Is garbage hauling sustainable?

Caveat: this is not a Recology problem even though they are the only named entity.

There are more than twice as many garbage trucks, 179,000, in the US as there are transit buses. These refuse hauling monsters get an average of 2.8 miles per gallon. Garbage trucks move at an average speed of 10mph, an incredibly inefficient pace for a combustion engine, but one that's necessary because of the garbage trucks duties. The average garbage truck guzzles 8600 gallons of diesel fuel a year. Together US garbage trucks use 1.5 billion gallons of fuel, about 4% of all the diesel used in the US, accounting for billions of dollars sent overseas. (from $20 per gallon by Christopher Steiner page 162.)

Now these trucks will also get to go load a train, with garbage from from the Peninsula to Marin, because we don't price out what we throw away. Senator Reid can fix this with a federal tipping rate fee of $100/ton. For the role of tipping fees see Understanding Dynamics of Landfill Gate Rates by Cary Pecket, page 32f. BioCycle, August 2009. Higher tipping fees enable business from recycling including home deconstruction. The money should go to Fish and Wildlife for enforcement of the Clean Water Act since a secondary problem of any dump is toxins leached into the water table.

The primary problem is garbage service as a mechanism to expand sprawl in existing polluted corridors; and roads into openspace, including the road to nowhere, which ends up creating a community by the dump (Steiner's point in the opening quote.)

Recology trucks in the Belmont area are biodiesel. But as Stanford Professor Jacobson showed, when their fossil fuel production component is factored in, biofuels are worse in most metrics.
Since Belmont just signed up with Recology (formerly Norcal) this article could be titled: Belmont boards for burial at Burning Man.

Michael Cabanatuan, Chronicle Staff Writer

In the dusty Nevada desert, about 30 miles east of the playa where Bay Area artists and hipsters gather annually to build a temporary city at the Burning Man festival, a San Francisco garbage company wants to build a dump for Bay Area trash.

But a group of residents in the Winnemucca area, near where Recology seeks to build the 1-square-mile landfill, wants the company to leave the desert alone - and California to keep its garbage to itself.

"The notion that Nevada is some sort of wasteland because we don't have Ponderosa pines covering it is repugnant," said Jim French, retired wildlife biologist from the Nevada Department of Wildlife and a member of Nevadans Against Garbage, a group opposing the planned dump.

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Eye on the prize

Eduardo Galeano in Upside Down lays out the case for the rapacious consumption of resources by they corporations and politics which brings to the unsustainable state of peak everything with a planet where life itself is imperiled. But politics won't address peak anything even when the benefits are clear.

Higher gas prices have reduced revenue for road widening, reduced VMT, reduced gas consumption, lowered fatalities, raised public transit usage, reduced pollution, etc. For years public officials were trying to raise public transit usage - now the buses and trains are running full and capacity is an issue. The Peninsula Traffic Relief Alliance reported at the Belmont Green Advisory Committee that all their last mile shuttles are running full. When will policy makers stop moaning and start cheering a ladder for $20/gallon along with some minor TDM strategies?

The GAC has asked for a 20 mph city that would enable NEV- Neighborhood Electric Vehicles, they max out at 25 mph, reduce pollution, enable hybrids to run on their electric motor, make the environment safe for walking and bicycling the two sustainable transport modes, and reduce danger to children, seniors, and pets/wild animals. Most streets today are 25 mph or less so that change the speed environment much. The few arterials like Ralston (25-40 but with schools and neighborhoods needing 20 -25), El Camino (35), and Alameda (25) within the city would show marginal changes. However teh difference for walkers and bicyclists would be immense. And the attitude of drivers on side streets like Monserat and Folger which could use 15mph are posted at 25 and get speeds in excess would be the main benefit.

Building local distributed power for water, sewer, and electricity with solar panels would also significantly the infrastructure load of cities. Wind can then be used to fill reservoirs near citeis which can run hydro at night when the wind is not blowing and recharge the NEVs.

Alternate thinking for significant resource consumption declines face daunting tasks as wind demonstrates. Coal and nuclear lures despite clear liability in pollution, waste, and liability and continue to enjoy subsidies which lower the cost of power delivery because the problems are exported to poorer areas (also documented in Upside Down.) The only bright line is that rising prices cause subsidies to exert a bigger force on the market in reduced subsidy or taxed areas.

