As waste grows, some cities are bucking the trend
Little Kamikatsu was facing a big problem. The rural Japanese town of 1,500 residents didn’t know what it was going to do with its trash. Residents had always burned it, first in front of their homes or on the farms, then in a large community pit, then in an incinerator the government quickly banned out of fear of pollutants. The town didn’t have money for a newer, safer incinerator. It had to find a new way.
“They had to look into zero waste,” said Akira Sakano, chairwoman of the board of directors of the Zero Waste Academy, an educational institution in Kamikatsu, explaining the discussions of those days in the early 2000s.
That research introduced the town to what was then a virtual unknown but has since grown into one of the most widespread and successful recycling efforts in history, bringing cities the world over to the precipice of what once seemed fantastical: the elimination of waste. Today, places in rural Japan to metropolitan Sweden send very little of their trash to the landfill. Many more have a “Zero Waste”
plan. In the United States, San Francisco leads the way, diverting more than 80 percent of its waste, two and a half times more than the national average. It has become a lifestyle, with millions of images flooding Instagram touting a #zerowaste existence, and generating a plethora of new businesses.
The concept calls on people to
think differently about waste. It starts with the creation of categories. There are recyclables, like aluminum cans and glass bottles. Reusables such as clothing. Compostables such as uneaten food. And then those that shouldn’t be used at all such as plastic bags, which are very difficult to recycle. The number of categories might expand or contract depending on the location, but the goal behind the zero waste philosophy is the same: to vastly reduce the amount of trash going to the landfill.
Every year, the world is making more of it. In 2016 alone, the world’s cities produced more than 2 billion tons of solid waste. Americans produce a disproportionate amount, throwing away the equivalent of their own body weight every month.
If zero waste has an origin story, it would wind back more than 40 years to a man in Berkeley, Calif., named Dan Knapp.
A former college professor with a doctorate in sociology, he rode his bike to the Berkeley landfill nearly every day and scavenged, hands going through refuse for valuable metals. Patterns began to emerge, and from those patterns, categories. Here were the textiles. And the glass piles. And rotting food. And soil hauled from construction sites.
Recycling, he realized, could go way beyond what was then a lofty goal of 35 percent, beyond aluminum cans and paper. Our trash just needed to be categorized appropriately, he said. Recycling shouldn’t be made simple. It should be made complex. The thought ultimately led to a taxology of trash — called the “12 master categories of recyclable materials” — laying some of the initial groundwork for the “zero waste” concept.
But few people were listening. It took a city on the other side of the world, working on a plan that seemed stripped from the pages of the hippie manual. “In a natural ecosystem there is a balance,” began “No Waste by 2010,” a plan that Canberra, Australia, initiated in 1996. “The wastes from one process become the resources for other processes. Nothing is wasted. In a consumer society waste is an accepted part of life. A strategy is needed to reverse this trend.”
Knapp, the owner of Urban Ore, which salvages Berkeley’s waste, said he was flown in to advise the city. He brought back the town’s plan and soon was passing it around.
Paul Connett, a retired professor at St. Lawrence University, said the Canberra plan made people take the idea of zero waste seriously for the first time. “It wasn’t an activist talking about zero waste,” he said. “It was a government law. All of a sudden, it became a topic of conversation.”