 Good afternoon. Good afternoon to all of you here today and to those of you watching online. My name is Ellen Vaughn and I'm delighted to welcome you to this briefing on behalf of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. This briefing on recycling is appropriate today, Earth Day 2014. And EESI would like to also extend our thanks to Senator Carper's office for helping us put together this event. Reduce, reuse, recycle has a fairly common mantra these days, especially among young people, I think who were raised with the phrase. There has been remarkable progress on public education and there are many successful recycling programs around the country and that's what we're going to focus on today primarily. We know that recycling reduces the need to extract new resources from the earth and it reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Still the waste problem in this country is by no means solved. Studies found that in 2012 more than 50% of waste in the United States ended up in landfills. This presents a variety of problems and costs which speakers will talk about today. The good news is that a growing number of communities have implemented recycling programs that make it a lot easier for all of us to do our part. Resource conservation also provides the additional benefits of cost savings and revenues for communities and U.S. jobs. In 2001 the recycling industry accounted for more than a million jobs. Our briefing speakers will share data and news on four types of recycling, curbside, compost, and organics, building deconstruction and reuse, and electronic or e-waste. But first it's my pleasure to introduce you to Dave Smith from Senator Carper's office. Dave is Senator Carper's point person for recycling issues. Thanks Ellen, I'll make this brief. Thanks everyone for coming out and big thanks to EESI for putting this together and to our speakers. Senator Carper is the co-chairman of the Senate Recycling Caucus for anyone who doesn't know. It's a huge passion for him and Earth Day is arguably one of his favorite days of the entire year. I'm sure he's doing all kinds of recycling in Delaware today. So once again my name is Dave Smith so anyone please feel free to reach out. If you're in a Senate office or an organization and you have any policy issues or recycling matters that you'd like more attention, please feel free to reach out. Have a bunch of cards on me and please come say hello after. Thanks. Great, thanks Dave. So I have the pleasure of introducing our panel of experts. And each will present for a few minutes before we invite your questions at the end of the session. We're scheduled to end at 2.30 so we can try to start Q&A I hope at around 1.20, I mean excuse me 2.20. And we have this room for a little while after that so if you have additional questions feel free to stick around and we can talk. So I am delighted to introduce our first speaker, Chas Miller. Chas is Director of Public Policy and Advocacy for the National Waste and Recycling Association. He was President of Maryland Recycling Network and also Chairman of the National Recycling Coalition Board of Directors. He's testified at numerous congressional and state hearings on solid waste and recycling issues. He's been a keynoter and speaker at more than 100 solid waste and recycling conferences held in the U.S. and Canada. Also a speaker and facilitator at the U.N. Conference on Waste Management in Tokyo 2011. And previous work experience includes Director of Recycling at the Glass Packaging Institute and the U.S. CBA Office of Solid Waste. Chas Miller. Thank you all and I realize it's kind of an odd experience being in this room facing this way instead of facing that way. So I feel slightly disassociated doing this. And thank you to Dave and Ellen for putting this on. It's kind of cool to come to here and talk about recycling on Earth Day. I want to give you a brief view, a look at recycling in America with an emphasis on the trash that you and I create and can recycle instead of throwing away. In particular what we put at the curbside for collection. It's taken to what we call a MRF, a materials recovery facility where it's put on a floor, then goes through a fairly sophisticated array of mechanical equipment and emerges as industrial materials, veiled products that are bought by in-markets to turn into new products. I'm not going to go into the technology. We simply want to give you a snapshot of the state of recycling in America starting with all those curbsides. And all the data I'll use in this presentation comes from EPA. And in addition to curbside collection, we do have other ways of collecting recyclables. You have drop-off centers. You have deposit programs. We have commercial building recycling. What most of us relate to and what most of us participate in is your standard curbside collection program. Almost 10,000 communities in America have curbside collection program collecting usually paper cans and bottles and a lot of different varieties from their curbsides. 70% of single-family housing in this country has access to curbside. It's 15,000 plus recycling trucks that collect this material. 563 what we call residential-style MRFs, these material recovery facilities, the process them. And right there you see one of the most immediate job creation aspects of recycling. You've got about 15,000 trucks plus a helper on each truck for the driver. You probably got around 50,000 to 60,000 people working at the MRFs across the country. And then you have all the jobs that those manufacturers who use those as raw material. So there's tremendous job creation there. And so that raises the question, how much are recycling? The top line is total tonnage. The bottom line is the percentage through 2012. Out of 250 million tons of garbage, we recycle 87 million tons. That's about 35% of what we generate in this country. And you know it on that slide, a fairly substantial jump starting in 1990. Some of you all may remember the garbage barge, the floating Dutchman of trash going around the Caribbean in 1987, looking for a home and finally ending up back in New York City. It generated a tremendous amount of press coverage and media interest and launched 1,000 recycling bills. Launched the surge we now have towards residential recycling in this country. You might also notice the line sort of is slowing down in a way. Not as great an increase after 2000. On the other hand, tonnage did increase by 25% since 2000. Which I have to remember, not every line is going to go straight up. Sooner or later you're going to level off. And one of the things I'll be talking about in this presentation is why it's leveled off and what that means. Let's start with the raw materials. This is EPA data 2012. You see that paper is 27% of the waste stream before recycling. In other words, this is what you have to pick and choose from when you're getting ready to recycle. 