 This is the first meeting and open session of the National Academy Study Committee on Costs and Approaches for Municipal Solid Waste Recycling Programs. My name is Don Fullerton. I'm a retired economics professor studying environmental economics and recycling and waste matters in particular. For more information about the committee and the committee's work, please visit the website. Questions can be directed at Andrew Bremer and his email address. I think it's going to be listed there in a second if it's not already. And the other National Academy staff and their contact information can be found on the project webpage. During the next hour, we're going to hear a presentation from the EPA on the study context and goals and other information important to the committee's work. EPA's presentation will be followed by a roundtable discussion and Q&A with our committee. I might note that because of time limitations, that discussion will have to be limited to the committee and the EPA. But other members of the public can submit input and feedback at the project's website or to Andrew Bremer directly at his email. So this discussion is an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of EPA's goals and what they're looking for in a report and how they might use the committee's eventual recommendations. Committee members may also ask questions by any aspects of the committee's statement or task. We'd like to begin first by asking our provisional committee members to briefly introduce themselves. And we'll start with my committee co-chair, Debbie Reinhardt. Hi, I'm Debbie Reinhardt. I'm a professor of Merita from the University of Central Florida in Orlando. We should go around the room. Sorry, my video keeps going on and off. Sophia, why don't you introduce yourself? I'm Sophia Village-Bouge. I'm a professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California at Berkeley. Malik. Hi, everyone. I am Medecon Chaucy. I'm an assistant professor of environmental engineering at Florida Polytech in Lakeland, Florida. Derek. Hi, my name is Derek Kellenberg. I am a professor of economics at the University of Montana. Jeremy. Hello, Jeremy O'Brien is my name. I am director of applied research for SWANA. Mitch, you're not muted, but you may not be back yet. Oh, I'm sorry, Debbie. Did you get a chance to introduce yourself yet? I should have started with you, my co-chair. Yes, I did. Thank you. Okay. Susan. I'm Susan Robinson. I'm retired from the waste and recycling industry doing some part-time consulting work mostly for recycling trade organizations. Tracy. I'm Tracy Horst. I'm with the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. I'm the director of environmental compliance and recycling. Fatima. Hi, I'm Fatima Hopso. I'm a plastic physician and circular economy specialist. I work so much through environmental engineering. Becca. Hi, I'm Becca Taylor. I'm an assistant professor in the department of agricultural and consumer economics at the University of Illinois. Hillary. Hi, I'm Hillary Sigmund. I'm a professor of economics at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Marquis. Hi, I'm Marquis McGrath. I'm a professor or a lecturer of public administration and policy at American University. Let's see. Who else is on the committee that I haven't called on? Is Mitch back? I think we got them all. So now we turn it over to the EPA. All right. Well, let me, Lawrence, do we want to put up the slides now or so that you can run them? So let me just introduce myself and my colleague first and then we'll go over the presentation. So I'm Swarupa Ganguli. It's a pleasure to meet most of you. I know there's some familiar faces here with some people that I've worked with in the past, so it's great to see you all. And what my colleague Lawrence, let me just introduce myself really quickly. I'm the lead environmental specialist here at EPA at the Resource Conservation Branch in the Resource Conservation and Sustainability Division. And I also lead the bipartisan infrastructure law grant programs. This particular set of grant programs is going to be very important for our work because it is a very historic grant program. That's where we're going to spend a lot of our time talking about it because those of you who are familiar with this field will know that, you know, this has been the first time we have, the government has invested this kind of money into recycling systems. So we're going to talk a little bit about that and then focus on the economics part. So with that, let me let Lawrence introduce himself and then we'll dive into the presentation. Yeah, hey everyone, my name is Lawrence Doppelt. I'm an economist in the Resource Conservation and Sustainability Division, and I'm one of the primary contacts working with the academies on this project. All right, so let's go. So again, I want to really thank you for your participation. You know, it's a really, really honor to have so many of you from all across the nation from such esteemed institutions working on this topic. And we're going to talk a little bit about the importance of this topic as Lawrence gets into his piece of the presentation. What I'm going to do as I start is going to outline a little bit about EPA's overarching initiatives, why we are interested in this particular topic, the congressional and policy drivers that have been underlying our work for the past, I would say about three years, the challenges to the US recycling system, which some of you may be familiar with, those of you who've worked with us on the national recycling strategy. And then we're going to touch a lot on the bipartisan infrastructure law to explain how that has really, really changed the dynamics of what is going on with recycling and given it that push that we desperately have needed for so many years. So then we're going to dive into this collaborative study with Nasem, the legislative scope of the study, some of the background information, and then some headline questions that we thought would help spur the discussion. Because really what we want to do is not hear from me, but really hear from you. So that's going to be the focus of this particular session. So next slide. So before we start into this, some of this may be familiar to you, if it is apologize for the repetition, but I love going over this every time I talk, just because it is so historic. 