"Zero Waste is the mother of environmental no-brainers."

––Jeffrey Hollender, CEO of Seventh Generation, US

"Zero Waste requires, but goes beyond, recycling. Yes, we need improved systems to recover and safely recycle discards, but even greater opportunities to move towards sustainability come from other aspects of Zero Waste––reducing consumption, eliminating toxics, redesigning processes and products to be compatible with natural systems, in short, redefining our relationship to materials use in today's society."

––Von Hernandez, GAIA International co-coordinator and 2003 Goldman Environmental Prize Winner, Philippines

"Around the world, people are embracing and implementing pieces of Zero Waste. From India to Argentina, South Africa to the US, Zero Waste is capturing communities' imagination and slowly replacing the culture of wasting."

––Ann Leonard, GAIA International co-coordinator, US

Retreat participants achieve 83% reduction in waste!
Zero Waste at the Fall Retreat––We did it!

by Ann Leonard, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives

“Zero Waste poses a fundamental challenge to ‘business as usual.’ It has the potential to motivate people to change their life styles, demand new products, and insist that corporations and governments behave in new ways. This is a very exciting development.”––Peter Montague, editor of Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly, US

Months before the 2003 Fall Retreat in Ottawa, the Environmental Grantmakers Association decided to take its environmental commitment up a notch. Already EGA embodies many of the environmental values and goals we share; EGA retreats prioritize local and organic food, print on chlorine-free paper and recycle on site. This year, EGA decided to raise the bar even higher and aimed to make the Retreat a “Zero Waste” event. To do this, EGA contacted GAIA––an international alliance whose members have implemented Zero Waste systems in communities and at major events around the world, including the Civil Society Forum of the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

What is Zero Waste?

Zero Waste refers to a new way of thinking about an old problem. Currently, waste is typically viewed as an inevitable and growing burden to be disposed and replaced with an endless stream of virgin materials. In contrast to this historical focus on accepting and managing waste, Zero Waste seeks to reduce both the volume and toxicity of materials used and waste produced. Zero Waste not only means less waste to landfills and incinerators, but also less upstream environmental impact––less trees cut, less mountains strip-mined, less energy spent, and less pollution created in making the things we use in our homes and workplaces each day.

All over the world, from San Francisco to South Africa to India, communities are making commitments to Zero Waste. Many communities have already managed to reduce waste by 50 percent while a handful have exceeded 80 percent and are aiming even higher. Communities can not eliminate waste overnight, but a commitment to Zero Waste provides a clear direction and goal against which to measure options. Zero Waste ensures that we are moving toward real solutions.

Zero Waste recognizes the importance of recycling, but also recognizes its limits. With the current volume, variety and toxicity of today's discard stream, recycling is critical but it isn't enough. As long as our industries continue to use persistent toxic materials, recycling programs will be faced with products which simply can not be safely re-used or recycled. For recycling to succeed, it must be combined with programs to reduce the overall volume and toxicity of materials used, long before they have a chance to become waste.

In this way, Zero Waste is a design principle that goes beyond recycling by taking a ‘whole system’ approach to the vast flow of resources through society. Zero Waste reduces consumption and increases efficiency, eliminates toxic inputs and maximizes recycling, and ensures that products are made to be safely reused, repaired or recycled back into nature or the marketplace. It includes, but goes beyond, recycling.

Zero Waste at the Fall Retreat

The path to Zero Waste at the Ottawa Retreat included six main steps which form the basis for implementing Zero Waste anywhere, and these are:

1. Commitment––Whether planning for a single event or an entire city, the first step on the path to Zero Waste must be making a commitment. The commitment should include a goal and a timeline, and be backed up with the resources and know-how to turn it into reality. (For example, San Francisco has committed to Zero Waste by 2020.) In advance of the Retreat, EGA passed a resolution committing to Zero Waste and setting the goal for the 2003 Retreat at an 80 percent reduction in waste going to landfills and ensuring none goes to incinerators.

2. Prioritize Prevention Over Management––Waste that isn’t created doesn’t need to be managed, so EGA looked for every opportunity to design waste out of the system. For example, most conferences generate huge amounts of paper waste in the forms of advance materials and extra handouts which are abandoned on site at the meeting’s end. For this Retreat, EGA provided advance material electronically, limited speaker handouts to a page, and provided recycled computer disks on site to encourage paperless information exchange. EGA also did not bring on site materials which are notoriously hazardous to recycle––like PVC plastic––and requested that the hotel refrain from using single-use servings in the dining rooms to cut down on packaging waste.

3. Know Your Waste––In order to figure out how to prevent or manage waste, we need to know where the waste is generated and what exactly it contains. The hotel, Fairmont Château Laurier, did a “visual audit” of its waste, by simply weighing and looking through a number of the bins loaded onto trucks to be hauled to the landfill. Even this relatively simple form of waste audit offered big surprises. The main surprise was that much food waste was being landfilled, even though the hotel participated in a composting program. Theoretically, all organic waste could be separated for composting, but much was getting mixed in with other material, turning it into waste. Improving the systems for separating organics would have a big impact in reducing the volume of waste on site. The audit also identified other big portions of the waste stream: mixed plastics, waxed cardboard from the kitchen, and recyclable containers that had not been well separated. Identifying the largest components of the waste stream enabled us to make custom solutions. For example, we invested in renting a shredder for the meeting duration and the hotel began separating, shredding and composting piles of cardboard which had previously been landfilled.