25% is paper, 28% is food and yard waste. This is the first time ever paper has not been the largest component of the waste stream. And there's a lot of implications in that for recycling. And the waste stream itself has been over predicted historically. This is the generation rates for garbage in this country from 1960. Top is total, the bottom is per capita. What you and I make on a daily level basis has actually been relatively flat since 1990. And it's gone down since 2000. The total one, the top one, which is total garbage, logically should increase simply by the percentage of population every year. But that disconnected years ago. We have simply stopped making garbage the way we used to do. And it has to do with some very fundamental changes in the materials and the products that we use in our daily lives and how they are playing out. And that's going to be talking about in particular because we have a phrase for that in my business. Because if you see the rate of increase between 1980 and 1990, which is fairly steep, then the increase since then, if we had made garbage since 1990 at the same rate as we did in the 1980s, we'd have 80 more million tons of trash to have to deal with. That's a pretty staggering drop in generation and production. And why did it happen? It happened due to something we call the evolving ton. Less paper, more plastic, changes in cans and bottles. And who knows what in the future? Less paper. The average production in this country is down by almost 18 million tons from 2000. Why? Because we increasingly transmit knowledge by bits and bytes instead of by paper. Newspapers, books, magazines, printed paper, down dramatically. And yet paper is the lifeblood of a recycling program. Because of this drop in production, it has a major impact on the revenues of those processing facilities. Now they're dealing with the lighter waste stream, higher processing costs, but things evolve. Nobody ever promised you things would be the same forever. Plastic is up 25%. Plastic displaces heavier products. Lightweighting has been ongoing since the beginning of manufacturing. It's ramped up tremendously in the last couple of decades. And even within plastic, you're seeing lighter weight, flexible plastic packages displace heavier, rigid plastic bottles. Lighter weight, more efficient. A lot of advantages to them, but also raises some recycling industry. In cans and bottles, the number of plastic beverage containers doubled since 2000, displacing heavier containers. It's not necessarily that's good or bad. It's just a reality that we have to deal with in recycling. And it's had an impact on the overall recycling rate. And look at future products. The picture on the top after that, you have a cell phone, you have a video camera, you have a laptop, you have a pager, a walkie-talkie, a picture camera, a walkman, a watch, and a pager, all replaced by one of these little doobies. And I can put this in my pocket. So think of the impact of that on the materials we use in our daily lives. Tremendous impact. And it's ongoing and it's inevitable. So what this means if you're in this business, and for instance, Nelson on the organic side, Walter Alcorn is going to be talking about electronics products. We're going to be talking really about some of the changes we're seeing occurring in the future. We call this the evolving time because things change. The reality in this business is you've got to be successful. You've got to anticipate change and you have to plan for it. But that is so much easier to say than to actually do. But that's the reality of recycling in America. So we know we have these challenges. We know we do very well in recycling from single-family housing. Where can we do better? What's the future hold? Well, the future of recycling is those things in that chart. Commercial, multifamily, dirty mercs, and so forth. We know we don't do well in rural America and that's almost 20% of the population. We know we do terribly in multifamily housing. That's about 11% of the population. We know we do very differently in different types of commercial buildings. You do very, very well in some commercial buildings, very badly in others, for a whole host of factors. But what we're going to see in the future will be more mandatory recycling laws going beyond just your basic single-family mandatory recycling laws into commercial and into multifamily. The state of Maryland, for instance, joined California in the multifamily area last year. More what we call dirty mercs, pulling recyclables out of garbage in what's more formally known as a mixed-waste processing facility. The concepts have been around for a long time. Haven't seen a great deal of success though in actually getting those materials out yet. I think the future is organics. Food, yard waste, and paper that cannot be easily recycled. A lot more interest in that. C&D recycling, and Brad Guy is going to talk about an aspect of that. Clearly we need to do a much better job of educating people about recycling right because recycling is simply behavior change among all of us. For better or worse, it's simply behavior change. And we call this recycle right. Put the right materials in the right bin. Sounds kind of easy, but it's not always easy being green. And you put this in a little historical context. We actually began collecting garbage in this country in the 1870s. And you and I take putting the trash out of the curb as, well, our parents made us do this, and their parents probably made them to do this. It's been happening since the beginning of time. It didn't. People had to be trained in the 1870s to, instead of throwing their garbage out the window, they had to be trained to put it into this thing called a garbage can and put it at the curb where somebody would take it away. And that didn't happen overnight, and recycling is absolutely no different. It is major behavior change. It's getting people to change their habits, change their behavior, and do it everywhere. Not just at home, but in this building, at Union Station, at National Stadium, you name it in a variety of different places. And that's not going to be easy. So that's why we're looking a lot at the need for more and more education. Some of y'all may remember the sessions that KEB did on January. It was January, right? Over in the visitor center on the need to do more education for recycling. So last slide is recycling the ultimate goal. What we're seeing now in the industry is a great deal of interest in what's called sustainable materials management. EPA promotes this very extensively, and it raises the question, is recycling the ultimate goal, or do we want the most sustainable materials management system impossible, which means if you have a product or a package that in its entire life cycle, extraction, manufacturing, disposal, creates less waste but can't be recycled, is that bad or is that good? Now, if you believe in sustainable waste management, the answer is that's okay. Because overall you're creating less waste. You're having a much better environmental footprint. That still has yet to be thought through and totally resolved. I happen to think it's better for the environment, but I also realize we can do a lot more to increase our recycling opportunities. And the great thing about this panel is the next three speakers are going to tell you exactly what those other steps are. So I'm going to turn it over to Nelson. Thank you. Jazz, thank you so much. That was a great overview of the issues. And I will introduce our next speaker, Nelson Waddell. Am I pronouncing that correctly? And Nelson is co-founder of Peninsula Compost Group, and he provides marketing and technical support to Wilmington Organics Recycling Center, the largest state-of-the-art food waste composting facility on the East Coast. Nelson has more than 30 years' experience in the composting industry, and he's a founding member of the U.S. Composting Council. He began his career working in the family's construction company in 1970, specializing in the construction of major water and wastewater facilities and biosolids composting projects. He began collaboration with a famous Swedish fermentation specialist and compost pioneer and helped form Bedminster Bioconversion Corporation, which developed, marketed and licensed its rotary digester composting system in the U.S. and other countries. So I'm very happy to introduce Nelson Waddell. Thank you. As Chas mentioned, the 250 million tons per year of waste that's generated, the largest area that's still, if you will, untouched ground is organic material, represents 60 to 70 million tons a year of organic material. And what's ironic about that is that Mother Nature has been recycling organics since the earth began naturally through decomposition. It's how our soils have built up over millions of years, and particularly in this country, are rep fertile. And as a recycling technique, mankind discovered 5,000 years ago in ancient China that composting made the ground more fertile, made