2020 is when our collective lives and recycling changed with the Save Our Seas Act. The Save Our Seas Act provided the authority for grants report and a strategy for post-consumer materials management. At the same time, this is a little bit out of order. We also released draft plastics strategy for plastic pollution in 2023, but back to, again, 2020, what happened was we, in November of 21, about a year after the Save Our Seas Act was passed. And I will say when they passed the Save Our Seas Act, and this is a little bit of a nuance that comes, you know, being in the government, it gave us the authority, but it didn't give us any money. So we said, okay, this is great, but is this actually going to come with any money? So we waited for a year patiently. In 2021, we released the national recycling strategy. So some of you may, you know, a lot of you are probably familiar with it. We released it as a part one of a series of building a circular economy. The reason we said part one of a series is because we really, really wanted to focus on recycling. My particular branch, the one Lawrence and I work on, our focus is on the bread and butter recycling system, MSW recycling, and, you know, we'll talk about really what that means in terms of materials. That'll be very, very important for your analysis because a lot of the economic analysis is going to be highly dependent on the material streams. So again, back to 2023, we released two other strategies which are still in draft, the national strategies to prevent plastic pollution, and the national draft strategy for food loss and waste. Now I'll just caveat this. So these are very three distinct things, you know, there's MSW, which was the focus of the recycling strategy. There's plastics, which are included in MSW, but can be much broader. And then there's food loss and waste, which also is included in MSW is much broader, can be much broader. Again, these are all going to be very important as you start your analysis to understand what is the scope of the materials. So getting back to one of my favorite laws, the bipartisan infrastructure law. The reason we love this one, it was also called by the way the longer name for it is the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. We in the government, we just call it bipartisan infrastructure law to sort of highlight its bipartisan nature because it was passed by both houses of the Congress, but also because this is what funded us, actually gave us the funding authority for our grants program. So again, Save Our Seas gave us the statutory authority, Bill gave us the actual funding. How much? You may ask. So what it gave us was 275 million for the solid waste infrastructure for recycling. We call it Swiffer for short. I love that acronym because it's easy to remember. That particular program is what we call a no-year funding. Again, there's a nuance to this. A no-year means that it's not necessarily based on appropriation. So even though we get funded every year, it's not, it's a non-appropriation based funding. The other thing that's a very important point to note, the Swiffer program was funded under Save Our Seas as the statutory authority. So even though it was, the money was given under Bill, it was given the statutory authority under Save Our Seas, which is a permanent authority. That is very, very, very significant because a permanent authority means it's possible we might get funded. Again, after those five years possible, we're very optimistic that because of the statutory authority. The next one, the Rio, the recycling education and grant program, it's technically in the congressional language called the consumer recycling education and grant program, but we at EPA are just calling it recycling education and grant program. This was 75 million dollars to support recycling education systems. Some of you have may have seen the RFAs that came out last year and the selections that were made. What I will say for that, again, the nuance here is that was not under Save Our Seas, so there was not the permanent statutory authority under Rio. And then again, there's been 25 million dollars to fund a battery recycling program. That's not under my particular branch, so if there's more information on it, I'd be happy to get it to you. But for the purposes of our study, I really want to highlight Swiffer and Rio. Swiffer because it's infrastructure, because it's state planning, we'll get into that a little bit. And then Rio because it gives some of those softer skills, the education outreach, which makes recycling a very interesting study because it's both an economic issue, but it's also a consumer behavior issue. And Lawrence will talk a little bit about why that is the case and why that's going to be so important to our study. Then there's more to come. There's a recycling measurement guide that we're working on that will help give some guidelines to states on how to measure recycling. Again, that's going to be very important from an economic point of view. There's also a map of the U.S. infrastructure. Sorry, the map was already released. There's also going to be a study on the amount of funding that's going to be needed to sort of galvanize U.S. recycling infrastructure. That was a study that was required by us, again, by Congress, by appropriations. We are in the middle of finalizing that study and sending it to OMB. And there are other pieces of legislation that we follow. Just today, I heard, this was fresh out the press, that both the Recycling and Composting Act and the Recycling Infrastructure Act, two pieces of legislation