Ignorant development of water, timber and land have lead to this unsustainable consumption state. Some universities are working to correct this with programs that involve a new approach to day-to-day living, and the reappraisal of the existing infrastructure to achieve genuine change and keep sight of where we need to go.

Solve resource depletion with a pollution penalty

The challenge for the future is 350 ppm of CO2. How do we get there?

CO2 is produced from consumption of fossil fuels. Consumption of fossil fuels need to be reduced to the absorbtive capacity of the biosphere. Resource depletion has lead to peak everything. The challenge is not only to live within the capacity of the biosphere but to provide resources for the needs of future generations.

However no government or mainstream newspaper is looking at the future and laying out a plan of how to get there. Many non profits have worked out the strategies like a shift to renewables. The Sierra Club has a plan with the American Solar Energy Society to get there with 2% reductions per year. Others talk about a massive shift to photovoltaics. The Urban Land Institute calls for using landuse tools to reduce the impact from transportation.

But problem solvers are having a difficult time getting traction in the mainstream. Cheney-Bush-think of problem solvers as a person virtue is still the mainstream as to how government is organized and subsidies dispersed. Why isn't this different from business as usual? Because Gore and McKibben have elevated the public conversation. Instead of being a bunch of crooks in govenment looking to hand public resources to their friends today we can see some of the carbon footprint that results from resource usage. This visibility inturn leads to a discussion of why Belmont signed a single stream garbage contract instead of more resource protective dual stream contract. Or why we want to raise fees on low flow users of the sewer system to pay for the infrastructure cost incurred because of high flow users. Now we can ask questions like a set aside fee for future infrastructure costs that can be tiered, i.e. a placeholder in the budget of how the fee will be used instead of the present practice of subsidizing high flow users.

The overall result is that government continues to toast the planet because that is where the big money is invested. Greenpeace and NRDC have called unsuccessfully for a moratorium on coal plant building currently responsible for more than 40% of green house gases, to no avail, as the price of energy continues to make the old way of investment with massive government subsidies and no pollution penalty viable; while now options like solar are either regulated into non competitiveness (with varying state regulations that coal or nuclear don't have to contend with) or have subsidies eliminated in the middle of growth years (like the sunsetting 30% federal investment tax credit.) Even nuclear, despite its public face of horror and death, remains competitive without solving its waste, cost, and implementable timetable issues in the face of massive write downs on insurance and power purchase agreements. Like GM the business model is do what you know until you run the company into the ground even when the future is staring you in the face.

How can we get to a pollution penalty? How can the virtue of resource conservation change to an economic incentive? Non profits would like to change the tide. Pope of the Sierra Club says "One of the reactions it's very easy to have when you read a report like this (ASES) is, it's too good to be true. If all these things were possible, why aren't they already being done? And the unfortunate answer to that question is they are not being done because we have massive examples of policy failure and market failure in our energy sector."

Pope cited a number of problems, like building codes that don't allow white, reflective roofs to reduce summertime cooling loads, grid regulations that limit solar and wind production, and builders who have no incentive to build energy efficient buildings because they don't have to pay the energy bills. Pope vowed that the Sierra Club would aggressively pursue solutions to these problems. He promised that "This is not a report that will be sitting on a shelf."

Get rid of traffic to make a livalbe city

Cities need to figure out how to live without the pollution the traffic, & the crime. Restricting or getting rid of cars, with development by transit, and Transit Oriented Development will solve the first two. Removing the residential parking space requirement, allowing the transit agency to control streets and parking landuse decisions within a 1/4 mile of the transit center, and unbundling parking will solve this issue.

Eyes on the street via good development around a plaza will solve the third. By collecting streets into a public open space we can reduce the opportunity for anonymous crime that cities become plagued with. The plaza should collect the parking of Caltrain, Blockbuster, Walgreeen, and City Hall along with the already mentioned church and Safeway into one underground charged parking lot. Reducing parking and charging for the rest will allow us to free space for viable city development and extend the reach and viability of Twin Pines.

The incentive to do so is happening around us, driven by fuel prices. Last year a house on 6th street sold to a family from Tracy. They shortened their commute and saved on gas by moving to Belmont, near work. They have still not been able to sell their McMansion in Tracy. Another friend of ours say their fuel, insurance, and repair bill exceeded $1000/- last month for their commute car from Tracy to Cupertino. For most of us this is an affordable number which means that gas is still low and we need to do more as a city to deter driving.