plants grow bigger. In Moorish, Spain, during the 14th century, there was a formula for composting where they knew that they needed to have the right carbon to nitrogen, meaning vegetative waste and nitrogen waste. And it made Moorish, Spain a very fertile area. And as far as in this country, now organic materials, organics recycling is being recognized starting on the West Coast. But now, here on the East Coast, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York City, all have legislation or ordinances that are mandating the separation of organic material and its recovery, either through anaerobic digestion where we can extract some energy from those organic materials or into straight aerobic composting. Why is composting important? Well, composting is important because it is Mother Nature's recycling. It's part of the life cycle. Compost is half-carbon. We're half-carbon. The carbon cycle is important for life to continue and to exist. And since the end of World War I, where the synthesis of nitrogen-based fertilizers was discovered and all the munitions companies that supplied gunpowder, et cetera, for the warring nations in World War I have been promoting chemical fertilizers, which are harsh. They increase diseases and people have forgotten about organic material. But now finally, over these past decade or two, people understand organic material, organic fertilizers, organic is important. The other reason it's important is that when organic materials go into landfills, they decay and they create methane. And methane is 21 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than, say, CO2. Whereas composting, aerobic composting preserves the carbon in the material and reduces greenhouse gas. And finally, of course, our reliance on landfill is much reduced when we take those organic materials out of landfills and it reduces pollution. So we built this facility in Wilmington, Delaware about five years ago. Envisioning that a continued interest in organics recycling would be growing. And this facility is located very conveniently for those that are trucking it. We receive materials from New York City all the way down to Washington. And by being close to roadways, it makes it more convenient for those that are picking it up so they can get in and out of this location conveniently. It's located on about 25 acres. And it includes a receiving building, which is that blue building that you see there. And in the foreground is a biofilter for odors related to that building. And then a large compost field where there's an eight-week process turning raw food waste, wood waste, yard waste into fine-screen compost. Everything that comes in is weight, so we know where it came from. And that's important not only for our accounting system, but it's also important because we're tracking all the waste that's coming in, the food waste, because this facility is the only facility on the east coast that's registered on the Climate Action Reserve and is actually generating carbon offset credits and marketing those in the marketplace so that a close monitoring of food waste is coming in, where it's coming from, and ensuring that from a certification standpoint is important. We receive everything in a standard metal building, receiving building. But it's within this building that we make the mixture that we need for composting. Composting needs the right carbon to nitrogen ratio, carbon coming in the form of soiled paper or cardboard or wood waste, leaves. And even every week we get $40 million worth of shredded currency from the Federal Reserve, which I'm still trying to figure out how to put together. But it's a good carbon source. And of course, food waste is high in nitrogen. It's also high in moisture. So we get the right carbon-nitrogen ratio, the right moisture, and we have porosity. Then we can aerate it, and Mother Nature takes over from there. So supermarkets, you know, the kinds of food waste you get, you get not only food, but you also get wax cardboard, which is essentially unrecyclable in today's recycling market, but is absolutely perfect for composting. And the menu of things that you can take is quite wide, you know, which might be floral or, you know, dairy, protein, meats, fishes, including pallets and, as I said, wax cardboard and those sorts of things. So when you say food waste, it encompasses quite a large menu of materials. Here's a load that comes down from New York City of food waste coming down from Manhattan. It gets dumped on the floor. And then the loader operator, who is like a chef, he knows that he needs a bucket of this and two buckets of that to approximate that 30 to 1 carbon-nitrogen ratio, around 60% moisture, and that mixture that we want. Then he puts it into that big orange machine, which is like a huge food processor. So it homogenizes everything, sizes it, then it goes out to what we do, which we use piles or windrows, as we call them. And in this instance, we cover them with a special fabric that is manufactured by the Gore Company. It's famous for their Gore-Tex fabrics. And what it does is encapsulate that material so that it is truly separated from the environment. So when it rains, the rain doesn't mix with the material we're composting. But interestingly enough, it's also semi-permeable or breathable, like their jackets are. So we blow air up through the piles, it goes through the cover, and the odor is trapped underneath. We have an eight-week process, and basically what we're doing is feeding microbes, the microbes that exist everywhere in nature. And by doing that, we're able to stimulate the bugs. They drive the temperature up, it sanitizes the material, and after eight weeks, we have compost. We need to screen it, because no matter how clean it comes in, it's still plastic and things like that. But then when we screen it, we have compost. That's Cooper, our compost dog. One of the unfortunate things that we found was we attracted seagulls from a nearby landfill. And we were advised to get cannons and tape recordings of seagulls being strangled, or a hawk, whoever. But a good old border collie is what we got, and he's our mascot, and chases the birds away. But it's all about this. It's all about compost, and compost can be used for anything that grows. You could take the Sahara Desert and put all the fertilizer you want to in water, and nothing would happen. But you could take the Sahara Desert, put compost on it, and it'll become a garden. So whether it's agriculture, and we've got large amounts of material that go up to Pennsylvania to farms, or landscaping, horticulture, large nurseries are the material. It's the Philadelphia Art Museum. We even have some more material on the Philadelphia Eagles playing field. But depending on when they lose or win one week, I hesitate whether to tell people that. But it can be used for anything. It's a wonderful material. So the environmental benefits from composting are reduced greenhouse gas for effect, beneficial use of organic material, which is what this earth is all about. A collection of leachate. There's no leachate when you're composting and collecting that and conserving of landfill space. So composting is recycling. It's the original recycling. Thank you. Thank you so much. I think I could use some help on my compost pile in my backyard. It's not doing so well. So I noticed Target Corporation had some potting soil that's made from their food waste scraps. So until I get my compost pile, I might look into that. So that's great. As director of EESI's sustainable building program, I am very much interested in the life cycle value of buildings and looking at cradle to cradle approach and things like modeling the earth, biomimicry and some of those interesting things. So I'm real delighted to introduce our next speaker, Brad Guy, who is assistant professor in the master of science in sustainable design program, which is in the school architecture and planning at the Catholic University here