Surprise: Landfills Are out of Space; Logical Flaws as Perceptions Shaped

There is a report by communication experts camouflaged in green making the rounds that purports to consider waste disposal alternatives. In fact, it was funded by a composting company and looks at only one alternative.

"From giant corporations to university campuses to mom-and-pop stores, dialog about waste disposal alternatives is being conducted within the context of increasing trash, decreasing space and tightening budgets," Garbage Is a Terrible Thing to Waste says in its opening lines.

The report is written by a group called Global Renewable Energy & Environmental Network.

GREEN is a creation of Global Fluency, a public relations firm "specializing in integrated, multi-dimensional campaigns that shape market perceptions, grow customer relationships, and build valued brands," its Web site says.

"Aside from the pressures to change due to skyrocketing disposal costs, it is also inevitable that the government will tighten regulations around waste disposal, at which time non-compliance could bring stiff penalties," the report continues. The government action is inevitable-not to change behavior-because we will soon be out of landfill space, the authors reason.

"In 1980 there were approximately 20,000 landfills nationwide; today, there are only about 1,600, a drop of 92 percent," Don Scott, a spokesman for GREEN said. "We are running out of landfill space."

The logic does not compute.

Ed Repa, the director of environmental programs at the National Solid Wastes Management Association said everything went from small local landfills to regional landfills after Subtitle D regulations on municipal waste went into effect in 1991.

NSWMA reported 39 states had disposal capacity for more than 10 years in 1995. In 2000, 42 states reported more than 10 years of remaining landfill capacity, according to Chartwell Information Publishing. Sixteen had 20 or more years of capacity left.

"We will have to do some research on that I guess," Scott said.

GREEN conducted its survey on solid waste disposal without contacting members of the solid waste industry because "the report was trying to get at how people in the corporate world look at the issue of waste and how they are handling it. We stayed away from the providers that you are talking about," he said.

The report also fails to consider the feedstock for composting. After the Indiana farm, Back 2 Basics, took Chicago garbage, laced with plastics, paper and metals in 2004, producers must beware. No recycling efforts are mentioned in the report.

Although the project was funded by BioSystem Solutions, a firm engaged in composting in general and compost by worms or a thermophyllic process briefly mentioned in the report, Scott claimed there is no conflict of interests.

"We handled fielding of interviews with experts, we handled fielding of the quantitative survey and rounding up of organizations that helped us by fielding invites for the survey to their membership," Scott said. "All of that is detailed in the report. We made an intensive effort to reach out to people with the question of where are we going with our waste stream."

Learn more about this author, Andy Arnold.
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