exactly stop when the pandemic subsided).Councilmember Mark Squilla is trying to change Philadelphians’ lackadaisical attitude towards our trash. His new bill, the Zero Waste and Circular Economy Act, introduced last month, calls for the City to divert 60 percent of its waste by recycling and finding ways to reuse it rather than dumping it in a landfill or incinerator. The bill has been assigned to City Council’s Committee on Commerce and Economic Development. This is a first for a bill involving waste, according to Maurice Sampson, Philadelphia’s first recycling director and a member of the Solid Waste and Recycling Advisory Committee.But it comes at a particularly fraught time. Not only is Council holding a hearing November 18 to debate Mayor Parker’s legislation to re-up the City’s multiyear contract with Reworld, but just last week, Ellen Lankenau, head of the City’s Office of Sustainability, resigned, leaving a director-size hole where an authoritative Zero Waste representative should be.The ordinance calls on City Council to make a plan for how (and when) Philadelphia should reduce the amount of waste it creates. It throws out a few ideas — an anaerobic digester! Municipal composting! But for the most part it’s open ended.So, what should go in the plan? Squilla says there will be a community input period so that labor unions, environmental advocates and ordinary Philadelphians can let the City know what they want.Here are a few ideas from other cities that have successfully increased the amount of waste they’re diverting from landfills.<h2>1) Finally deal with food waste</h2>Let’s start with a fact: Philadelphia tosses out 206 million pounds of food annually. Although much of this waste is residential, a good chunk of it — 27 percent — comes from restaurants and catering companies.Food waste doesn’t need to go to a landfill or incinerator. In fact, it’s one of the most reusable forms of waste out there, thanks to good old composting. Composting facilities use bacteria and fungi to break down food waste, transforming it into a nitrogen-rich fertilizer for soil. The practice is doubly good for the environment: It helps replenish the nutrients in the earth and sequesters carbon back into the soil rather than emitting it into the atmosphere.Plenty of cities have curbside composting — it’s now mandatory in New York City. There are ways Philadelphia could get there: Partner with private curbside composting business Bennett Compost to scale their services citywide. Use the second trash collection day for composting.Squilla’s bill calls for the City to look into municipal composting networks as part of its plan. But it also proposes another solution for managing food waste: anaerobic digestion.No, anaerobic digestion is not some leotard-clad 80s workout / fad diet. It’s a process that seals food waste and — in the absence of oxygen — uses microorganisms to break it down into two materials: biogas and fertilizer. In Chicago, the nonprofit Green Era has run an anaerobic digester that has accepted bulk food and beverage waste since 2025. The process is similar to what happens as a cow, or other animal, digests food, Green Era’s founder has said. It sells the renewable natural gas it produces and uses the compost on its urban farm. Perhaps Philly could use any biogas created from anaerobic digestion to power PGW?“If the city is able to finance and bring in outside investment for something like anaerobic digestion, it will set the stage for investors to believe that the city is actually serious about this and they will then be willing to come here and invest in circular infrastructure,” says Samantha Wittchen, cofounder and managing director of Circular Philadelphia.<h2>2) Recycle, repair, and reuse </h2>The best way for Philadelphia to send less waste to the landfill? Stop throwing so many things away. To that end, the Zero Waste and Circular Economy Act calls on the City to consider strategies like “local repair hubs, materials reuse and hard-to-recycle material centers, and advanced recycling infrastructure.” Here, again, the language is light on specifics.A few local governments have launched “fix it clinics” to teach residents to repair their own items — rather than throwing out and replacing them when they break. Hennepin County, Minnesota’s monthly fix-it clinics draw up to 100 people each month and have diverted more than 43 tons of waste from landfills since the program began in 2012.How it works: People bring their busted items to dedicated, monthly repair clinics where volunteer experts in everything from sewing and jewelry repair to engineering help them fix their broken items. The program has been so successful that the county has now opened two repair hubs, where people can go to learn to repair their items.Philadelphia could replicate the program by having the City fund, partner with, and promote local groups like the Philly Fixers Guild, who already offer a similar service.If items can’t be repurposed or repaired, it’s best to recycle them. Philadelphia currently accepts only a handful of materials for recycling: glass, aluminum, paper, cardboard and plastics 