in Washington, D.C. Brad is also associate director of the Center for Building Stewardship at CatholicU. He is focused on sustainable materials through life cycle assessment and also looking at prefabrication and modular design, designed to use reclaimed materials and deconstruction. And he's been working in Detroit recently on some initiatives. Brad organized the Reclaim plus Remake International Symposium at CatholicU and hosted speakers from 23 universities and countries. He chairs the U.S. Green Building Council materials and resources technical advisory group and is also active in the National Institute of Building Sciences and a member of the Sustainable Sites Initiative Materials Committee. Brad is active in AIA as well and the American Institute of Architects and he received the Tides Foundation Environmental Leadership Program Fellowship and has won lots of awards. So I will introduce Brad. I could go on and on, but I think maybe we'll like to hear from you. So, Brad Guy, thank you. Thank you for having me today and thanks to Ellen and David for organizing this event. I was saying how nice it is to come down to the real Washington because I usually go between my home and Catholic and it is such a beautiful environment here, historic building. So that's my focus. What we build we should keep. Honor it. We reuse it and recycle it and retain the cultural, environmental and economic values embedded in our buildings. So I'm going to jump right to it and I'll ask you to forgive me for a lot of numbers. I think they're useful. So we know construction is a large sector of the economy and good times it's close to 10% of the GDP. The manufacturer of materials has great global warming impacts globally, cement being a very large impact. You may not know, but 60% of all materials flow in the U.S. economy goes somehow through the built environment and unfortunately we've gone from a very renewable based society to a non-renewable based society. In 2000 only 5% of this materials flow is from renewable sources. The industry contributes about 40% of total solid waste each year in this country. And what does that look like? That's around 170 million to 200 million tons, which is a big number. So I did a little back of envelope. If you built a structure of big mass about four stories high, about 35 feet, the width of a two-lane highway about 24 feet wide, that amount would be the length of the coastline of the continental United States every year. So I don't know if you could see that from space, but eventually it would get very, very large. So hopefully and fortunately we have some amount of recycling and we have to do more. So what is this material? It's a little bit different than the municipal solid waste stream. You can see the big one concrete masonry brick, the cementitious materials which you wouldn't find in your household waste. And they are the largest portion. They're also very heavily recycled. Metals are a very small portion but very heavily recycled. And wood, of course, we're a very wood-based country. We're developed around wood. About 94% of all homes in the U.S. are built out of wood. So mostly residential construction. We have a tremendous amount of wood waste. We have some drywall and asphalt shingles. We're not the best and we're not the worst. Relative to other, quote, developed or western countries. I'm American so I wish we were better. The other one we all know has some very significant constraints in terms of land and very, very high levels of regulation. So we are better than some countries and the more exact number seen to about 40 to 45% of all waste and we recycle about 30%. So this is not including household waste and not including road and bridge construction which does a very good job of immediately recycling. And it's a very simpler or simpler material stream. It's concrete asphalt paving and steel as a majority. I focus on deconstruction which I'll talk more about in just a minute. This is another one I think is interesting. We don't think about our waste. It's not visible to us quite so much in the construction sector. You can abolish a home in half a day. You could drive down the street one day and two days later the house is gone. You didn't really know what happened. It just disappeared and it went somewhere else. When we build them, of course, take a very long time and we see them, they're present. We almost become part of a community sometimes when you have to deal with them. But in fact, only about 9% of the waste from construction activities comes from new construction. There are 91% comes from renovation and demolition. Over 50% comes from demolition. So we can look around and where the impacts might be. Demolition is clearly a very significant area to focus. There have been some very, I'll call them, progressive or aggressive efforts by some states and cities around the United States. From one extreme to the other, I might say. So landfill bans in Massachusetts. In 2006, through a pretty good ramp-up phase of stakeholder engagement and support, has actually banned five major C&D waste materials from landfill as recyclables. That has grown the recycling industry in that state. And they've reached about an 80% diversion rate. Seattle is in the process of implementing a landfill ban of those five materials plus more. Carpet, drywall, plastic wrap, asphalt shingles. And their goal is 70% diversion by 2020. California recently established its 75% diversion goal by 2020. And here in the District of Columbia, I'm sure you know, the Sustainable DC Initiative has set a very aggressive goal, including reuse by 2032. Residential deconstruction is more likely to be where we would find deconstruction. So mainly wood-based materials. But I can look around this building and see many things which you could knowledge and you most certainly would not want to see go in the landfill. Not just because they're valuable as material, but because of their symbolic value. So we can see salvage and reuse in any walk of life. We all buy reuse books, might have bought a reuse car. We all probably lived in a house that somebody else lived in. It is part of our society. And this is about a more focused effort, a more institutionalized effort to implement this within the recycling paradigm. So in Seattle, now in their residential demolition permit, they require 20% reuse component. And I'll be more clear about what reuse is as opposed to recycling. Chicago now has recently implemented 5% reuse requirement within their overall 70% diversion goal. So this is happening very slowly in a few places, but it is happening. So what is deconstruction? The simplest way to talk about it is building in reverse. So we build buildings in parts. We build them as layers. I like to use the analogy of an onion. If you think about building the foundation, the structure, you wear the exterior envelope, you wear the systems, you wear the interior, you build up this whole kind of onion of materials, which doesn't make it very difficult to undo that onion. So that's one reason why deconstruction is not as prevalent. But in fact, every material that was used in that building is potentially recoverable, as long as it hasn't been contaminated or hazardous material from past lives. And the benefits are many. I'm not going to read that list, but one I'll call out more significantly is the cultural value. D.C. would not be D.C. if we did not reuse these buildings. We all probably cherish heritage objects or hand-me-downs from our families. So that's part of our culture. And I think if anything, we can honor the material culture of this country as well. And right now my best guess is we only used about 0.2% of that C&D stream through reuse. Just a 5% reuse would be a 25 times increase in that amount of material flowing through the economy. And I'm making a little bit of a joke. It's a peeve of mine that people confuse recycling and reuse. So reuse is not recycling. It is actually the continued use of