Last Thursday Portland State hosted Garbology author Edward Humes as a part of Oregon Metro’s Let’s Talk Trash series.
Let’s Talk Trash is an event and public engagement series intended to involve residents of the greater Portland area in decisions about the future of solid waste management in the region.
Metro’s Senior Public Affairs Coordinator Ken Ray explained that the current waste management contracts are in place through the end of 2019. This event, and others like it, are intended to involve the public in conversations about what to do in 2020.
“We currently send garbage to a couple of landfills outside of the metropolitan area, one of which is in Arlington, [Oregon], about 150 miles away,” Ray said. “Should we continue to send garbage to a distant landfill and bury it in a hole in the ground?”
Humes is an author and investigative journalist whose most recent book Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash takes a close look at the production and management of trash. One of the book’s chapters discusses Portland’s trash system. In the book, Humes points out some of the things Portland does right, and suggests some areas that need improvement.
Humes discussed that the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimation of trash produced in the United States is inaccurate. He cited a 2008 Columbia University report of 389.5 million tons of trash produced in the U.S. every year. The EPA’s number is 249.6 million tons.
“The real number is based on the weight of what is actually going into our landfills,” Humes said.
“The EPA doesn’t measure a pound of trash to find out how much trash we make. They do a survey of manufacturers to find out how much stuff gets manufactured in America,” Humes continued. “Then they try to calculate what the lifetime of that trash is; how long it will last. They come up with a number which, unfortunately, is radically wrong.”
Humes described waste management as a euphemism.
“We don’t have waste prevention departments. We don’t have waste elimination departments. We manage our waste. I think what we’re really doing is hiding our waste,” Humes said. “We manage it by rolling it to the curb and it magically disappears.”
Humes also discussed “the way back from trash.” He referenced ideas like localized waste-to-energy plants, reducing junk mail, shopping with reusable bags and incentive programs. He mentioned how large corporations like Patagonia and Wal-Mart have implemented models that contribute to reducing waste.
Though Humes presented concrete evidence to support the benefits of Wal-Mart’s Zero Waste program, many in the crowd audibly expressed their disapproval at its mention.
After Humes’ lecture, he was joined by Metro’s Senior Waste Planner Tom Chaimov, and director of PSU’s Community Environmental Services Eric Crum.
CES is a research and service unit at PSU that provides research, technical assistance and educational outreach to clients like Nike and New Seasons Market.
Crum discussed the ways CES is making an impact on the PSU campus, and what that could mean for other college campuses.
“I think we could be having a lot larger impact nationwide and in the region if you took a model like CES and placed it out at other universities, and started expanding that regional impact and public to private interface,” Crum said.
Crum also emphasized his desire not to discourage the efforts being made through PSU and Metro. “I don’t want it all to be gloom and doom, because it’s not,” Crum said. “There are organizations moving in the right direction.”
Chaimov discussed the need for public involvement in helping Metro address the upcoming changes to Portland’s trash system. “There’s a golden opportunity before you, over the next year or so, to have a real impact on what happens to your garbage over the next ten, twenty or thirty years.”
Though Chaimov pointed out some of the improvements in trash management—product stewardship, recycling and waste reduction— he emphasized the continued need to deal with large amounts of waste.
“The sad truth is that we believe in the next 20 years we’ll still have hundreds of thousands of tons per year of garbage that needs to go somewhere, maybe a million tons of garbage generated in this region.
“Really, the question is: Do you want to do something other than landfills?” Chaimov said. “This is the immediate problem.”
Chaimov reiterated some of the alternative ideas presented by Humes and mentioned technological advances in mechanical sorting methods that may help waste management.
Metro’s next Let’s Talk Trash event will be an art opening on Friday, Aug. 8 at Disjecta Gallery in North Portland. This event features local artists whose pieces consist only of materials found in Metro’s Central Transfer Station in Northwest Portland. Next door, Nisus Gallery will host a photo series of transfer station employees by Natalie Sept.