that we have been following just past the Senate have gone back to the House. So those will also provide one of them, actually the Recycling Infrastructure Act is another grant program that will provide money to rural recycling and the Recycling and Compost Act will provide money for data collection and for national composting study. I mentioned those because we've been tracking them for a long time. They were introduced about a year ago. We didn't know where they were going. And just today, the fact that they passed the Senate gave us some optimism about those two pieces of legislation. So next slide, please. So again, you all, those of you who are familiar with Recycling and who helped us with the National Recycling Study, the strategy, you may be familiar with some of these challenges. And again, the study really focused the National Recycling Strategy really focused on MSW Recycling. And I think that's a theme that I want to continue to emphasize is how different that is from other types of recycling. So MSW Recycling, you know, the way we look at it and the way the National Recycling Strategy, I would highly recommend those of you have not read it to read that because that's kind of our foundational work, really looks at what are most of the things that go through the MRF. So, you know, your paper, your aluminum, your glass, your metals, your glass, some of your plastics, things that have economic value. That's, you know, Lawrence and I were talking about that. And I think that is one of the reasons why that particular set of recyclables is so important. And these are the challenges. And they're fairly basic challenging. You know, first is the confusion on what can be, what materials can be recycled. And that's again, getting back to why I was really happy that Congress did give us money for recycling education and outreach, because that particular grant program really targets consumers, because as again, you know, sneak peek into what Lawrence will talk about. And what we're talking about, the conundrum we face with recycling from a supply and demand point of view, is the supply is based on consumers that are basically doing it for free. So in order to do that, if they're confused, you are going to have a real problem with the supply. And that is really one of the basic questions that issues that we face all the time here at EPA when our constituents tell us, I'm really confused at what is, should go into the recycling system. The other thing, yeah, and I think this is good too. So we, what do we do about that? We promote education and outreach. And that is where some of those soft, you know, education behavioral changes issues come in. The other is outdated and recycling infrastructure. Again, none of this is new. But that is one of the reasons why the funding for this recycling infrastructure and improvement has been so historic. And for those of you who followed our community infrastructure grants program, we announced them in November, we announced 25 awards, again, historic amounts of investment to the country to make those awards. We also funded 59 tribal nations, also to fund infrastructure improvements. So both of those, we hope some of those problems will be solved by helping with these infrastructure fundings that we're going to be doing. Reduce market for recycled materials. This is somewhere where I hate to say this, but where EPA doesn't really have a lot of control, even though people think we can do a lot, this is where we really, really have to depend on both sort of the nonprofit groups that track this particular issue, but also the NGOs, the MRFs, and the end markets who are actually in are on the demand side. So we track this information. You know, Lawrence will talk a little bit. We can mention a map that we put out, but this is where the data is limited and where we really have a lot of struggle. So I'd love to find out a way to get put a spotlight on this to how to better get this information. And this, you will find that as we, you know, back to point two, as we fund our grants program, we are going to find that the markets, how the, if these grants programs work, which I hope they will, and optimistic they will, how they will go into the end markets, how they will be sold to those end markets, you know, given everything that's happened with the international export bands that took place about three years ago. And then finally, the lack of consistency in measuring recycling system performance. This has been a siren song for many, many years. Those of you that have been in the field. And this has been a tough nut to crack, mainly because EPA really doesn't have the authority under RICRA to mandate recycling. All we can do is set some broad standards, but then it's really up to the states on how they follow the standard. So the recycling measurement guide that I mentioned earlier, we are, that's going to be a refresh of the recycling measurement guide that EPA put out about 30 years ago. We're not changing a lot of things. We're going to put it out for comment, but we hope that at least getting, giving some guidelines out there without sort of the regulatory and statutory authority will give our states and our counties some uniform ways to report on recycling. And that can be really as simple as, hey, the recycling numerator includes the following materials, and it does not include the following materials. And, you know, let's just even something that simple would be very, very helpful to calculate a national recycling rate, which we have not been able to do from the bottom up, from the states, because we've had this inconsistency. Next slide. So this slide is something that kind of we have put to kind of overlay what I just talked about earlier. The objectives, again, of the national recycling strategy to address the problems I built on are again, improve the markets for recycling committee commodities, increase collection, reduce contamination, enhanced policies, and standardized