a material in a much less energetic way, let's call it, as close as possible to its original form. And when you reuse, I think it's really important to remember, there's a whole rucksack, what's called an ecological rucksack. All the materials are extracted to make that final product. So think about the many times more iron or different kinds of ore that's extracted to end up with this one pure mineral. And these are some of the rucksack factors of some common materials. You can see aluminum is incredibly high. And more benign material like wood is not quite so high. So reuse is not just saving this, it's saving the entire rucksack that came along with this object. And then lastly, reuse and recycling creates jobs. There's a place for everything, but through different analyses, source separation and deconstruction can create about eight jobs per thousand tons compared to waste disposal at 1.3 jobs per ton, per thousand tons. And according to the US EPA, if we implemented either a 50% or 75% national rate of C&D recycling, we could in effect remove somewhere between 15 and 25 million cars, the emissions, the greenhouse gas emissions of those cars from the roads per year. I looked it up, there's about 250 million cars in this country, so that's up to almost 10%. So we could offset 10% of our annual driving through achieving these admittedly aggressive goals. And I'll just close with, I think, jazz referenced it. Nature does use things very well. We're not as good as nature. And I always find it helpful to remember that waste is a resource, it just may be misallocated for the moment, but it's available as a resource in our economy and society. So thank you. Thank you, Brad. Our next speaker is Walter Alcorn. Walter is Vice President of Environmental Affairs and Industry Sustainability for the Consumer Electronics Association. So all those gadgets we saw on the screen and that we all have plugged in at home is a subject that he's going to talk about, eWaste. CEA is the US Trade Association representing more than 2,000 consumer electronics companies and owning and producing the continent's largest annual trade show, the International CES. Mr. Alcorn is responsible for legislative initiatives impacting electronic product recycling, design, eco-labeling, and hazardous materials restrictions. He currently coordinates CEA's E-Cycling Leadership Initiative and the Associated Billion Pound Challenge announced in April of 2011. Previously, Walter co-founded the National Center for Electronics Recycling in 2005 and he's authored numerous studies and research products on eWaste issues. Please welcome Walter Alcorn. Thank you very much, Ellen. Appreciate the opportunity to be here and talk with you all about what I like to tell everybody is my favorite subject. And I did want to start by saying, Chas, thank you. I loved your slide with the iPhone and that's probably a better way of making the point that I've tried to make before. So thank you for doing that. CEA, we represent primarily manufacturers and retailers of consumer electronic equipment. So televisions, computers, smartphones, tablets, the range of different devices that are in the consumer electronic sector. And some of this has already been said. I'll try not to be repetitive, but there is significant resource recovery potential in these old devices. And one of the challenges that we have and as Chas's slide underscored, these products do evolve quickly. The technology changes very fast and consumers are purchasing new products, new form factors, new materials in those devices, new technologies that drive those devices. And that does create a challenge from not only a recycling standpoint, but also materials management standpoint. And this is recycling is a big challenge or is a priority for us, but it is also challenging. And I'll be going through some of those challenges. And just a quick commercial. We are very much interested in not just focusing on local collection activities and state policies for recycling, but we see this really as a national issue that at some point as a country we probably need to get a better handle on dealing with this issue at a national level. We do have 25 different state laws that mandate some form of electronics recycling or another on the books right now. And one of the things that we talk a lot about is, at least in the electronics recycling and the electronics sector, how you get recycling going is you make it part of a business. You get businesses to incorporate recycling into their business model and really exciting things can happen. So in 2011 we did announce an industry-wide initiative called the E-Cycling Leadership Initiative. We did this at the Best Buy store up on Wisconsin Avenue. And Best Buy is a wonderful case study that we talk about in terms of a company that has incorporated recycling into their business model. You can go into any Best Buy store in the country and recycle old consumer electronics at no charge. It doesn't matter if you bought it there. Best Buy has figured out a way to make that work for their business. They like your feet in their doors. They want to see you come to their stores. And if you're bringing some electronic equipment there to recycle, well, that's okay because some of the folks that come inside will actually buy something new. That's part of their business model. And that's something that we certainly encourage. In our initiative, we do have more than just Best Buy. We do have major manufacturers that also are participating in this. And in 2011 we said we're going to try to recycle a billion pounds of electronics annually by 2016. We also have guiding principles that were announced back in 2011. It should be responsible recycling. We do want to see this brought up to a national level. Obviously high industry standards are important. And probably most importantly for the people in this room in terms of consumers is it needs to be convenient. There need to be places where people can actually recycle their old electronics. So as I mentioned, quality is important as is quantity. Opportunities to recycle is very important. Awareness is something I do want to focus on. We've been measuring at CEA how aware consumers are and where they can recycle old electronics. It's gone from 58% in 2010 up to 63%. This year we're going to be doing another survey this summer. Hopefully it will continue to increase. We've been working as an industry as many of our companies and other partners to increase the awareness of recycling opportunities through greenergadgets.org, a website we've done a radio and a television PSA and some things in some schools. So consumer awareness is a huge issue for electronics recycling. One of the things we're doing is we're also looking at measuring our progress on how we're doing in terms of quantitative numbers or recycling. And we are up to 620 million pounds. We just announced this yesterday. We released our third annual report of our E-Cycling Leadership Initiative. More than 99% of that is going to third party certified facilities. That's a trend I'll mention here in a second. You can get more information if you're interested at e.org forward slash E-Cycle. So what are some of the trends? Again, the trend to smaller, more mobile devices is clear. Those are less resource intensive. That's generally a good thing. We're also seeing trade in markets come in nowadays. If your smartphone is a year and a half old, you're ready to move on to something else. There are places that will buy them back from you. You can go to pretty much any big box retailer. There are online also services that will do that. This is new. This is a new wrinkle that really facilitates reuse and refurbishment primarily of those devices. But there are also challenges. As our devices become smaller and more mobile, we have new competition with the trashcan. It's much easier to throw away a smaller device than it is a big television. So as we're seeing the evolution