1, 2, and 5. But plenty of other things can be recycled.Boulder, Colorado, has a Center for Hard to Recycle Materials, where residents can drop off printer cartridges, plastic bags, old solar panels and dozens of other items to keep them out of landfills.Here in Philly, private, subscription curbside recycling company Rabbit Recycling will recycle everything from old shower heads to busted balloons and bicycle tires — and a lot more. The Resource Exchange and Wittchen’s Circular Philadelphia also operate resourcePhilly, a search engine that helps people figure out how to repair, donate, or recycle their items — or find gently used things to take home themselves.Finding ways to connect more Philadelphians to those services (or better yet, subsidizing them) could go a long way toward hitting the 60 percent waste diversion goal.<blockquote>“Every time you have a new administration, you have new executive orders, new ideas. Nobody has to follow them. Instead of just passing resolution after resolution and calling for hearings, we wanted to codify something into legislation that would hold us accountable.” — Councilmember Mark Squilla</blockquote><h2>3) A more invested, waste management partner </h2>Advocates like Sampson hope that Squilla’s bill will set the stage for the City to award longer trash and recycling contracts.Right now, Philadelphia’s trash contracts are short — the current proposal before City Council is four years with three optional one-year extensions — and they require bidders to have waste transfer stations in Philadelphia that can process 300 tons of trash and 150 tons of recyclables per day. Since the City frequently releases RFPs late — this cycle, they released requests for proposals in December 2025, for a contract that should now go into effect by the end of the year — new companies don’t have much time to set up shop.All of this means that it’s been difficult for the City to attract innovative waste management and recycling services providers. Instead, the contract goes to the same handful of companies that already have local facilities, like Chester’s Reworld incinerator. Long contract terms also give companies time to see a return on their investment, should they put money into building a new facility in the city.“We need to give the contractors enough time to build the new facilities that allow you to get the most modern facility at the lowest price,” Sampson says.He hopes the Zero Waste and Circular Economy Act, should it pass, will push the Sanitation Department to find better partners. There are recycling partners who accept a larger variety of materials and work with cities to improve resident education and increase recycling rates.That’s long worked in San Francisco where Recology, their long-time partner, helped bring composting to the city and got them to an 80 percent waste diversion rate — the highest in the U.S. More recently, Boise, Idaho partnered with a new service provider to add plastic film (aka what those pesky plastic bags are made of) to its recycling program.Sampson hopes Philadelphia will release an RFP for a new, 20-year recycling contract by the end of the year and a new trash contract RFP by the end of the fiscal year, June 30, 2027. A long lead time will allow new companies to build facilities in Philadelphia and bid on the contract.<h2>4) Set goals (and track them!)</h2>All these ideas are great, but skeptics might shrug and say well, they’re just that … ideas. Philadelphia has had zero waste plans before. Most recently, under Mayor Jim Kenney, Philadelphia had the Zero Waste and Litter Action Plan. Its goal: Divert 90 percent of waste from Philly landfills by 2035.What happened? Covid, mostly. Kenney fired the program’s director Nic Esposito and killed the Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet to fill a coronavirus-sized budget hole in 2020. “It was all motivated by the mayor. There were no legislative teeth to it,” Wittchen says.Squilla says his bill, though less ambitious, isn’t as vulnerable to the whims of any given mayor. “Every time you have a new administration, you have new executive orders, new ideas. Nobody has to follow them,” he says. “Instead of just passing resolution after resolution and calling for hearings, we wanted to codify something into legislation that would hold us accountable.”That’s all well and good, but the public should also be able to track the City’s progress — and hold elected officials accountable for failing to meet waste diversion goals. Whatever plan City Council creates should include set waste diversion goals and clear timelines for achieving them.That’s a hallmark of a number of successful pieces of environmental legislation, including the Clean Air and Water Acts. Some cities have taken it a step further with their zero waste plans. Boulder, Colorado, has a dashboard where the public can track the city’s progress.Thinking even bigger, Esposito wants the City to shoot higher than a 60 percent waste diversion goal. “The diversion goal is really low,” he says. “Better recycling and citywide composting could get us there.”