measurement. Now that is a huge ask and it is not just the EPA that's going to do that is a ask to the entire recycling industry. We are all in this together. And this is something that it's going to be a combination of the government of the nonprofit sector of the end markets of everyone to to help achieve these goals. Now, on the, I think it's my left hand side, is really the bipartisan infrastructure law that I just described. We overlaid this to just so you can understand how these all fit in. Really, the recycling strategy is kind of our umbrella and the subsequent strategies will be our umbrella in how we implement the bipartisan infrastructure law program. In effect, they give the vision behind the structure and Congress basically said, EPA, we want you to do this. We want you to create the vision and then we want you to implement it. And it turned out that we were already going to do the national recycling strategy anyway. So just the timing was really, really coincidental because the day we put out the strategy was the same day the bipartisan infrastructure law came out. So as I mentioned that now in the hopper are also what I call the more difficult materials, the non-murph materials, the ones that aren't necessarily going to have the easiest and cleanest economic markets. So, you know, food waste and organics, critical minerals and electronics, built environment and textiles. These are all issues that are a little bit harder to probably understand mainly because they don't have the murph-based infrastructure that the commonly recycled commodities do. So we are really going to have to put our heads around how to put these strategies forward. Again, the food and the plastics have already come out in draft. The other three are still in the works for subsequent years. The textile is one that we may personally take in the next year. The textile has some very interesting issues. Again, non-murph, they don't go through the murph system. So it's going to be a little bit more difficult to understand from an economics point of view. Next slide. And now before I hand it to Lawrence, I just, this is just sort of a schematic for how our SWIFR and our Rio programs are structured. Again, Congress gave us a fair amount of leeway to design these programs and we designed it with all our constituents in mind. So the grants for the communities really goes to the local governments or as in congressional parlance, it was called political subdivisions. So it could be anything from villages to councils to barrios all over the US and Puerto Rico. The grants for states and territories goes to 56 states and territories. The nuance here again for the states, the grants are mostly for planning and for data and for policy and for the territories because the territories are in a different state. The territories grants are for infrastructure, similar to the community's grants. And then the final set of grants are for tribes at Interest Tribals Consortia. Those two are mostly going to be for planning, but also for infrastructure. So except for the states, the 50 states, which are really focusing on planning and data collection, all the rest of the grants are going to be for infrastructure. So we really did try to keep with Congress's vision for getting as much of this money out to stimulate the infrastructure and recycling. And then the Rio grant, as I talked about, separate funding stream, not under SAVRCs, focuses on consumer behavior. So two different funding streams, two different grant programs. And out of these, I want to say the grants to the states and territories have been awarded. They are in implementation mode. The grants for communities, the tribes and for the Rio have been selected and they are in the process of being awarded. I think for communities, every day I get a new number. I think three have been awarded. So we are really enthusiastic about trying to get them awarded and over to our constituents as soon as possible. And with that, I think Lawrence, then you are going next to talk about some of... Lawrence is going to drill down into the mechanics of these programs and then go into some of the questions that we are going to ask. So thank you. Yeah, thank you. So I will pick up for a super left off. I think we have been talking a lot about the grants and these national policies and programs. But I think this really helps inform the study that we are looking to do with the national academies because recycling activities happen at the local level. It is the municipalities, it is the tribes and sometimes the states that implement these programs. It is not really from the national level. We provide guidance but it is really the municipal programs that are implementing these activities. So it is good to look at these entities requested funding from us and these are the sorts of things that they want to use the money for. These are kind of like their top line, high priority activities as they relate to recycling that they want to spend this money on. So for this first one, the infrastructure grants for communities are the political subdivisions. Some of the activities that these are eligible that are applicable are like purchasing a new fleet of recycling vehicles for curbside pickup, construction of drop off stations, construction of composting facilities and also updating their management plans or their waste characterization studies. And so 76% of the funding for the communities will also benefit disadvantaged communities and the LH20s really any sort of like local government, city, a county, a township, a village, they really just had to provide some sort of proper legal documentation that they're considered a political subdivision of their state. And so these are really the largest EPA investment in recycling infrastructure over the last 30 years. And there are, you know, some methods to improve local waste management systems. We're trying to meet Congress's goal to create a stronger and more resilient recycling