4. Compost, Compost, Compost––Since organic waste makes up such a big part of most waste streams, the simple act of separating and composting organic material can yield tremendous volume reduction. Often overlooked as just a feel-good, backyard activity, composting is in fact a critical component of waste management at any level. When landfilled, organic waste rots and generates methane, a greenhouse gas. It creates an acidic leachate, which drips through the landfill, extracting toxics from other materials and creating a sort of “witches’ brew” which permeates liners and pollutes underground aquifers. Landfilling organics also takes valuable nutrients out of ecological circulation instead of returning them to our farmlands. In contrast, composting lessens the problem of landfills, creates a valuable soil amendment, and is far safer and cheaper than either landfills or incineration. Prior to the EGA Retreat, GAIA spent days with the hotel kitchen staff discussing the benefits of composting and figuring out ways to improve organics collection during the meeting. This turned out to be the most effective of all our waste reduction strategies at the retreat.

5. Segregate––When discarded materials are kept separate, they are resources; mixed together, they become waste. For example, when paper gets mixed with beverage containers, the paper gets contaminated and less can be recovered. There is no safe disposal option for mixed municipal waste. However, if kept segregated, more of the glass, metal, paper, and some plastics can be put back to use with significant environmental, energy and economic savings. And the more of this material recovered, the less pressure to go harvest, mine or produce new stuff. To improve and facilitate segregation, we set up a recycling station in the main conference area and added extra bins to all of the hotel rooms for the duration of the meeting. Good segregation depends on education, so the Fairmont agreed to provide a letter to all hotel guests—even those not with EGA—asking them to segregate all their discards into the correct bins in their rooms.

6. Take It Upstream––Once we have maximized all the prevention, recovery, recycling and composting we can, we need to move upstream to the source of the waste that remains. Because of bad design or use of toxic materials, a portion of the current discard stream can not be safely recycled or composted. For these products, we need to utilize Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) systems to hold producers responsible for the entire lifecycle of their products, even when no longer useful. Currently, producers are able to externalize the true cost of disposing of these unrecyclable, poorly-designed, toxic products because their disposal is paid by public money, public health and the environment. EPR motivates producers to make less wasteful and less toxic products. Also by looking upstream we can address the issue of production waste, which is much larger in volume than the municipal waste generated by households. Generally, about 70 trash cans full of waste are created in the production of the contents of each single trash can we put on the curb. So, without taking our Zero Waste goal into the production processes, we will never make more than a small dent in the waste produced in North America. This is the work that continues long after the EGA Retreat ends.

The Results

We did it! The combination of waste prevention, recycling and composting resulted in only 17 percent of the hotel’s waste going to landfill during the EGA Retreat. None went to incineration. This means we prevented 83 percent of the material from becoming waste during the retreat. We met, and exceeded, our goal.

The Legacy

One of the goals of EGA’s Zero Waste project was to identify and implement waste reduction systems which would remain in place at the hotel, leaving behind a legacy of improved environmental practices.

The biggest factor in the waste reduction was the improved composting, which the hotel believes they will be able to continue. Because of the high commitment of the hotel staff and changes in their plate clearing process, we were able to cut the organic waste going to landfill by over 50 percent! Prior to the EGA Retreat, approximately 250 kilograms of organics were landfilled daily; during our stay, this fell to 120 kilograms.

Another big factor in reducing waste was the segregation and shredding of cardboard boxes from the kitchen. Shredding enabled the material to go to the compost program instead of the landfill. However, the hotel is unsure whether they will continue this as they have limited storage space for the cardboard between composting pick ups.

The Zero Waste project also resulted in a higher level of plastics recycling, which the hotel will continue. In fact, they were previously landfilling some plastics for which they thought no local recycling market existed. In our research for the project, GAIA found out that, unknown to the hotel, the same facility which recycled their other plastics could take those being landfilled. So, as a legacy of the EGA Retreat, there will be less plastic going to landfill.

A major obstacle, from the hotel's point-of-view, is that they have a contract with a waste hauler which requires the same fee regardless of the volume of material landfilled. Such “put-or-pay” contracts are a disincentive to invest in waste reduction programs, since reducing waste doesn't translate into lower hauling and landfill costs. Fortunately, the Fairmont’s contract is up for renegotiation in the new year and the hotel hopes to amend it to provide for waste reduction savings so that it makes economic, as well as environmental, sense to continue aiming for Zero Waste.

Thanks to everyone!

Reaching this level of waste reduction was possible because of the involvement of all EGA Retreat participants and the cooperation of the wonderful staff of the Fairmont Château Laurier, a hotel with high environmental standards and many good programs already in place. A special thanks also goes to the Sustainable Consumption and Production Funders, the Homeland Foundation and the Mitchell Kapor Foundation which all provided funds for this project.

Ann Leonard is the international co-coordinator of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), an international coalition with members in more than 60 countries working to promote Zero Waste through information sharing, providing training and tools, coordinating global projects, and implementing model demonstration projects around the world. She is also on the board of the Grassroots Recycling Network, a leading advocate for Zero Waste in the United States.

For more information on these organizations and Zero Waste, please see www.no-burn.org and www.grrn.org.