<h2>5) Money, money, money </h2>“A plan,” says Dr. Walter Tsou, former Philadelphia Health Commissioner and a past president of the American Public Health Association, “is only as good as a willingness to finance it and the political will to implement it.”We can set strong goals. We can implement new, cutting edge waste management tech. We can look to other cities and steal their ideas. None of it matters if the City can’t afford to invest in the circular economy over the long term. If Squilla’s bill passes, City Council should consider how they will pay for it.Some savings would come from a 20-year trash and recycling contract. Short contract terms have meant that Philadelphia pays more for trash and recycling, since companies have more opportunities to up their rates. If we do get a 20-year contract, the money we save could be reinvested in the circular economy.Other cities have tried another strategy: Charge residents garbage pickup — and charge more for trash than for recycling and composting. Denver has charged its residents for trash pickup since 2022, but recycling and composting is free. Since 2014, Seattle has fined its residents $1 when they don’t separate food waste from regular trash. Or, maybe instead of financially punishing residents who suck at recycling — Philadelphia has an over 20 percent poverty rate — we reward them for getting it right? Use a carrot instead of a stick? Or, go after a certain size of business that gets this wrong, instead of individuals?These policies serve two purposes: Incentivize circular waste management practices, and fill the City coffers with funds for new sustainability initiatives.<h2>Too little, too late?</h2>Creating a zero waste and circular economy plan is a “long-term play,” Wittchen acknowledges. The City will need to act quickly to issue new RFPs for the solid waste and recycling contracts, but they won’t take effect until the contracts that City Council is currently voting on expire. That’s at least another four years. The winner will likely need time to build out new infrastructure — like an anaerobic digester or improved recycling facilities.Some advocates want to see Philadelphia change its waste management systems sooner, especially when it comes to one of the City’s dirtiest practices: burning trash in Chester.“This incinerator has — for decades — been spewing this toxic stuff into the air,” Tsou says.Third District Councilmember Jamie Gauthier, who last year introduced the Stop Trashing Our Air Act to ban incineration, says she sees a path to landfilling all of Philadelphia’s waste today. Right now, the City plans to split the waste management contract three ways — between WM, Republic Services, and Reworld, the firm that operates the incinerator. Gauthier would like to see the solid waste contract split solely between WM and Republic.“We could easily, easily split the trash between these two vendors,” she says. “It’s [burning trash] harmful for the environment, and it flies in the face of any goal to be the cleanest, greenest city in America.”The City, however, has pushed back, saying that taking Reworld out of the equation would compromise the bidding process. In addition, said Managing Director Carlton Williams, as quoted in the Philadelphia Tribune, “Reversing the process from incinerator to landfills does not solve the issue of the overall environmental impact it had on either Chester or Philadelphia or in the surrounding region … We need environmental policy that has us moving beyond the two flawed disposal methods.”Esposito agrees that landfills are not a solution either. “They make people’s groundwater completely polluted, and they’re one of the biggest emitters of methane gasses — which is a huge driver of climate change,” Esposito says. Plus, they’re filling up. Some experts estimated in 2020 that U.S. landfills would reach their full capacity within 18 years.Esposito notes the Zero Waste and Circular Economy Act and putting an immediate end to burning trash in Chester aren’t “mutually exclusive.” We could stop burning trash now and temporarily send more waste to landfills while working to make less trash over the long-term.“We need to look at the problem of waste and how to properly deal with it,” Sampson says. “If we do that, we won’t be landfilling and won’t be incinerating.”MORE WASTE SOLUTIONSZero Waste Goal for Recyclables Recovery Process in Philadelphia, PA. Credit: NurPhoto / Contributor, Getty Images</div></body>

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There are a handful of visual shorthands to help folks comprehend the massivity of a ton: It’s about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. One fifth an adult African elephant. Two grand pianos. Now, multiply any of those by 1.3 million. That’s how much garbage Philadelphia makes in a...

How Can Philadelphia Get to Zero Waste?

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There are a handful of visual shorthands to help folks comprehend the massivity of a ton: It’s about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. One fifth an adult Af

How Can Philadelphia Get to Zero Waste?

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