system. But there are other objectives that go beyond recycling and waste management. So things like reducing greenhouse gas emissions, keeping those materials out of the landfill, creating jobs and strengthening supply chains. And this is just a graphic showing like the distribution of the projects that are happening on the local level. So you can see a lot of composting and a lot of turf equipment and drop off transfer stations. So really the kind of poor MSW materials along with composting and some reuse. And then things not as popular anaerobic digestion and construction demolition. And just to show where this is kind of being distributed across the country, there's at least one grant per region. This is also available on the website. If you go to ebay.gov, you can see a full list of all of these grantees. So for the states and territories, as Swerve mentioned, this is for every state, the District of Columbia and five territories. They all opted into this program. This is a non-competitive program meaning that they didn't need to compete to receive the funding. All they needed to do was express formal interest and they would receive funds. And every single one who was eligible did opt in. And I think that this fact that everyone opted in really demonstrates that there's a real need for recycling funds beyond just the physical infrastructure and equipment. A lot of states and local governments really struggle with the planning aspect and having enough data to really understand whether their recycling programs are being effective. So these things like planning to advance their post-consumer materials management, collecting data, and supporting the state implementation of those plans are really important on the state level. Every state, D.C., and the territories will receive between $370,000 and $760,000 on their own to help and reach these goals. And then for the tribes and intertribal consortia, this is almost like a mix, almost like a combination. The tribes intertribal consortia can use the money to develop or update plans, implement their data collection efforts, or they can use it for infrastructure and equipment to expand their materials management infrastructure, demonstrate an increase in the recycling rate of the quality of materials collected. This one, I think Sorpa mentioned, but 59 total awards, about $40 million total for this grant program, with again at least one per EPA region. And 100% of the funding will benefit disadvantaged communities. And I think one kind of unique feature of this funding opportunity is that it allows for the purchase of much-needed equipment and provides sufficient funding to meet this goal, which is not really found in many EPA or other federal agency grants for tribes in particular. And this is the distribution. It kind of correlates with where a lot of the tribes are located in the United States, but again at least one per region. And then the last one is the Recycling Education Outreach Grants. This is kind of the other side of recycling, not just the infrastructure and equipment and planning, but making sure that the people who are going to recycle and who we want to recycle understand how the system works and what can and cannot be recycled in this current recycling system. And so the projects must, as you can see, inform the public about recycling programs, provide information about materials, and help increase collection rates and decrease contamination. This one, pretty much any sort of entity is eligible. States, local governments, tribes, non-profit organizations. And then we have just a couple of the initiatives here like Justice 40. At least 40% of the funding will go to projects benefiting disadvantaged communities. And at least 20% will go to projects that serve low income rural or Native American communities. And this is the distribution of the Rio Grants that are being awarded. Again, you can find this online. So just to summarize, I won't read through all this, but I just want to note that this was a Montague mental team effort from EPA to really undertake all these activities over the past year. You know, these are our current initiatives and activities that EPA is undergoing right now. And it has required a huge mobilization of staff across the Office of Resource Conservation Recovery, other offices who have donated their time to help us, staff from all the regions, 100 volunteers and more to help review all of these applications. There were over 750 reviews and a lot of applications that came in. And so it's really exciting for us. And I do think that it kind of plays a role into what we're about to talk about, which is this study in particular. And so I'd like to go into a little bit of background information on this study, considering what we've been talking about so far, and then go into like the actual requests and questions that we would like to have answered for this study with NAS. So let's see. Going into the study itself, I'm sure many of you have already seen the legislative scope. This is what Congress asked us to do. It's what kind of started this contract or this collaboration with NAS. And so the background information that I really want to share here is that there's some context that we need for this study. Generally, we know that there are some benefits to recycling. These are pretty fairly well documented in research and literature. It creates jobs, reduces GHT emissions, but there is really a lack of recycling programs across the country. Not every city has a municipal recycling program. And this could be due to a variety of reasons. There might be just no funding or capital. There's no political will to implement a recycling program. There may be insufficient resources to ascertain the cost-benefit trade-off for your particular community. And then there are some factors like just the opportunity cost of recycling is not worth the opportunity cost of land-filling materials. And there's no clear economic incentives for individuals