The first elected mayor of Boston in the 21st century will have to be a green mayor. Addressing issues of solid waste and recycling is a crucial step in greening our city. According to the cover story in today’s Boston Globe Magazine, only 30% of waste in our city is recycled or composted. This is both environmentally and financially wasteful. One of the barriers outlined in the article is the difficulty of composting in Boston. I support Deer Island’s pilot program to accept food waste, and will work with schools and businesses to develop a compost culture and infrastructure in Boston. By fighting to increase recycling and composting we not only preserve our environment, but bring the full economic benefits back to our community.
As mayor I will set ambitious targets to reduce waste, work diligently in schools and neighborhoods to boost recycling rates, and renegotiate garbage and recycling contracts to create jobs. The timing is right, and the foundation for these changes is already in place. The City of Boston’s recycling contract is up in 2014, and Governor Patrick’s administration has proposed a commercial food ban that would take effect the same year. Under this ban, businesses that produce significant food waste will have to find another use for the food, whether through composting or donating. We can take advantage of this new regulation by fostering new innovative businesses that can use or reuse these products, and supporting existing city priorities such as gardening and urban agriculture.
Many Boston residents have already shown a commitment to sustainability with initiatives such as Cooperative Energy Recycling and Organics and the Dorchester Community Food Co-op, which held its kickoff just yesterday. We have a unique opportunity to increase our recycling rates, create good jobs and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. I have seen the demand for a cleaner, greener Boston and I am committed to making that happen.
-Marty Walsh
MA’s 30 year old bottle bill covers beer and soda, but not tea, water, or sports drinks. There’s a proposal to expand the nickle deposit to those beverages too.
Do you support that expansion?
…the push can be for universal curbside recycling, which would make a bottle bill moot.
Boston already seems to have universal curbside recycling, as far as I can tell – though someone should feel free to correct me if I am wrong about that. In any event, a recycling program doesn’t moot a bottle bill.
A bottle bill complements curbside recycling. An expanded bottle bill does too.
The fact of the matter is, it *costs* Boston to recycle bottles and cans. Maybe less than if they were thrown out in the trash, but it still costs money. Every bottle or can which Boston doesn’t have to process saves the city coffers.
An expanded bottle deposit [ie tea, water, sports drinks] would mean a higher recycling rate within Boston, at a lower cost to the city government than they face now.
The way to do that it seems is to minimize consumer effort. In my former town everything that could be recycled was and it all went to the curb with the trash. That’s why when I first heard about the expansion proposal my first thought was that it had outlived its usefulness not realizing that curbside recycling was not universal from community to community. I suppose if you want to supplement curbside with this to keep costs down you can try it, but I don’t know if it will be cost-effective if the low-effort option is also available. I personally would much more likely put everything on the curb and sacrafice the nickel here and there.
Seriously — did you even read the link?
The evidence is clear. Curbside recycling results in recycling rates higher than non-curbside. Bottle deposit laws result in higher recycling rates otherwise, in both curbside and non-curbside jurisdictions. Broader deposit laws (tea, water, sports drinks) result in higher recycling rates than traditional deposit laws, and higher deposits (see: MI, California) result in higher recycling rates than the nickel.
Your personal instincts and anecdotes don’t align with the data.
Doing both is fine, but if it ever came to a choice I’d take curbside.
We’re talking 60% vs. 98% – it’s not even a comparison. My only complaint is that I’ve been asking the MassPirg staff asking me to support the expanded bottle bill this question for years and not once have I gotten someone who could answer. Given these facts, however, it’s no question, we need an expanded bottle bill now.
It sounds like you’re saying that the existence of a deposit (or not) determines how recyclable something is. Wouldn’t it be the type of material that determines how recyclable it is? If it is a matter of where it goes and how it’s processed why can’t bottles be moved from curb to the same place they go from a redemption center? Is it that containers that are intended for deposit made from different material to begin with? If so I don’t see why all containers can’t be made of material that is 98% recyclable rather than 60%. I really resent people questioning whether I’ve accessed either the link or other information. Just answer the question or make your case without the patronizing.