And as discussed at the council last night, under Item 6C, cities need to be cautious how they give away crucial resources on local institutions. Carlmont and Norte Dame for example have statistically our worst drivers. Socially these students should be getting better grades to benefit our property prices- not spending their time earning money for gas and insurance and repairs. Creating pollution, traffic, and crashes within less than a half mile of the transit center is not good policy. Yet it was appalling to hear the Dean say that there was no alternative to driving and that we need to adjust to pollution, traffic, crime, and stressed out students.

Council Member Christine Wozniack was right on when she said we should stop making it easier for cars and in the process making it difficult for people to walk or bike. We got to make it worse for cars, like gas prices are presently doing, because that clearly benefits the environment, bikes, and peds.

The NY Times article goes on to say "In March, Americans drove 11 billion fewer miles on public roads than in the same month the previous year, a 4.3 percent decrease — the sharpest one-month drop since the Federal Highway Administration began keeping records in 1942.

Long before the recent spike in the price of energy, environmentalists decried suburban sprawl a waste of land, energy and tax dollars. Governments from Virginia to California have in recent decades lavished resources on building roads and schools for new subdivisions in the outer rings of development while skimping on maintaining facilities closer in. Many governments now focus on reviving their downtowns."

We should focus on a plaza downtown too and a systemic solution to traffic. We can't let the tide of history sweep us toward another untenable development.

We are going backward

Global Warming is a consequence of lifestyle choices; of resources used because they are there and no negative consequences to us thinking we need to use them. We are evaporating eons of fossil fuels into the air we breathe and changing the earth's albedo.

Government provides rules for the allocation of resources, like how much air can be polluted. As a consequence of resource use governments manage growth and crisis- not very well. Business is exploitation of resources for growth and the deferral of risk in crisis.

James Hansen said Business As Usual was what will prevent solving the crisis of Global Warming; not a absence of available solutions.

Take Belmont's desire for a flat sewer rate or three cars per unit downtown.

According to City Manager Crist low intensity water users are not paying for the cost of infrastructure. High intensity users require larger infrastructure. LIU use it but don't pay for it is the argument. The Public Hearing will then be held on May 13, 2008, at 7:30 p.m. at One Twin Pines Lane, Belmont, CA 94002 in the City Council Chambers.

But that infrastructure is built up for the high intensity water users. And the city's unrequited commitment to sprawl has resulted in miles of non permeable roads, which have steadily increased over the last 30 years, causing runoff into the sewer, exacerbated by the higher rainfalls of global warming, now overtaxing the sewer system from 50 years ago. The total cost is estimated at $40M.

Someone said its unfair that she has to pay more to water her yard which benefits all of Belmont because it meets residential design standards for landscaping. Native plants, recycled water, and low water landscapes may be on the GAC charter but they are not presently policy. Why should a high flow user bear the costs she asked?

Because at the same time, in the Green Newsletter that Belmont sent out, we are asked to conserve water for our supplier Mid Peninsula Water Company. Given that we live in a 25" per year, semi arid low temperature climate, conservation makes sense. What is the harm with conservation anyway? That there will be more for our children? We could be even greener if local water capture, community gardens and home gardens got similar incentives like the solar waive fees and streamline guidelines to encourage installations.

In the past local government felt that growth was in the community interest and needed to be subsidized. Sewer, garbage, water, postal, electricity and gas rates and utility charges were averaged over the community to pay for consumption of open space. Downtowns were taxed to pay for sprawl; and deteriorated as people saw more value in exploiting open space than losing services downtown. Local government with the various departments at city hall make it possible to consume our way through the planet.

That infrastructure for Global Warming consumption patterns remains in place in all the jobs at city hall. Today the same low growth, now pro open space arguments, are saying that in the community interest, increased consumption (of water in this case) needs to be subsidized. Averaging the sewer rates means government still ends up subsidizing consumption rather than efficiency; while at the same time feeling a need to remind us to conserve for Mid Penn!

Where's the food?

There is shortage of decent organic food downtown Belmont.

We have Safeway which has been trending away from most organic labels in favor of its in-house factory organic label. The selection has declined significantly.

A G Ferrari has a small selection of specialized organics.

The Farmer's market is fantastic but its only once a week.

I could use a Trader Joe's or Whole Foods style store. They are short bike rides down El Camino to Redwood City but I'd rather walk.