to recycle. And so EPA and Congress have really made efforts over the last several years as we've been talking about. But despite that, there is still a lack of understanding or perhaps a general misunderstanding of the real costs and benefits of recycling. And as you can see here, I think a lot of people the laypeople or a layperson sees recycling as just a pro-environmental do-good activity. I just want to recycle because I know it's good for the environment. But really, it is a highly localized business activity. Recycled materials are bought and sold as commodities in a market for remanufacturing products. And almost everyone is a player in this market. People like myself, just as an individual, I recycle. And I'm providing recycled materials to the market. Businesses who are trying to remanufacture goods are purchasing those materials on a market. And so there have been several national level efforts to better understand these impacts. But we really need better information on what happens at the local level. This is really where everything is actually happening. And so we do want a better understanding of the costs and benefits of these local recycling programs. And so this leads me to kind of our top line, headline, like questions and intended outputs of this study. And the big one is, what are the true costs of recycling? Of course, there are programmatic costs to implementing a recycling program. You've got to purchase collection trucks. You have to operate MRFs. You have to have drop-off in community centers, staffing. But there are also economic costs that, one, don't seem to get maybe as much research, or two, they might just be harder for entities to really measure and fully understand, despite its massive role in administering these programs. And so economic costs, what we're thinking of are things like the opportunity costs of recycling versus land filling, maybe tax revenues on energy captured through landfill gas programs, landfill tipping fees, those playing to those opportunity costs, the supply, demand, and price dynamics of recycled commodities, externalities, such as GHG emissions that are generated from recycling or a household's willingness to pay for recycling services. And I kind of have a quick one out later. But for me, as an individual, there's really no economic incentive for me to recycle the costs to throw away like empty soda can in the trash can is not any different than putting it in the recycling bin. So are there any sort of economic incentives to motivate me as a consumer to recycle? And how do these costs and policies differ across city, county, state, and tribal governments? Of course, the needs will be different in urban, rural, and tribal areas. Some policies that make sense, economic sense for like a dense city just won't be economically sound for a rural community or a tribal community. And the same thing goes for material types. So in some instances, recycling might just not be the best solution at all. And that is something that is okay, but we need to understand why that's the case. So things, in a sort of mention earlier, like textiles and plastics, four through seven, maybe recycling in the way that we see it with a MRF is just not the best way to do that. And maybe city shouldn't invest resources and time and money into trying to kind of fit that in when that might just not be the best solution. And so we're really trying to look at the economic components of recycling. Is recycling itself inherently an economic activity? And how do things like incentives play a role? Taxes and other sources of funding can help pay for recycling programs. But at the end of the day, we do want to know, is recycling inherently an economic activity? We think it is. But how else can we talk about that? And so I know we're kind of getting close on time here. So if we do have just some questions, we can talk about, talk about this in the discussion, but I can end that there. Yeah. So Lawrence, thank you so much. I think we, Andrew, I can hand it over to you because I know the committee wants to have the discussion, but maybe with the headline questions, we can start the discussion portion. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you very much. It's Debbie Reinhart, one of the co-chairs of the committee. Yes, our committee has lots of questions and some of them are very interesting. Some of them have been answered, I think, from this presentation. So thank you so very much for that. So I guess what we'll do is allow committee members to raise hands and we will, I'll call on you. I did, you know, just some, your last comments. So it isn't my understanding, I mean, that if a material cannot go through a MRF, that we're really MRF-centered centered here, that if it can't go to a MRF, you don't really want to have us spending time on it. Is that the takeaway? Well, so again, we, like our branch, we focus on municipal solid waste and MSW generally goes through the MRF. Not all of it. Things like text files are part of MSW. I wouldn't say that it's not worth doing. It's just a different pathway than what we might traditionally envision recycling is. So for, we call these like the low hanging fruit, like the metals and the glass, you know, those things we know they can be recycled. We know that like the technology exists for those and that they work through MRFs. And so for others, like those plastics 4 through 7 and textiles, we just don't know if MRFs are the best pathway for them. And if they're not, that's okay. We shouldn't spend resources and money and time on trying to build like a textile MRF if that's just not the best pathway or for processing plastics 4 through 7, that might just not be the best. And we'd like to look at different options for those. Yeah. And let me add, I think this is a really, really important point that we would like you to look at because it's not so much the MRF. It's the end market because if you're going to look at recycling as an economic