Bye Bye Boardie
December 15, 2009 marked a significant day in the history of waste management and recycling in California. The California Integrated Waste Management Board, after a 20 year run, held their last Board meeting in Byron Sher Auditorium in the California Environmental Protection Agency. It is ironic that the last meeting should take place in that specific auditorium because Byron Sher is the Senator that created the California Integrated Waste Management Board through legislation in 1989. Senator Sher was there to bid adieu to his creation, and regardless of your feelings about the ordeal, the auditorium’s energy was melancholy and reflective.
There are many sad things about the departure of the Board, but among the saddest is that there really isn’t much the State gained in removing the executive team and public hearing process the Board offered. In many peoples’ opinions more was lost than gained both economically and environmentally. Since the former Board members paychecks came from a special fund that is filled by industry through fees at landfills, there were no savings from the State’s general fund.
Even though there will no longer be a Board overseeing it, the charge of the California Integrated Waste Management Board, now the Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (DRRR), doesn’t end with the Agency’s change in structure. The DRRR will still continue to lead us down the path toward zero waste in California. Strategic directives like reducing the amount of organics disposed in landfills, and pushing higher statewide diversion goals, will still be carried out by the staff that have been successfully plugging away at them for years.
Whatever the organizational structure, I’m confident that Californians will continue to do their part in helping to meet the ambitious goals the former Board members and Chairs have set for us.
Bye bye Boardie, I’m gonna miss you so; bye bye Boardie, why’d you have to go?
Green Jobs are Already Here
There’s a lot of talk about the green collar jobs of the future, and the U.S.’s current economic state has a lot to do with it. Investors, entrepreneurs, and governments are hopeful that the maladies of unemployment will be cured by the creation of a momentous number of green jobs in wind, solar thermal, and photovoltaic power, or in creating the smart grid, and energy efficiency retrofits. The irony is that these green jobs are already here, and have been for at least twenty years.
Curbside recycling programs have been established in about half of all U.S. cities and towns. The programs are an easy way to go green. Most curbside recycling includes the collection of aluminum, glass, plastic, paper, and steel*. More importantly, each one of those programs requires people to pick up our empty milk jugs, juice bottles, pickle jars and tinfoil.
The programs are also driving community education and awareness. Each generation is more thoroughly educated than the one before on how to identify and separate materials that were previously thought of as trash. As landfills fill up more quickly with the rising rate of consumerism and single-use products, curbside recycling provides a convenient alternative destiny for materials that are easy to reuse.
But most importantly, curbside recycling programs are also a quiet source of jobs. They employ the collectors and drivers that wake up earlier than most to make it possible for households to participate in environmental conservation. They employ the mechanics who keep those trucks running, and the people who organize that material and pass it on to industry. Curbside recycling programs keep your neighbors employed.
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At a time when everyone is budgeting and counting pennies, and the U.S. unemployment rate is 10%, 1,075 recycling jobs are currently being advertised on just one website. Curbside recycling doesn’t require a lot of trial and error with new technology. It works, it’s available, it doesn’t tax us irrationally for the bottles and cans we buy at the supermarket. For about twenty years, curbside recycling programs have been quietly making a real, tangible, and impactful difference.
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