 Hi, my name is Kim Moat. I'm the Assistant Director of the Code Compliance Department. I'm over the Soloway Services Division and what we're here to talk about today is to do an update of the development of the City's Comprehensive Solowaste Management Plan. This is a repeat of the open house meeting we held on September 1st, 2015. It was the second in a series of open house meetings where we talked about where we're looking at growing in the City's Solowaste, the 20-year City's Solowaste Plan. During that September 1st meeting, this was the agenda. However, today we are not going to cover the second and third bullets because they were covered originally in the briefing that we did in October of 2014. You can easily view those slides with the previous PowerPoint that is on the City's website. What we are going to talk about today is the future possibilities under consideration. Some information on waste that's in the news today that you may have read about what we have for public feedback to this point in time and then how you can engage with the City and let us know your ideas about what you would like to see for betterment of the City's Solowaste Plan. What this is not is not a rollout of the final plan. We are seeking your input. It is not promoting any specific plan at this point even though we'll talk about certain things that could be part of the plan. And we are not going to discuss certain aspects of residential collections, why miscollections occur and why individual issues are occurring at certain addresses. We do welcome your comments on the merit of the collection program and we look forward to receiving them through the website I'll talk about at the end of the presentation. There are several things that are going on in the Solowaste industry right now. One of these you may have already heard about. One is called a one bin system in mixed waste processing. One bin system is where you put everything into a cart, recycle, garbage, yard waste, everything else and put it at the curb and the service provider will come and collect it and then it will be processed on the back side. Part of the problem with this system is it has to have a completely different material recovery facility which is where the recycle is processed and it has to be able to handle mixed waste but it does recover everything that can be done in the regular collection program and trying to divert the rest of this material out into its different commodities so that it can be sold on the back side. Some of these systems actually do collect yard waste or collect it separately as such as what we do right now. The processing facility is actually called a dirty murk by some people because it does receive a lot of contamination from the garbage and that has to be worked out. And yes, this is what the City of Houston is actually considering. They're still in the process of making some final decisions on that. And what I have on the slide here is actually one of the promotional items that they send out to all their residents as to why the program might work for the City of Houston. Each city has really got to look at this independently to figure out whether it works for them or not. So the solid waste industry itself is really divided on this issue and you can see between the left side of this slide and the right side of this slide there's different discussions about this. The rest side of the slide is from an expert with waste management and he talks about several of the things that are very difficult to do with this program and he also talks about some programs that are based upon this system that have gone away. Those local governments decided not to proceed down that road. The other side is from some industry magazines that talked about the Houston program it's specific and whether it's a dirty mirf or whether it's not a dirty mirf and so on and so forth. So it's a very topical issue within the solid waste industry. It's still not settled out. But why would a city consider this? Well, if you look at the city's collection program you have to collect the municipal solid waste but you also have to pay for the collection of recyclables. You have to pay for the recycling processing and then you have to pay for the disposal of the materials that are not done in the recycling process. So all of these are the costs that are added into it. What the proponents of a 1-bin system say is you can eliminate the collection of the recyclables and so you've got that money that go back into your program. What it does not mention is the tonnage of the recyclables never disappears. You're still going to have to collect it. So the collection of MSW, the solid waste if you will, actually increases to be more, say over 55% because you've still got those tons to collect. You might have some savings on the backside because you don't have to run so many trucks. You still have to pay for a disposal but the disposal costs are going to be drawn down quite a bit as you pull a lot of the recycle materials out of the waste stream that are still there because people chose to put it in the garbage cart. However, the recycle processing is also going to dramatically increase to make up for the tons that are not being disposed in processing that material out. Part of the problem with that is recycle processing costs a lot more than it costs to do for simple disposal of those tons. So all in all, the cost would probably increase for a 1-bin system and that's what the city is going to be looking at whether it makes any sense for the city of Fort Worth to do this type of program. Some of the factors that affect it and they're varied. There's a lot of things that go into this as to what potential the costs are, what the ramifications are, what the politics are involved in, where the siding has to be done because we're not talking about a simple recycle processing facility