activity. So, you know, we're going to take off our recycling hats and put on our economic hats. What is the end product and what is the value? Is there a value to that end product in the marketplace? One of the challenges we've had with recycling is because of the China, you know, the international export plans, I should say, we didn't really have a good sense until 3 or 4 years ago what the price of that end product was because we were exporting it. Now that we are not doing that, what value does that end product have in the marketplace? So that's the way I would phrase the question rather than what goes through the MRF or not. For example, critical minerals, that's another area that I highlighted. We have critical minerals that have a lot of economic value. There's gold and silver. They don't necessarily go through the MRF. But if they are recycled and processed properly, there is economic value to recycling them. But how do we do that? So that's the way to look at it. Does it have an economic value at the end? Great. Thank you. Dime, I think you were next. Thank you. Thanks for that wonderful presentation. I learned a bunch of things that I didn't know about how involved BPA is in recycling. Your presentation focused on federal grants in particular. And so we listed all the grants and all the money going to state and local for governments for recycling and education and outreach. And that's all wonderful. But there are other federal and state policies that could facilitate local recycling. And in fact, it seems to me that it's possible that different ways for the federal government to spend money might involve creating markets for these things. The other point about your presentation is that you focused on things that there's a market for. Well, we might be able to reduce landfill costs and recycle more materials if there were policies that could create markets for things that don't now have a market. And so I guess the question is basically is that are you interested for us to discuss some of those options with pros and cons? Because, you know, I think for economists, it's not all about market prices and quantities. The markets currently for recycling are insufficient. And they don't take into account social costs or externalities, so to speak. So we're worried about, you know, the social cost of landfilling and of recycling and of the distribution of those costs and environmental justice in particular. So, you know, I know all these things are listed in the in the list of tasks, but we want to look outside the market. And so I don't think we want to have our hands tied by looking at things that that can be bought and sold. You know, even the economists here know that there's value social value in these in these other things. Lawrence, do you want to answer that with the social cost of waste that we've been looking at? Well, I'll just say that, yeah, I recognize that we spent a lot of time on the grants and there are definitely other kind of federal initiatives that can be taken and state level initiatives that can be taken. I didn't really have a lot of time to go into things like a container deposit legislation, like bottle bills, those are some guidelines that on the state level help impact markets on the local level, like states have their own bottle bill legislation, and that affects whether people are maybe more incentivized or motivated to recycle their bottles and cans than without one. And so we definitely do recognize that there are other kind of guidelines and initiatives that could be taken to impact the local level. And I would say that we definitely are interested in looking at what some of those those other ones could be. Let me just add to Don to your question. I think that's a you do raise an important point about because we are doing a separate, you know, sort of thinking on social costing and externalities and the materials that, you know, cannot be recycled. What are some of the, you know, not just cost of landfilling, but noise and odor and, you know, greenhouse gas. To me, again, I don't want to limit the study. So please don't get me wrong. I think it's almost like those two things get confused a lot. And this is a charge to you. Maybe there's a way to explain it that these are the things that are can be bought and sold and it's an economic activity. And these are the things that can't brought and sold. There's still value to it from a social cost point of view, but they are not necessarily things that can be bought and sold. You know, they have to be created markets, there have to be additional incentives, they have to be more policies. And but they have inherent value from the social cost point because they are avoiding landfilling. So maybe maybe look at it in those two different lengths, because my concern is these two get conflated a lot. And then we get back to the, oh, recycling is inherently a do-gooder activity. That's kind of what I'm trying to avoid. But it's hard to explain externalities to non-economists sometimes. And I call myself as a non-economist. So a next question. Patsyma, did you get your question answered? Yes, mostly. Okay. Do you want to elaborate? Yeah, I think I'm just, I mean, this was excellent. Like, thank you for the description. I just I'm just worried about how we're seeing recycling as a part of like a value chain, or could it perhaps ever be considered like a community-driven activity? Because I'm being very mindful about who has access to recycling programs and how value chains are built. And this ultimately will impact communities that don't have access to infrastructure, right? Like communities that are far off. And then it becomes an environmental justice. Like if we're going to start off there, then we're excluding the justice aspect right away, right? Like we're couching it out from our scope right away. And so I'm just trying to be mindful of is it can we perhaps think about community-driven value? Which obviously people assign different values