It’s not the material the bottle is made out of, it’s how the glass is collected.
Single stream recycling mixes glass with everything else. During this process, it gets broken up and those small pieces are mixed in with bottle caps, small bits of paper, etc. – all of which makes it too difficult or expensive to separate. So for every 100 pounds of glass sent to the recycling center using single stream recycling, 60 pounds can be recycled into bottles, 19 pounds is too small to be sorted by color so can only be used in road base or landfill cover, and 21 pounds can’t be separated at all, so it gets sent to the trash.
A major point of the article was that single stream recycling decreases the amount trash the city sends to the landfill or incinerator, but not all that reduction is recycled – the recycling center, due in part to single stream making many recyclable products unusable, sends a lot of “recyclables” to the landfill or incinerator.
In contrast, deposit bottles are collected at redemption centers. They only collect glass and that glass, because it’s broken up into pieces that are large enough to sort by color, can be sorted effectively. Thus, for every 100 pounds of glass deposit bottles recycled, 98 pounds can be turned back into glass. Presumably, you could make a similar same case for curbside recycling that separated glass from paper and metal.
…we were required to separate materials. Do they all just get throuwn together anyway? My town also required recycling of appropriate materials that could be so the idea that people would at least in theory not be a concern.
The following things tend to be true in American cities and towns with recycling:
1. If you require separation, you get fewer tons of material for recycling curbside than if you allow single stream (throw all recyclables in the same bin).
2. The value of the single stream materials is far less than the separated materials. This is both because now you have to pay to separate, but also because the paper gets spoiled by the drips from beverage cans, etc.
With respect to recycling, if Americans had the commitment to precision and following the rules that the Germans and the Japanese have, we’d (almost) never do single stream. But, we don’t. And, for many Americans, if it’s choosing between trash bin and recycle bin, they’ll choose correctly — but if its choosing between trash, paper, glass, and plastic, they just say “screw it” and throw it all in the trash, or all in the paper, or whatever.
We originally had strict separation, but later went to just a paper/cardboard vs. glass/plastic separation. At least in my house that was automatic. We put paper in a paper grocery bag and the containers directly in the bin. What I’m wondering is if there is a way to get the best of both worlds – ease for the consumer AND most efficient recycling of materials.
Let more people live there. Instead, policies that restrict how much new housing can be built in transit-friendly areas force people out to driving-intensive suburbs. If you want to learn more, read Matt Yglesias’ The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think
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…is there room for more people? I think I would priortize expanding what constitutes transit-friendly areas, along with incentivizing transit usage through lower fares and more frequent service.
from 1950. Could add 160,000 residents and not reach the levels seen back then. Why could the city handle it in 1950 but not 2013?
In the 50s it was common for more people to be living in each house. For instance, in our house there were about 6 people living in our house where there are now two. People don’t have as large families as they used to and wealthier families also take up more space. To get back to the same population level as back then you would now need to build additional housing because you are not going to convince people to have large families or take in boarders.
Our zoning makes it very difficult to increase the number of housing units in a 2/3 family home. We can’t add in-law apartments, perfect for allowing a housing unit to have more people in it (and to allow for caring for aging parents, the aging parents care for the children, etc etc).
We also have minimum size requirements for apartments in Boston. Even if people want to live in micro-apartments by themselves (instead of packing 4-6 sharing rent into a more traditional apartment), they’ve been impermissible. That’s starting to change, but it will take lots of time for that change to work its way through.
We also require a significant portion of new development to be devoted to housing vehicles. (If parking’s needed, great, people can demand new lots be built. Let the free market decide! But instead city law requires parking be built whether it’s needed or not.)
Christopher, we know you don’t value big city living, but where is there room? Boston is the 51st most dense city in America. By my calculation, that means that 50 other cities have figured out where there was room for more people (per capita). Heck, Somerville, Chelsea, and Cambridge are all denser than Boston.
Where to put those “more people”? Look up.
I know it’s not the densest and I suppose you can just about always expand vertically, but yes I am also looking for open horizontal space, not all of which I want used up and you’re right – I’m not keen on packing it in.