technologies and less resource intensivity, the importance of educating consumers and getting people in the habit of recycling old electronics becomes more pronounced. And also because we are changing, our products are changing, having a closed-loop system where materials from old electronics go into new electronics is a big challenge. It's something a number of companies are working on, particularly in plastics area, but metals is kind of a no-brainer. Metals is sort of inherently recycled, or at least much of it is recycled content. But that's something that does create some challenges, but as an industry we are working on closing that loop. Cathode ray tubes, I'll just mention quickly. If everybody remembers the old tube televisions and also monitors that had the big bulky devices heavy, those have leaded glass in them. And that leaded glass is not something that is very... There's not a vibrant recycling market right now for that leaded glass, and that's created some challenges. We are seeing the majority of consumer electronics by weight are these CRT devices. They're the old TVs, they're the old monitors. And so we are looking at new applications, new recycling technologies, encouraging that as an industry. But once those CRT devices cycle out of the recycling stream during the coming years, the overall weight is going to go down of what's coming in for recycling. So another trend is on the collection side, we see a lot of diversity of who's actually collecting this material. Local governments are still the largest collector that we see. And that's really traditional within the United States in most communities it's the local government that either does it or coordinates collection of recyclables in solid ways. But the role is changing, particularly in our industries. Retailers have stepped up. Best Buy I mentioned earlier, you can go into any Best Buy store. As well as in some parts of the country, charities play an extremely important role in collecting electronics, not just for recycling, but also for reuse. Goodwill, for example, in the Pacific Northwest is a very strong collection and recycling program. And then in many other parts of the country, Dell works closely with them for computer equipment recycling. So recyclers, as I mentioned, third-party certification earlier, this is something that's really come online within the last four or five years. There are new standards, third-party recycling standards. There are two different flavors of that, E-Stewards and R2. And it really has made a difference in the industry. It's brought up the level of recycling, electronics recycling overall in terms of the quality, environmental sustainability of that recycling activity. Another trend among the recyclers is, as our companies, as our manufacturers in particular have gotten more involved in the recycling business, that has brought compliance with the various state laws to become almost a new market for these recyclers. But it's a tough market. It's primarily a big market. You're talking about contracts with manufacturers that are looking for lots and lots of weight and generally a cross-state line. So this has been tough for some of the smaller recyclers, some of the things that we're still as, we're really, I guess, a guinea pig in the electronics or in the extended producer responsibility field. We're very much learning as we go along as well. Consumer behavior, I mentioned earlier, that really is key. You need to make sure people are aware before they actually can or will recycle. And then influencing that behavior to have them avoid the trash can is critical now, but I see it becoming more critical as these products become smaller. So in terms of our long-term strategic vision, we're really looking how can we get companies to incorporate recycling into their business models. And then for consumers, we're really looking how can we make recycling as easy as purchase? So appreciate the opportunity. And I guess we'll all be happy to answer any questions anyone might have. So thank you. Thank you very much, Walter. I know that I have a lot of questions, but I want to open it up to all of you. And I do want to, again, thank Senator Carper's office and Dave Smith for being the leader, one of the leaders on this issue and working with us on this briefing. It really is an evolving issue. And just when you think that there's, maybe you know a lot about it, you realize how much you don't know. So like I say, I have a ton of questions, but I would like to invite yours at this time for any of our speakers. Yes. Can you give an example? Oh, microphone. Can you give an example of how you can recycle or how e-waste recycling is done? Like we learned how organic matter is composted. We learned about trash pickup from the curbside, but what's the process for e-waste recycling? There are generally two big flavors of electronics recycling. And most companies borrow from both, but one is dismantling, where you basically take the products apart, you separate plastics, go into one pile, circuit boards might go into another, you get the glass into a third. So dismantling is one flavor. The other is shredding. And there really aren't companies that will throw the entire unit into a shredder, but some companies get pretty close. They'll pull the batteries out and maybe certain devices they won't throw into the shredder. But typically both of those, depending upon what the recycler is looking for in terms of who's going to be buying the material or where they're going to have to, in the case of CRT glass, who they're going to have to pay to take the material away and what conditions those downstream vendors place on what they receive, some of them will either be closer on the dismantling side or closer on the shredding side. Okay, thank you. Another question? For a couple years we were hearing all about the electronic waste going to the third world, and I'm wondering if the third party certification process has kind of stemmed that or is downcycling materials still going to other countries like the cathode ray tubes or the less valuable materials that we're not recycling here? I think it's helped. I think third party certification has helped. And I think another thing that's helped is, frankly, as our industry has gotten more involved in the recycling of the electronics, our companies are often big brand names and they can't afford the bad publicity of sending stuff to those sham recycling operations abroad. It's too risky. I mean, there's already been a 60 minutes episode on this. So if for nothing else, just for PR purposes, as our companies have gotten involved, they've been very careful not to associate themselves with those types of activities. I think another thing that's changed is we have better data now. I think that still goes on. I'm sure it does. But I think we now have a better handle on how much of it is going on. I think there was an MIT study that came out late last year that suggested that it was under 10%, I think it was closer to 7% or 8% of the flows end up in developing countries like that. But it's certainly something that, you know, we're concerned about it. It's not really a high priority for us because we just can't afford to do it. We don't do it. So thank you. And following up on that, are there sort of inspections for some of the recycling operations to make sure that there is proper handling and recycling of the components? Actually not. You know, there's very little regulation of the recycling industry. It's a pretty open market. Third-party certification has definitely made a difference there. You know, nowadays, you really, if you're third-party certified, you have to know where the stuff is going and you generally have to have a relationship. And historically, that wasn't always the case. You know, brokers who might be shipping it anywhere would take responsibility for some of this and some of it would go, you know, who knows where. And that's, there's still