to different things. So I'm just trying to think about like, how do we think about it not just as an economic activity? I hear you with is recycling just a do-gooder activity, but I'm trying to think about how to frame it so that we're not excluding the justice aspect right from how we frame it. Yeah, I think I would have to think about that more. But I'm trying to picture the framing of the report as like the cost of recycling. So there are those economic costs, but there's also the programmatic costs. So like the actual tangible infrastructure and administration costs, the hopefully things like the grants do kind of help support recognizing that yes, not every city and program has a recycling program right now. And that's due to a variety of reasons that we talked about. And so having an understanding that not everyone has access to recycling, this is also part of some of the other reports that we're working on like the infrastructure assessment to help understand like what infrastructure is needed to provide access to more communities that don't have them. That is something that we definitely need to consider. But yeah, I think I just need to think about that more because the environmental justice aspect of this is really difficult because that access is just not available for everyone. So yeah. Yeah, and we didn't talk about it as much. We may have just mentioned it. There's a lot of work and thinking on environmental justice. I mean, the entire grant program that we have is subject to justice 40. So it means 40% of the grant. So I understand that that's a concern, but I will say there's a lot of work that is going into that area. So my sort of suggestion would be to keep the study more focused on the economics part of it just because you don't want to have too many things going on with the study. I mean, admittedly, that's a very important area, but it has been a lot of work that's already going on. And there's other studies that we're doing on. In fact, like I mentioned, we're doing a social cost of waste that we're putting 40% of our grant money into social justice issues. So I see them as complementary, but different things, if that's helpful. Great. Thank you. Mitch, you've been very patient. Yes. You're muted. Okay. Have I ever not been muted? That's the question. So my question has to do with the grants program. It seems that there is a high and an appropriate emphasis on disadvantaged communities, places where the need is great, where significant improvement can occur. Might there be also a little niche for high performing or highly improving programs that can serve as exemplary role models for other ones? Maybe their grants might also include support for technology transfer, you know, collaboration with other programs where the need is high. And yeah, that's my suggestion, whether or not you could might sort of have a vanguard of high performance that could disseminate out to other systems. Yeah, our community grants, the ones, they should be on our website. The ones that have been selected, a lot of them represent kind of the gamut of cities from all the way from, you know, Austin to Greenfield. I mean, they really represent sort of the range of cities across and communities across the world, across the US, sorry. So I think that we will see that once these grants are implemented, we will see a lot of great case studies. Jeremy, I'm afraid we're kind of out of time. Andrew, there were a lot of questions remaining that we discussed before. So do you think it'd be possible to summarize these and maybe just get some written responses? Maybe that's something that might happen afterwards. But we can talk about that later. Yes, certainly. Yeah, this is not the last and all the all for the conversation. So can certainly do that as well. Well, I just want to wrap it up by saying thank you so very much for the very thoughtful presentation and task description that you've provided to us to kick us off. And we're all very excited to be part of this study committee and looking forward to working together and hopefully meeting your needs. But this was so very, very helpful. Okay. Is there anything else? I mean, I know some people have asked for the slide deck, which we're happy to give you. Are there other materials that we can give you? A lot of them are on our website that would help the committee. You can let us know. Yeah, certainly, we'll certainly let you know as it comes up. I'm sure there will be things that you've already got that we could benefit from. Okay. Okay, Andrew. Yep. And we can help facilitate that. So we're with Laurence as you flag things for us. We can certainly, for any of your reports or notices of grants, anything else like that we can kind of facilitate and make sure that is available as part of kind of all of the committee's materials. So if we could start off with a list of recommended reports and papers, that would probably help accelerate our efforts. And then once we identify those, then maybe you might, Andrew, help us get them. Okay. Great. Well, thank you, Lauren, since Rupa for joining in the discussion. And we can kind of wrap up our open session here. Again, if there's any questions, kind of for those others tuning in, feel free to reference the project webpage. And my email was on the holding slide earlier and is also available on the project webpage for any further questions and comments. So thanks all. We will thank you, everyone. We were thrilled to have work with all of you. Thank you. Thank you both. Great. Thanks. We will quick pause. Maggie, welcome to the committee. We'll give our committee members a quick bio break if that works just a couple of minutes. Could we convene, let's say, 408? Can we stretch it to an eight minute bio break? I know there was a need to kind of get up and bio break, get a snack or lunch. And yeah, we'll see you in a couple of minutes. So let's say 410. And Maggie, we can connect now to make sure everything's, see you all in a few minutes.