of clean recycling. We're talking about all waste going there and where it should be. We have to talk about the financing of the project because this facility costs a lot more, some more upwards of $50 million for a city the size of Fort Worth to run a program like this. Plus you have to have an extensive public education program and potential enforcement actions involved as well. Serious drawbacks exist of the 1-bin system, the contamination that will reduce the value of the recycling, cost of the facility. It's going to be at least twice as much of a facility of a normal recycle processing program. The cost of the actual processing, it costs a lot more than just the standard recycle processing. Extensively, the loss of the value of the material now become contaminated. One of the other things that's still a very topical issue in the solid waste industry is waste energy. It's basically taking the waste and treating it as a fuel to generate electricity or heat, which is then used for energy. So it is a form of energy recovery. Most of the waste to energy facilities produce electricity and or heat that in turn is used as a source of energy. There's also a more specialized process called conversion technology or in some cases gasification, where you take the solid waste and convert it into a combustible fuel gas such as these items that are listed here on the slide. These are some of the waste to energy facilities throughout the United States. Overall, 23 states have at least one waste to energy facility. There's a total of 85 in the United States right now, 12 states in located in concentrated pockets have three or more facilities that account for 71 of these facilities. Generally, the states that have waste to energy facilities, the state has deemed solid waste to be a renewable energy source that give credits back to the waste to energy facility so that it supplements the cost involved in running it. Most of these facilities were built back in the 1980s. The picture of the facility on the lower right is a brand new facility that opened in West Palm Beach, Florida, north of Miami. It's publicly owned, but it's operated by a private contractor. The facility opened in 2015 and it's what's called a mass burn facility. In other words, all the waste goes in there and is incinerated to generate the power. Services the needs, the waste needs of a population base of almost 1.3 million people. It's designed capacity as over 3,000 tons of waste per day. City of Fort Worth generates just over 1,000 tons a day so a facility like this has the potential to work within the city of Fort Worth. This facility is the first waste energy facility in the past 20 years to be built. Its cost was $672 million. That's why it's a very conscious decision for a local government entity to make a decision to operate a facility like this. Across the European Union, there are 456 of these facilities so it's a conceivable process to use for a local government. Another issue we talk about is the food waste and its effect upon the environment. This is actually an infographic that comes from a Central Texas Council of Government invitation for an event that's going to be held on October 21. It's going to be analyzing the effects of the food waste on the environment and what is being done for uneaten or unconsumed food and what happens with the waste. It consumes 25% of the fresh water used in the United States, 4% of the total energy consumption, and 21% of the municipal solar waste. We know that it's fairly straightforward for the City of Fort Worth. We estimate it to be about 22% so we're right in that range. But it also generates about 23% of methane gas emissions, which is a greenhouse gas. The thing that's shocking to a lot of people is uneaten food, in other words, food we have on hand but never consume, whether it's thrown away from a grocery store, restaurant, or even at home, accounts for $165 billion a year annually, which is a shocking number. One of the concepts we're looking at is a concept called zero waste. It's not a process, but it's a policy decision. But it's also a change in philosophy. The intent of zero waste is to find ways to maximize diversion of materials out of the landfill and finding a commodity stream that it has a home in each one of them. Whether it's a recycled commodity or a compostable item, you're trying to find a way to utilize this on the backside so it's not being disposed of in a landfill that ends up being a resource and not just a waste stream. So that's the main thrust of it is to try to figure out how it can be a resource. And one of the conscious decisions that zero waste proponents have is what is the highest and best use for these materials? It's trying to get it back into the marketplace so that it makes sense for the economy. And one of the major proponents of zero waste is a gentleman named Jerry List and he has a very, to the point, question. And he says, if you're not for zero waste, how much waste are you for? It's a very straightforward question that all of us really need to look at to try to understand. There's been a lot of media reporting about recycle programs throughout the United States. A big one that came out in the Washington Post in June of 2015, it was picked up by many media outlets throughout the United States as saying that America recycling is stalling and the way that a lot of cities such as Fort Worth are collecting it, single stream recycling in one cart is the reason why. There's a lot of information in this that just has to be really looked at from the industry standpoint and also from the residential standpoint as to what's happening and why is this. The right side of the slide talks about unprofitable recycling, ways upon waste management, who happens to be our contractor, and why the commodity pricing is impacting what waste management does. But the things that