My impression is that you don’t live within 10 miles of Boston. And hey, dense urban living isn’t for everyone. But, the fact that rents are so high suggests that more people want to live in Boston than there are housing units. Nobody is suggesting that a residential tower (or anything else) be built in the Public Garden or any other park land in Boston, or that we tear down the Beacon Hill historic housing either. The flip is that there is loads of space in Boston — very close to major transit lines — which is no denser than triple deckers. The city can certainly handle more people, and more people in Boston means more people with a lower heating and cooling carbon footprint (smaller units, shared walls), a lower electricity carbon footprint (smaller units and newer appliances lead to lower electric bills too), and a very very small transportation carbon footprint (walking, biking, and the T are all extremely light on fossil fuels). That it would help keep Massachusetts and New England a national resource throughout the 21st century isn’t inconsequential, either.
P.S. I don’t know why I’m hung up on the word seriously today. It’s like a nervous tick. Serio… never mind.
So you want Boston to give up all of its awesome green space so that it can become more like Somerville etc?
Yes indeed, Boston could always be denser. But do we really want it to be. I know that I don’t.
I haven’t seen anyone suggest that, unless you count paved side and back yards as green space.
Boston is filled with 2/3 family houses. Loads of ’em. There’s no reason why some of them — particularly those closest to transit — couldn’t be razed and replaced with higher density housing (anything from 4 story brownstone-like buildings to 15 story apartment buildings, depending on location). What greenspace would you lose? Heck, a condition of a development like this might be to require the developer to acquire land for a small park/playground, make it public, maintain in for X years, and then hand it over to Boston Parks Department… thereby *increasing* the amount of greenspace.
This is not a totalitarian government. People live in those houses, you can’t just “raze” them. Someone has to buy those houses and then redevelop the properties. And in fact, this does happen quite frequently. I can think of a number of areas of JP and Roslindale that have redeveloped with denser housing. But by and large the most desirable multi-families near transit have already been condoized. No developer is going to buy blocks of condos to turn into apartments.
I appreciate the theory that higher density is somehow “greener”, but it depends on the huge assumption that that density will not lead to more automobiles in the city or an overburdened transit system. I already know in the case of JP that higher density has directly led to more cars and more traffic despite the public transit.
The reason I brought up greenspace was to counter the suggest that Somerville, Cambridge and Chelsea should be considered as models for Boston. All of those cities are woefully short on greenspace.
This spells out exactly what keeps Boston’s growth from getting smarter: I’m already here & have it nice, and refuse to change a single thing to make it easier for anyone else to live here too.
Who is talking about refusing all change? Indeed no one can deny that Boston has changed significantly in the last twenty years and no doubt will continue to do so. However, I reject the idea that Somerville, with its cramped streets, bad traffic and lack of parks, is a model for what Boston should look like. It is simply lazy of you to suggest that is “NIMBYism”.
The fact is that Boston has already been getting denser downtown and near the best transit options. That has happened naturally. Where Boston has become less dense is in the outlying neighborhoods with no rail, and fewer or longer bus routes to get downtown. If you want to a denser Boston, you need better, faster and more widespread public transportation and the housing will grow up around it.
I even think it would work well in my town of Andover. Increased density in the downtown could create lot more opportunity for business.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/how-skyscrapers-can-save-the-city/308387/
Both of these cities have recycling rates of about 80% from what I’ve read. What are they doing that Boston is not? And what are they doing that we can replicate here? Might be good to know.
My summer job in Boston sometimes has me grabbing lunch at Quincy Market. As you may know it is basically a food court setup and I think all the places sell beverages in containers already covered by the current bottle bill. When I throw my trash away I have put my soda bottles on top of the trash bins hoping someone would take the hint. Today a maintenance person was standing right next to the bin when I threw my stuff away and promptly took the bottle and threw it away as well. There must be a ton of recyclable/redeemable bottles thrown away at Quincy Market on a daily basis and this seems like such low-hanging fruit. Either QM or the city could, and I believe should, set up recycling bins next to the trash bins, and in the case of redeemables collect nicely on them.