 Hi, this is Kim Mote. I'm the Assistant Director of Code Compliance Department for the City of Fort Worth. I'm the City's solo waste manager. And the purpose of my presentation to you today is to give you an update on the development of the City's comprehensive solo waste management plan and where we are in the process of developing this 20-year plan of how we manage our waste into the future. The purpose of the plan is to provide a blueprint of where we need to go. What we need to do is a city to manage our wastes. The previous plan, developed in 1995, focused primarily on landfill space, but also recommended the system we have right now, a pay-as-you-throw system for garbage, the use of carts, and encouraged a lot more diversion from landfill to include recycling and yard waste collections. The current plan needs to address a lot of these following items. Are we doing the right things? Are we being sustainable? Do we have the right assets? Or do we need change for the near future? Waste materials can and should be seen as untapped resources. Where does our material go to the landfill, recycle processing, or does it need to go into further material recovery? Input is needed from residents and businesses because it's critical to developing the plan. We can't, as city staff, we can't do this in isolation. Together we have to find better solutions for material discarded from our homes and places of business than landfill disposal. What this plan is not, this is not a rollout of the final plan. That's gonna come some 18 months from now. Staff is seeking your input. It's not promoting any specific plan at this point. Again, we are seeking your input. While we are discussing aspects of residential collection programs, we are not here to present individual complaints of an address or of a driver. We do welcome your comments on the merits of this collection program, and I will tell you how as we get further into the discussion. Methods do change, thank goodness. While I touched on history earlier, I thought I would review some of the city's most recent passing handling solid waste. This is a cover from a long-range disposal plan in 1966. It's one of several plans I have in my office that go through how the city was managing its waste back then. In the background is the city skyline of 1966. In the Fort Granis, one of the city's landfills, and yes, the smudge you see in the middle of the thing is what you think it is. This is a citation from the plan. Open burning of refuge has practiced at both dump grounds and trenches dug for this purpose, with a residue of such burning covered by a mixture of dirt and ashes. This disposal method can most charitably be called, is primitive and seriously distracts from Fort Worth's images of modern progressive city. And this is on page two of this document. In 1966, Fort Worth was not very different than most towns and cities in this regard. In addition, very little diversion of waste, as we know it today, was being done at that time. We simply picked it up, took it to the disposal area, and disposed of it. The reason I bring this up at this point is to point out that solid waste practices and disposal methods do change and evolve. As in this case, the current methods used in 1966 had to change. A requirement of our solid waste comprehensive plan is that we look at not just residential, which is all the other plans have looked at that, just as residential collections, to more global focused all waste, what are businesses and industrial complexes in the city doing with their waste? We need to understand and capitalize the emerging and sustainable technologies that fit the needs of our city. My business in the solid waste field is rapidly changing and different concepts and different methods of handling waste and disposal waste is being tested and strengthened. We need to develop and implement strategies that foster market driven collection and diversion programs, and to foster collaborative public and private partnerships to seek these better ways of doing the business. We need to develop a capital funding plan for new technologies and future infrastructure. Now, I'm going to talk about what we're currently doing in the city. For residential collections, we do once a week collection of garbage in three sizes of carts. It's called a pay as your throw system. You either have a 32 gallon cart, a 64 gallon cart, or a 96 gallon cart, and pay for your services based upon the size of your cart. Recycling is provided at no extra charge and it's done at the 64 gallon carts or 96 gallon carts. In contrary to what a lot of people believe, it's recycling is not mandatory in the city. Yard waste is also collected weekly and it's done with a variety of collection methods. We do have monthly bulk waste collections and it's set on a set schedule based upon where you are geographically within the city based upon the four quadrants on how we provide the bulk waste collections. Commercial industrial waste is collected in the city through an open market system where individual solar waste service providers contract with business and industrial operations to collect their waste and dispose of their waste according to the terms of the contract. The distribution of collection is divided between what is managed by the city and what is serviced by the private sector. As you can see on this slide, the city manages about 33% of the waste collected within the city. This is primarily residential, almost exclusively residential and about 1,000 small commercial customers that can be serviced the same way a residence can be serviced. This is what the city directly controls and that's our circle of direct control. The circle of influence is the remaining waste that's collected within the city and that's about 67% serviced by the private sector, private waste collection companies and a private contract with these private industries and businesses throughout the city. So once this waste is collected, how is it managed? Material collected as garbage is disposed of in landfills. Residential garbage, we disposed of 200 and almost 235,000 tons last year in the Southeast landfill, which is the city's landfill. Commercial, not sure of that number, but we estimated it to be about twice as much as residential. Material