are important in here is one of the things they're saying is that contamination that is collected as recycling is really weighing down the processing and causing a lot of challenges from the standpoint of the cost of doing this. Another aspect of this is the economy in China where a lot of this recycle material is sold to be made into new products is slowing down. You just saw the impact of what it had on the stock market earlier this month. It affects recycling as well because a lot of that material is sold up there. If they're not willing to buy it for a variety of reasons or they don't need to buy it, it slows the marketplace down. Another thing is much of the recycling is still going in the garbage cart instead of being in the recycle cart. So that's pulling those commodities away from a recycle stream and putting it in the landfill. I'll talk about that a little bit more and show you a slide that really has a severe bearing on that. Another concept that's really impacting recycling is that the EPA reports that the recycling is very flat. There's a huge impact to that. It's something that's called the evolving ton. It's received a lot of media reports within the industry, the solid waste industry itself, and sometimes you see it in the mainstream media as well. It comes from the standpoint of the way the producers are making products is evolving and changing. They're doing a lot of light weighting of the products. There's an old joke about what weighs more, a ton of lead or a ton of feathers. Of course they weigh the same. They both weigh a ton, but it takes an awful lot more feathers to make a ton than it does the components of lead. So that's what's happening. The bottles are getting thinner, they're getting lighter weight, aluminum cans are getting lighter weight. There's more aluminum cans in a ton these days than there was previously. A lot more flexible pouching is coming into place, such as the pouches that you get a lot of food in right now. And it's having an impact upon the recycle waste stream, and it's drawing down the recycling to a certain extent as well, the actual diversion of waste. For example, the average weight of a half liter bottle of soda bottles has actually dropped 48% between the year 2000 and the year 2011. Aluminum cans have gone from an original weight of empty aluminum cans to about 33 per pound now. And you can see it yourself when you buy a non-carbonated beverage, such as water, you open up the top and you're almost squeezing the water out immediately because there's very little plastic rigidity involved in the container anymore. This is some of the things that are impacting the evolving ton. But it also in the recycle stream itself, the slide I'm showing here is showing the impact upon the solid waste stream as forecasted by the US EPA. And the year 1994, on the left side, it's showing the percentage of those components that were in the waste stream. These don't total up to 100 because it's only talking about the recycling materials that are in the waste stream. In the year 2009, you see the percentages there. On the right side, you see the difference. There's a significant difference in paper and in glass. And plastic is greatly increased over what it was before. It's as have metals because we're moving away from glass and moving towards other containers. Paper has had a significant impact because newspapers are not really read by a lot of people anymore. That's really impacted the newspaper industry and it's really impacted the recycle marketplace for newsprint because it's just not there anymore. What I want to talk about now is the input we've received from Fort Worth residents on our plan. The triangle you see on the right side of the slide talks about all the things we're doing to make contact with residents and trying to get your input into our plan. We seriously want your ideas, your concepts, your thoughts as to what we can do to make our program better. We've conducted a lot of these already. We still have some to do in the future. So please keep your eyes open for items on the city's website for some of these items coming up. Our next open house meeting is going to be in November. But I want to talk about some of the input we've actually received from residents. The next two slides are actually from the city's citizen survey. It's a survey that's done nearly every two years by the city of Fort Worth, not just the solid waste department. But in it, we ask how the city services are being done, how the city's a livable community, how is policing going, how is the fire protection going. And one of the questions that's asked is how is solid waste being done? How is the solid waste services performing for you? And if you can look at the slide, the darker blue is very satisfied, the cross-tatch blue is satisfied, and the white is neutral, and then the red is dissatisfied. But you can see here between these different lines, curbside recycling, garbage collection, drop-off stations, all these are showing a great level of satisfaction with the programs. Now we recognize we can always improve, and that's one of the things we're trying to do is trying to figure out how to improve the program. The next slide compares those opinions for three periods in 2002, 2009, and the most recent one in 2015. And you can still see we're ranked very favorably with the program back in 2002 and 2009. Again, we recognize that there's several things that we need to do to increase the program and make it better. That's why we're open for public opinion. So when the Solid Waste Services Division started doing surveys for this program, our Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Plan, we did it in several ways. The first one was an online survey. This was through the city's website, and citizens who wanted to participate physically went to the online survey and did a survey