Solid waste crisis leads to overdue statewide effort

Eating more takeout these days? Buying more stuff online? And I’ll bet you’ve dropped the habit of bringing reusable bags to the supermarket.

It adds up to more trash in the coronavirus world. We can all see it on garbage day — overflowing barrels. It’s like the week after Christmas, every week.

And recycling isn’t what it once was because for some materials, the markets have collapsed.

In short, we already had a solid waste disaster before the annus horribilis of 2020, and now it’s worse. We’re seeing it in the socalled tipping fees towns pay for trash removal. In the 12-town consortium that includes Bethel, for example, it’s just under $97 a ton, up from $43 a ton just three years ago, First

Seletman Matt Knickerbocker said.

On Wednesday, the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and 65 cities and towns publicly launched the Connecticut Coalition for Sustainable Materials Management with the hope of heading off some of this silent but growing crisis.

The coalition — not a name that rolls off the tongue, and we won’t call it the CCSMM — needs to be part public relations, part think tank brainstorming, part support group and part joint action team in the solid waste field of a small state that makes a lot of garbage.

“The state is at a crisis point in the way we are managing our waste today,” DEEP Commissioner Katie Dykes said as she explained what the new group is about. “In this crisis, the Lamont administration sees an opportunity to come together.”

Municipalities include Bridgeport, New Haven, Greenwich, Stratford and Westport among others in southwestern Connecticut.

The immediate crisis is the ill repair of the trashto-energy plant in Hartford, run by a quasi-public agency, the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority. MIRA’s longterm fix would mean $145a-ton prices for decades and that won’t fly. Besides, Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin doesn’t want a rebuilt trash plant, and he’s right, for the sake of racial and economic justice after decades of low-income urban residents living next to these plants.

A MIRA breakdown means the downstate trashto-energy plants, including Bridgeport — which largely operate as incinerators since they’re not making electricity very efficiently — can and do charge more. Plus, their own costs are rising.

Obviously, the idea is to come up with ways to reduce the state’s 1,370 pounds of trash per person per year, only about onethird of which is recycled. And by the way, recycling itself doesn’t really save all that much considering all the resources it uses, but it’s better than not recycling.

Composting is one solution. Anaerobic digesters that turn organic waste into usable fuel make sense as part of that new stream and there are other ideas along those lines.

Another is pay-as-youthrow, the system of charging by the bag that a couple of towns use. The dystopian in me worries that that could lead to people throwing trash out of their speeding cars.

“You have to look at all of these solutions together,” Dykes said. “You need to give people places to dispose of things that aren’t trash.”

As I talked about the coalition with Dykes and Knickerbocker — he’s a co-chairman along with Durham First Selectman Laura Francis — it’s clear we’re talking about a cultural issue here, at least as much as technology, logistics and management.

“The problem is bad and it’s worse than, I would say, 99 percent of Americans realize. Because Americans are spoiled,” Knickerbocker said. “The old ways of burying trash and forgetting about it are over.”

China doesn’t want our garbage anymore, and even though some Connecticut towns ship their trash to landfills in Ohio or other states, that’s not a longterm answer either.

“We know that some of these landfills that are closer to Connecticut may be reaching their capacity,” Dykes said. “Waste will have to be shipped greater and greater distances in order to find a place for disposal…It translates to a lot of unpredictable costs.”

Besides, it’s bad karma. We learned that in kindergarten, right?

Dykes and Knickerbocker didn’t put it exactly this way, but the upshot is, all the state and municipal systems in the world won’t substitute for personal responsibility. Buy less packaging, throw out less stuff and if you have a backyard, use it for its intended purpose — to compost food scraps.

Yeah, I know, animals. Wrong. I’ve got some bad environmental habits, but I’ve composted for six years without any dumb plastic equipment or gyrators or even chicken wire. Just a neat pile behind the garage, next to a crabapple tree. Here’s the key: No meat, no dairy, no grains, no oils. No animals. Just turn over the dirt every few days. I promise you’ll feel good.

Or, hire one of those composting companies that will take everything from chicken bones to paper towels. The point is, everyone has to take some responsibility. And please stop putting yard waste in the regular trash stream.

Now this new coalition will do some deep thinking, and some public relations. It’s a worthy effort that’s overdue. Maybe coronavirus helped push it along.

“If anything it’s highlighting for us these things that we’ve known for a long time,” Dykes said.

But like any public problem, solutions comes with a warning. “If you make it be too complicated or too expensive, they just won’t do it,” Knickerbocker said. “That’s the way Americans are.”

dhaar@hearstmediact.com