Organizations encourage reduction reuse, recycling

Johnson County is not alone in falling behind the national percentage of recycling participation. That is a distinction shared by the entire Kansas City metropolitan area and being addressed by the Mid-America Regional Council Solid Waste Management District.

According to a sustainability study conducted in March by Burns & McDonnell Engineering Company Inc., Kansas City, Mo., for MARC's Solid Waste Management District, the entire metropolitan area needs to begin radically reducing the amount of waste it sends to local landfills.

"The country is at around 32 or 34 percent and we are at 23 percent," Tom Jacobs, environmental program director for MARC, said. "The report said that as a region, we are disposing something on the order of 8,000 tons of stuff a day in our landfills."

Deffenbaugh Landfill in Shawnee is one of the 10 largest landfills in the nation and takes in about 6,000 tons of waste a day. In comparison, the Lee's Summit landfill takes in 250 tons a day.

Deffenbaugh is scheduled to close sometime in 2027.

The MARC Solid Waste Management District serves five counties in Missouri and works in coordination with Johnson, Wyandotte, Leavenworth and Miami counties in Kansas. MARC has adopted a goal of reducing by 80 percent how much waste is sent to landfills by 2023 to correspond with the Deffenbaugh Landfill closure, Jacobs said.

"The study reflects opportunities for enhanced recycling at the residential and commercial sectors and some of the ways that might happen," Jacobs said. "It could be through different kinds of local government policies and contracting mechanisms and programs.

"There's a huge activity in Johnson County where their environmental department, their sustainability programs and their collaborations with folks through the community are really setting the stage for some neat stuff."

Johnson County Commissioners recently adopted a new solid waste management plan that includes diverting yard waste from the landfill to composting and instituting a pay-as-you-throw system designed to increase recycling participation.

"When you keep yard waste out of the landfill and you compost it, you've created a win-win," Jacobs said. "There's been a ban on yard waste on the Missouri side probably 15 years so they perhaps are in a better position on that than perhaps the Kansas side. But in Kansas, there are more communities that have curbside programs, certainly in Johnson County that's the case."

Jacobs said recycling is perceived differently in the Kansas City area than it is in most other parts of the country.

"In Kansas City, I think solid waste management is viewed as an activity that's driven by the private sector so there's a network of private haulers and private landfills that provide services to residents," he said. "There are four notable exceptions: Kansas City, Lee's Summit and Platte City in Missouri, and Olathe in Kansas.

"Those four local governments are very involved in solid waste management and pretty much all the rest of the cities are not. There has been less policy leadership in trying to create programs, incentives, contract policies, plans and mechanisms that drive recycling rates above where they are now."

Jacobs said the area needs to incorporate and three "R's" to improve recycling participation: reduction, reuse and recycling. Public education typically focuses on reduction and a lot of time and effort is put into recycling programs.

"Reuse is often times kind of the forgotten piece," he said. "But the opportunities through that are enormous. For example, the Habitat for Humanity Restore; it's amazing, it's like 20 wins all wrapped together in one."

Instead of putting building materials into the landfill, they can be taken to the Restore at 4701 Deramus Ave., Kansas City, Mo., where it is resold with the proceeds going to help construct a Habitat house; (816) 231-6889; www.restorekc.org/portal/page/portal/ReStore).

"You get a tax write-off for the value of those materials, stuff stays out of the landfill, at the same time somebody fixing up their home can acquire good materials at low cost, and you've created jobs all through the process," Jacobs said. "And at the same time those revenues that the Restore generates supports the construction of new Habitat homes so you're supporting affordable housing in the urban core, which also is desperately needed.

"So when we talk about sustainability, that's really what we're talking about when you can line up the community benefits and the economic and job creation benefits and the environmental benefits such as keeping stuff out of the landfill and saving energy; that's what we're about."

Bridging the Gap (www.bridgingthegap.org) operates three recycling drop-off centers in the Kansas City area at 91^st and Hillcrest, Metro North Shopping Center and Deramus Community Recycling Center. It operated one in Overland Park at 119^th and Hardy until that city took it over a year ago. They specialize in taking materials not included in curbside recycling programs.

Bridging the Gap also runs the Keep Kansas City Beautiful program, the Heartland Tree Alliance, and the Kansas City Wild Land programs, among others said Richard Gordon, business programs and recycling operations manager.

He said recycling participation rates depend on where a person lives.

"Recycling is going pretty well in the metropolitan area," he said. "I'm from San Francisco and compared to California, the Kansas City area is well behind. Compared to Macon, Ga., we probably would be way ahead.

"It's all about education; people have to be educated, they have to care, and that's really the key. But behaviors are very hard to change."

Gordon said the most important thing people can do is utilize their curbside recycling programs.

"The more people who use those programs the better, and they should try to encourage their neighbors to use those programs," he said. "Eventually, we're all going to be on a pay-as-you-throw basis; the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has been pushing that for a long time, and that's the way it's going to end up.

"And it's the best way to go because we're always going to have finite landfill resources."

A good way to think about the importance of recycling is to think about plastic water bottles, he said.

"There are all kinds of issues about that," Gordon said. "But forget all those other issues and just look at the recycling. Nationally, only 14 percent of plastic water bottles are recycled, so that's 860 million of those things that go to the landfill every single week nationwide.

"That's a huge, huge number and all of them are recyclable in some way."

Gordon said he sees positive movement in people starting to recycle.

"We continue to see increased participation at our recycling centers," he said. "We have huge volumes of materials coming to those and people are constantly calling and asking how they can recycle this or that, the things that are sort of out of the recycling mainstreams.

"We had to quit taking computers for a while, but we're going to start taking those again soon; all electronic waste we're getting ready to start taking again."

And if saving landfill space, energy, protecting the environment and the feeling of doing the right thing does not sway a person to recycle, Gordon offers this suggestion: Think of New York.

"Remember the barge with the New York City trash on it being shuttled around the Caribbean and up and down the East Coast looking for someone to take their trash when their landfills closed?" he asked. "We don't want that to be us; we don't want to have to put our trash on a barge and float it up the river somewhere to be able to find a landfill or our monthly trash cost will be going up three or four times.

"If we don't want to fight wars for oil, then we need to learn to conserve and be efficient. The landfills in the Kansas City area are filling up and there are no replacements for them currently."

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