online about how they felt about the program with a series of several questions and a chance to add comments. I'm going to talk about three of these real quick. The most pressing environmental issues, we asked the residents to rank what was the first, what was the second, and what was the third most pressing environmental issue residents were challenged with. And the most frequent was air quality. That's a given. We're in a major metropolitan area. That's clearly understood. But the second and third came in both with recycling. The people that ranked it recycling third still outpaced every other opinion, as did the second level. We also asked what are the prioritized ideas to increase recycling? This is some of the feedback we've gotten from the residents, and those are some of the things that we're really looking at within the plan in what we're going to be basing a lot of our decisions on. The third side is we asked the opinion, would you participate in a curbside food waste collection program if it was offered? And it came out 62% said yes, they'd be willing to consider it. 38% said no. And we understand there's a certain yuck factor involved in that, that we have to understand and how we do the program. The next slide is very similar to the online survey, but this is one where we actually went out to over the Christmas shopping period last year and actually did what were called intercept interviews or basically walk up interviews where we walked up and interviewed people, asked the same basic question we did before and that the actual numbers ended up being very, very similar to what we saw on the previous slide. They're very, very, very close in that and that's interesting because the first slide was people that willingly went out and found this site to do the survey. This other one was walk up and finding a man in the street interview if you will to try to ask their opinion. We also did interviews with a select group of individual businesses in the city of Fort Worth and we're just trying to ask some questions to figure out what they knew about business recycling and trying to understand how the city can work with businesses to try to increase the commercial recycling sector in Fort Worth. Previously heard the other presentation, you saw that the impact of the city's solo-way services division is only about a third of the waste in Fort Worth. Two-thirds are in the open marketplace for the commercial and the industrial sectors and they contract directly with waste companies. So trying to figure out how to best encourage recycling in those sectors is something we're very interested in doing because it'll have an impact upon Fort Worth's sustainability efforts in the future. So we asked the question, what do you know of business recycling requirements in Fort Worth? They got the answers on the left. What are some of the hardest things in offering recycling in businesses? Some very straightforward opinions with that that's something we need to look at as well. And we also asked from the standpoint of one bin collection and was it a good idea? Answers were, obviously logic sounds easy, but no, it also sounds very expensive and that's something we're trying to weigh out as well. What we've got for the rest of the period, the comprehensive solo-waste plan will not be finished probably until late spring, early summer, next year. But there's also a lot of chances for public opinion. We will have briefings in front of council. We'll have another open house. As I mentioned earlier, it's in November and we're just trying to get a good feel for what residents in Fort Worth want. So we value your opinion and please take the opportunity to let us know. One of the ways you can do it is to provide your comments and your ideas through the city's website and go to the solid waste plan. This is the actual link, but going into the city's website and finding garbage and recycling through the solid waste plan, you have the opportunity to provide input to the city's solid waste planners so we can add this in and have our consultant look at these issues to help us make those decisions. I've got one other slide I want to show you before we go and it's really kind of an eye-opening. Back in 2012, we did an audit of one single garbage truck and we found out that we were throwing away, we estimated about $13 million worth of recycling through the brown garbage carts. The residents of Fort Worth were. If we could pull that out or if we could have residents not put it in the garbage cart, put it in the recycling cart, there's an awful bit of large benefit to the city. But I want to show you those numbers that have been expanded across the United States and what that would be. This is a slide from a presentation made by Mr. Jerry Powell. He is the editor of the resource recycling magazine. It's an industry trade magazine. But he looked at this simply from the standpoint of paper, aluminum cans, plastic bottles, steel cans, glass bottles across the United States and what the recycling rate is and what the value of that material of the other percent that's not recycled that's going into the landfill and what the value of it was. And he came to the startling realization that about $6.5 billion a year in recyclable materials are being thrown away in the United States simply because people are making the choice not to recycle. That's a shocking number that I think we all need to keep in mind and figure out better ways to do it. And we're all in this together and we need to find better ways to handle our solid waste. It shouldn't be going to the landfill. That's it. That was basically a briefing I gave at the open house on September 1st. Again, I value your opinion and I urge you to get back with us and let us know your opinions on how solid waste can be more sustainably handled in the city of Fort Worth. Thank you for your time. Goodbye.