collected as recycling is processed and returned to the marketplaces where all materials. Residential recycling last year was about 37,000 tons diverted from disposal. Commercial recycling, again, we're not exactly sure about that number, but it's estimated to be about the same as the residential. Material collected as yard waste from residences is mulched for commercial use in sale. The residential yard waste collections last year was about 27,000 tons that were diverted from landfill disposal and turned back into a usable product. Commercial, again, we're not sure of how much that is. The photograph you see is actually at the Southeast landfill and shows the different bunkers as the different materials are divided up for commercial sale by the processor at the landfill. Material collected as bulk from residences is mostly disposed of with some limited diversion. Last year, we collected over 33,000 tons and commercial is just collected with the waste from commercial industries. Some of the success measures in Fort Worth on the residential side, diversion from landfill is about 21.5% to 23%. In 2010, a landfill expansion provided the city with over 40 additional years of life of for disposal. Residential or blue cart recycling, the participation rate is over 65%, which is a very good number. Sanitary, and again, this is not a mandatory service. Our sanitation rate stability, we have not had a rate increase since 2006. In fact, two years ago, we actually lowered the rate a little bit because we successfully renewed our contracts and saved some money. Service attempts each week is nearly 675,000. That's each week. That's contacts with residents by our service providers. Miscollections for both garbage and recycling is a very low number, 0.0007%, an extremely low number. Other further success measures from residential collections, over 74% of the budget is outsourced with private contractors. The reduction in illegal dumping from 2004 to 2014. In 2004, we collected 2,600 tons of illegally dumped material. And in the past year, we collected less than 3,000 tons. That's a significant positive measure. We have three existing drop-off stations. The construction of the fourth will start in the spring of 2015. And the use of the drop-off stations is an extremely high level of nearly 200,000 individual visits in fiscal year 2014. We have a multifamily apartment recycling program. And each department manager is required to look at the service they provide and see if recycling is a possibility for that apartment complex. Right now, we have 82.6% compliance with the new ordinance and approximately 67 complexes are still either seeking a waiver or working on implementing a program for their complex. We also have a business smart program, which is an outreach program to small and medium-sized businesses. So what are we looking at? What are our current challenges to our program? Two landfill audits recently, one in 2012 and one in 2014, revealed that nearly $13 million is thrown away in the landfill. This is materials that could be recycled in our blue card program that for some reason or another, individuals are just choosing to put it in the brown card versus putting it in the recycled card. We need to look at increasing that so we can increase the diversion from landfill disposal and reduce contamination, contamination being materials that should not go in the blue recycling card, but should be thrown away. And we need to increase that awareness of individual residences and the ownership in that process. We need to increase opportunities and requirements for the multifamily recycling so that process can increase and we get greater diversion from landfill disposal at departments. And we need to look at a greater engagement of the public's, the business sector to re-examine their waste. Again, as I said before, nearly two-thirds of the waste generated in the city is from the business and industrial sector. Businesses can often reduce expenses with proper recycling. What we all need to recognize is there's no magical land of a way. When you put something at the curb to go away, it really doesn't go away. It has to be managed and it has to be managed properly. If we just simply all want it to go to the landfill, that's what happens. But we can divert a lot of this material to be used for proper material in the future. So some of the future programs that we're looking at, these are now in development. We have a request for proposals out right now for recycled processing facility in the city of Fort Worth. Currently our material goes to the city of Arlington to be processed by waste management. We're looking to bring that back to the city and have it processed in the city. We have compressed natural gas-powered trucks. Actually, waste management and night waste services, who's the waste management subcontractor, have a requirement by their contract to bring in compressed natural gas trucks. Night waste has already converted their fleet. Waste management will be converting their fleet this year to natural gas. Less emissions, cleaner air. We're also looking in that regard of having a public-private refueling locations with waste management to allow city vehicles to be refueled at those facilities. Landfill gas, when waste goes into a landfill, it decomposes without oxygen or anaerobically, and it creates methane gas. We have to look at capturing that methane gas and trying to figure out a beneficial use for it. We're under contract negotiations and looking at processes with Republic services who operates our landfill with trying to utilize this gas for beneficial use. And hopefully by the end of the year, we will have a contract with a third party that will develop this landfill gas for the city. The fourth thing we're looking at is a development of a disaster debris management plan. We're on the prairie in Texas every year, nearly every year. We have a storm that comes through and impacts part areas of the city, sometimes the whole city. We have to come up with a better way to manage this debris so that it is removed quickly and used in a beneficial way to solve the problem of that waste generated by those storms. Some other future possibilities. We need to look at increasing the waste diversion from