brokers in the industry and there are a lot of different layers that I think you'd have to look at to really get a good understanding. But I think there definitely have been improvements and in large part because of third-party certification. Thank you. Anyone want to take that on? When you say most important method, most important method of education or message, I'm not an expert on messaging or the academic research. I do know from work I've done in the past that kids are up to about fourth grade or by far the most sort of receptive but not. It's really middle school fourth to about eighth to ninth grade. You know, we all were a bit rebellious when we were in high school and we knew it all and tended to be a little more, quite frankly, resistant to a lot of good citizenship stuff. So you go really, you concentrate on middle school, middle grades. And I think kids at that age are very open to discussions of resources and discussions of a cleaner environment. And actually let me add one thing to that. We at CEA, we worked last year with a group called Young Minds Inspired and worked on some curriculum targeting fifth graders. So I don't know, maybe we're a little on the young side. But drawing a page from the very successful campaigns to promote recycling in the late 80s and early 90s where kids were coming home and telling their parents, wait, you can't do that. Aren't you going to recycle? So we're really looking forward and saying how do we change the household culture in terms of making the trash can less of a receptacle for electronics anyway. And we're probably going to do more of that. But it's certainly, we've seen it have an impact in some small scales in terms of what we did with Young Minds Inspired. I think many of you, oh, yes, sir. I work for an electronics recycler and we are going through the third-party certification process and we have had four compliance audits and have to keep documentation as to where all of our material flows so it really does have a significant impact. I guess my question is to everybody, my company is starting to pay for the electronic waste as a way to incentivize consumers to bring that into their kind of consciousness. I just came from an event this morning and just people are excited to bring stuff and know that it's going to the right place but also be paid for it. Across those industries, do you think to get to the zero-waste target? Is it a matter of additional financial incentives? Is it a matter of convenience? Is it a matter of awareness? I'd just be curious to hear from all the members of the panel in terms of that. Thank you. I guess I'll start. I think it's really that the risk of sending evasive, it's all of the above. Some people respond very well to financial incentives. Others are indifferent to them but have to know where to take the materials and are looking to do the right thing. It's a mix of things. In our culture, we love silver bullets. We love one simple answer but it's a lot of different things because people are very diverse. What I've found in developing composting plants is that it's all well and good and laudable to have an environmental facility to be recycling organics, to reducing greenhouse gas, to reducing reliance on landfills and everybody wants that. But unless it is economical and it is at least cost-neutral or it is cheaper than other disposal methods, people aren't going to do it which means, let's say, in places like Alabama and Arkansas and Georgia and Texas where the tip fees and landfills are 25 hours a ton, I can't build a composting plant. Period. But in Virginia to Maine, you can. So I would say that the environmental attractiveness is one thing but it has to be matched with economic incentives and competitiveness. So as we know, buildings are very long-lived, very large and involve a lot of people over a very long supply chain. So they have those obstacles. You might build a building or inhabit a building which outlives you and there's an issue of responsibility. So the rating systems have been powerful. Those are maybe a marketing or branding. Energy has been very powerful as a kind of portal for materials, I believe. It takes energy to make material. It's not as obvious and not as significant, say, as your lighting in a commercial building, but that's a way that's brought, dragged or brought recycling and reuse and all of that materials management along, I think. And then as we see is that kind of connection between energy and materials, I think is a very important one. And sure, economics, we've found a lot of good research now about the green jobs, which is any sector could have a portion of the green job economy and creating more types of jobs that are based upon, say, a less resource intensive because we've changed that way. So how can we use our technology and intelligence? And there are opportunities. I mean, it's almost like a Google or Silicon Valley. Let's think about how our mind power and those are exciting things for people. Can I create an app that'll help recycling? So there's, as Chad said, it's all of the above. I think future is looking forward. We think about technology as hopefully a way to through. I'll just add one thing, excellent responses from my fellow panelists. And this gets into the economics just a little bit. I think it's really important that there are strong recycling markets that there's got to be some type of demand for the material. And the innovation on the recycling side is incredible. But there are some materials, and this is one of the things we're struggling with now with CRT glass, where there's just not that much demand. And so whenever demand goes away, it has really bad consequences. And so when there's demand, these things work. You know, they tend to work pretty well. Maybe not to the level that we would all like, but when the demand goes away, when the markets go away, then that's when we really have challenges. Walter, is there a role, do you think, for policy in that circumstance, when the market doesn't quite give the answer? I think there is. I think the obvious one is affirmative procurement. I think in particular, the federal government, and I think has in certain areas, can step up and buy recycled, particularly when there's no economic or functional difference from buying virgin, and just asking the question. I mean, we saw that certainly with the EPIT, its Environmental Purchasing Tool, focused on government purchases at least initially, where the question was just asked, where manufacturers had to say how much recycled plastic was in their product. They didn't even set a target, but that actually created a market for post-consumer recycled plastic. So sometimes, you know, the federal government or other government agencies or institutions can do it directly, but even just raising the subject can move markets many times. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Russell Klein, and I work for the DC Department of Public Works in the Office of Recycling. The DC does have an Office of Recycling, municipal government. I think it's useful to note how often building programs or communities throw their hands up because they've put out the tools to do recycling. They figure that they put the bins in the hall and the posters on the wall, and why aren't people recycling? There are percentages of that community who are going to respond, but I guess my question would be, is there any space left to ask what might make the investment in the community engagement piece? Because after you've put the bins in the hall, posters on the wall, you've set up collection at the parking lot of the loading dock. There still has to be that engagement with your employees, your tenants, or your residents so that they understand how to use these devices that you're offering, but a lot of municipalities or commercial facilities don't go that extra length to engage and to model and to complete a ground game that says, this is how you do it and this is how we're helping you to master these skills. So I don't know if there's... there's almost a question in there. I actually just thought of something and I would welcome anybody's feedback, but thinking of kids again and in a multi-family building or some neighborhood where maybe your office takes that education responsibility, maybe involves the kids once a month we're going to go and we're going to put stuff in the bins. I don't know. I think of, you know, back to the gentleman's question about what does it take and it's all of the above. And Walter mentioned the word habit. I mean, I think we would all agree that things have to become a habit and then you model, kids, you know, they model other behavior and people start to see it, but in my household, you know, it's just putting, you know, just modeling the behavior and making it happen and then, of course, then you want to make sure that inside there's a place where that stuff can go and it used to be a joke, oh yeah, yeah, they always, they just, they throw it all together and it goes in the landfill even though we're sorting it, you know, that's, that was the concern. But anyway, that is just one idea. I don't know that this is an excellent answer, but it's an observation. One of the facilities that I've been involved with, and in fact, my son runs it, is for the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts. And Nantucket is 30 miles at sea. There's nowhere else to go, which means that you've got a captive audience. So, I mean, that's not possible here, but Nantucket has a 92% recycling rate, plus they're mining the landfill, plus we're looking at some other things that take it up to 100%. So I mean, it really is, got the highest recycling rate. And it's amazing out there. On Saturday mornings, people bring their material to the, quote, dump. I mean, it's a cultural phenomenon. And there's fistfights at the taker to leave it, where people drop off clothing or chairs or bicycles or whatever and people are standing there waiting for them. Everything is recycled and it kind of permeates the culture out there. And how do you infuse that into another society where people have other options, because there are no options there. I mean, it's just the way it is out there. And as a microcosm of what could be, it's interesting that it's a cultural mindset that's taken a few generations to get to that point. And I think we're heading there. I mean, last week, I went to the Brandywine Springs Middle School in Wilmington, and it just amazes me. I mean, there were 207th and 8th graders and they are so hip to all this sort of thing. And they are separating their food waste at the cafeteria and that food waste comes to the plant, Wilmington and Compos. But the generations that are now coming up, I mean, 15 years ago, people could even spell Compos, but not be so. Compos, of course. I mean, it's a heightened consciousness that we're seeing now. And I think it really has to be, you know, a complete cultural revolution, which is happening as far as people understanding, resulting in doing it. You know, all the laws you want to in the world, but it's a combination of those things. David Biederman with the National Waste and Recycling Association, I was going to say a bit of what Nelson just said. It really is a cultural thing. It took 30 years to convince people to put their seatbelts on when they drive in this country. And we still only have an 85% seatbelt rate. And we know that texting and talking on a cell phone is dangerous, and still half of Americans still do that. And it's going to take cultural change to change those behaviors and get people to recycle more, which is a lead up to a question, actually, which is what role can the federal government, in particular, EPA play in taking the lead on educating people about how to recycle properly? Well, from my standpoint, what really frosts me is that, you know, there's a lot of laws or legislation encouraging recycle purchase. Electricity from solar or from wind. But I'm out there, you know, standing alone. No one has to buy compost. No one has to, you know, recycle organics so that the facilities that I build are totally unsupported by anybody. No grants, no loans, no nothing. You know, it has to be straight up. Now, about two weeks ago, Governor O'Malley signed a bill that we worked on all winter with the Maryland legislature, which is now requiring the MDE and the Maryland Department of Transportation to lead toward designating compost and composted products as best management practices kind of thing. And it's all about markets. All about markets, all about, you know, education of, you know, benefit of organics, because that's my field. So what role can federal government play? I mean, you know, stimulating knowledge of, you know, how good compost is and even maybe saying, you know, for federal projects, let's use recycle products and organics are recycled. So stimulating markets, and you had mentioned that earlier, I think is a role I could seek. That could be a great one for the federal government to play. Second, what Nelson had to say, also the option perhaps for EPA to work on various educational methods and maybe even do a best management kind of practices toolkit or something that would allow us to have a better handle on the best ways to do these kinds of educations. So I did a survey a few years ago of architects and designers about their use of reclaim material. For those who had not used them, their single biggest obstacle was lack of availability or in their minds. I don't know where to get this. I don't know what the possibilities are. I have no knowledge and it would take me too much trouble to do it myself. So information, obviously, once they overcame that obstacle then it was constructability, logistics, scheduling, all the kind of practical matters. So there you have just the technical side, specifications, building codes, in my case. There is now the international green construction code which is diffusing throughout the country. So we have that. And the government GSA obviously has done a tremendous amount in the green building realm by adopting different standards. So it's already happened and that kind of economic side is really, really important. Tipping fees are too low in this country. It's not really enough to make, this is just my interpretation. The markets are what drive, the poll is what drives this, not necessarily the push away from disposal because the value there is not significant. So how do we create more value? And there are many ways to do that. Thank you. Any other questions? I had one question for you, Brad. And that is helping the construction industry do the reuse, or the deconstruction reuse, because time is money, right? So it might be easier to get the wrecking ball than it would be to disassemble. So there's obviously a learning curve. There's education. And maybe even just having proper bins and different languages for the bins and things like that. Thanks for the plug, Ellen. And a place like Detroit, lack of jobs, disinvestment. If a home, and you know, Detroit is America, it's been there for 100 years. What's the problem with waiting another month to reclaim, because you only get one shot. Once you've demolished, it's essentially an old-growth forest or other historic materials. So what is the difference a week to reclaim that heritage and provide the economics? And people are working on things like a time delay or a special permit that might require something. The federal government's had a huge role in terms of blighted housing removal and disaster response. And FEMA and Army Corps of Engineers, we all know about that. So just a 1% element of reclaiming those materials and those significant impacts and feeding them back into the rebuilding. Thank you. Well, thank you all for being here. This is a great discussion and thank you so much to this wonderful panel for your good information and insights. Appreciate you being here.