disposal. Again, the landfill audits we did, nearly $13 million is lost by people throwing away recycled materials into the garbage and which goes into the landfill to be disposed of. There's no good reason for that other than choosing not to do it correctly. We have the request proposals on the material recovery facility and some of the things we're looking at, there's a vast array of different technologies out there to handle waste. Is it Murph going to be a mixed waste processing facility or dirty Murph? Is that an option? To recover additional materials and composting putressables or food waste and looking at maybe even refuge divide fuels or biofuels. The picture you see on your screen right now is actually a biofuel processing facility that takes waste and generates fuel that can be used for equipment from solid waste. We need an awful lot of the material that goes into landfills, construction and demolition debris. Can't we find a way to use that material to be reused again and used in the construction methods? Can our bulk waste collections, can we slightly change our method of collection to capture more material and divert it out of the landfill? We think we can. We're going to be looking at that to study that to see how best we can do that. What about the yard waste diversion? Can we increase it? Instead of having some of that material still go to the landfills, can we look at doing that? Instead of just having a mulching operation at our landfill, can we do large scale composting of that material to return that material back into a rich organic mixture that can be used for landscaping, whatever. More than just the mulch. And also we need to look at the collection of food waste or putressables and can we introduce that into the composting operation? We have to get over a little bit of a yuck factor but we think we can. We've got to figure out how the best way to do that. But I need to caution everybody at this point. Sometimes when we do more, it costs more. We need to understand what that cost differential is and what's the tolerance level of how far the city wants to or needs to go into that way. But most importantly, we need to discover what is the best fit for the city of Fort Worth. Some other future possibilities. We need to look at the potential of implementing a greater cost differential in the cart sizes. Between the 32 gallon carts, the 64 gallon carts and 96 gallon carts, right now it's about $5 difference. Should we increase that rate to make it more costly for the larger size carts and encourage the recycling that way? That's one of the things the plan's gonna look at. We should encourage the reuse through donations. Sometimes we need to stop looking at unwanted things simply as waste that needs to go to the landfill. If it still has a reusable life, why shouldn't we be doing any good to charities and having someone else enjoy that product for a while? We need to increase pedestrian and special event recycling within the city. That's a captive audience that we need to look at. And people will do this when we offer the opportunities for them to recycle. They will willingly recycle that material. We need to encourage green purchasing, not only in city departments, but throughout the business community of taking and buying products for use that have been made with recycled products. We can also look at research and development opportunities through University of Texas at Arlington and TCU partnerships that'll help us focus on sustainable efforts on the solid waste side to increase the opportunities for the city. We need to encourage innovation in future technologies. Another thing we're looking at is maybe even developing an eco-business park that will be centralized around our landfill and our material recovery facilities to further capture those materials and look at those opportunities. There's another concept called zero waste that is looking at all the waste stream and trying to figure out better ways to use the entire waste stream and actually get to a point that is zero disposal at landfills. That is a concept we're going to look at. We're not sure it's gonna have a fit in Fort Worth, but it's something we need to look at. But again, we need to look at the process of sometimes doing more will cost more. We have to determine what is the best fit for the city of Fort Worth. So what's the overall view of the comprehensive solid waste management plan and the resource recovery facilities? These are the next steps. We're looking at public engulfment throughout this whole thing. I'm not going to read this slide to you. Just understand that there are timeframes that we're looking at trying to go through this process. And we're hoping by the end of December of this year we'll have a draft plan that is a workable plan that has gone through a lot of study and we'll be sharing that with you as we get to that point and asking for your comments at that point. So what are the opportunities for you to engage with us and provide us your input? We have open houses that allow you to make comments face to face with us. We have social media opportunities. We'll have an electronic survey posted on the website. And we have focus groups that will be working with individuals in small groups to provide us feedback on what we think. We have workshops for the business communities that allow us to provide them to provide input to us on how they can, how they see their business going. How do they feel about those things? We'll also have one-on-one interview with VIPs and ordinary people to provide us this input and comments about the Solar Waste Plan. You can email us with the email site on this. It's listed below. And you can also go to our website that's listed on this slide and providing us input. So, bottom line, we need your input for this plan to be successful and to be a program that's gonna work for the city of Fort Worth. We need your ideas. So please consider going to this website and giving us your input on the Solar Waste Plan and what you would like to see, not just on what we're providing to you in this presentation, but also things that you've thought about. How can we improve our program to provide you better services throughout the city? Thank you for listening to me and have a great day.