 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to our briefing today about rethinking, reduce, reuse and recycle policies and programs to address waste. I'm Dan Bresset, the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. EESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental, energy and climate change topics to policymakers. We've also developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. This is the second online briefing of the week and considering that it's only Tuesday, that is a pretty fast start to a very important week in climate policy. If you missed our session yesterday, which focused on climate adaptation and resilience, and was co-sponsored by the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference, the British Embassy Washington and the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, you can view an archive of the webcast by visiting us online at www.eesi.org. And that goes for all of our work. Everything is available online for free, and the best way to keep up with our work is to sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Today, we bring together panelists who will help us understand the climate impacts of all the waste we produce. The average American generates about one ton of waste per year, which is the highest per capita rate in the world. Of this 300 million tons of municipal solid waste, about half of it ends up in landfills, which accounts for about one-sixth of human-caused domestic methane emissions. And remember that methane is an even more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. For years, many of us have felt a little better about our garbage because we are very good at recycling. But recycling is not always economic, and a good deal of what we toss in the blue bin, especially plastics, and especially single-use plastics like bags and baggies just ends up in big piles somewhere and does little to cut down on petroleum consumption. In the opinions of many experts, despite what many of us think, recycling is an increasingly non-viable alternative to reducing our waste. So in just a moment, our five panelists will describe the problems of waste, and because this is an EESI briefing, teaches about new and creative solutions to reduce, reuse, and sometimes recycle our waste to minimize its underappreciated contribution to negative climate impacts. But before our panelists begin, let me mention that we would be glad to take your questions as we go to help inform our discussion today. After our fifth panelist will have a Q&A, and if you have a question that you would like to incorporate into our discussion, we have two ways for you to ask it. You can send us a message at, or an email, rather, at EESI to EESI at EESI.org, lots of EESIs, or you can also follow us on Twitter at EESI online. And now it is my privilege to introduce the first of our five speakers today. David Allaway has worked at the intersection of waste, materials, and the environment for over 30 years. He currently works as a senior policy analyst at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, where he recently co-chaired Oregon's Recycling Steering Committee. David has also recently served as an advisor to Project Drawdown and the New York Times bestseller Drawdown, the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming. David, welcome to the briefing today. I'll turn it over to you for your presentation. Thank you so much. Just bringing my slides up here. Can you tell me if you can see my slides, please? Yes, looking good. Okay, great. There we go. All right. Well, hello, everyone. I am David Allaway with the State of Oregon, and I've been asked to provide some context and history to frame today's panel. I'm going to cover three topics today. First, the environmental impacts of materials and waste. Second, a quick look at how the United States ended up with our current approach to recycling. And finally, a major effort underway in Oregon to modernize our state's recycling system and policy framework. So let's start out by asking about waste. Waste or garbage is an environmental phenomenon that generates strong visceral responses on the part of the general public and policymakers. Garbage is perhaps the most visible, daily, obvious manifestation of our impacts on the environment. We interact with it every day. And in some ways, that's regrettable because it leads to some misplaced priorities. In this country today, garbage is not particularly impactful. Emissions from waste landfills and incinerators contribute about two and a half percent of our nation's domestic greenhouse gas emissions. That's not insignificant, but it's not huge. And we can contrast these disposal-related impacts with the impacts of making the materials that end up as waste. Those impacts are easily 10 to 15 times higher. Many of the materials that become waste here in the United States are produced in other countries. So in order to understand the climate impact of these materials, our domestic greenhouse gas inventory is of limited utility. In contrast, a consumption-based accounting framework tells a more complete story. Oregon's consumption-based greenhouse gas emissions inventory, which estimates the global emissions resulting from consumption by Oregonians, shows that emissions over the life cycle of materials contribute 41 percent of our state's carbon footprint, more than the emissions from direct consumption of electricity or fuels. And if we zoom in on these materials-related emissions, we find that only 1 percent are the result of disposal. The remaining 99 percent are a result of raw material extraction and manufacturing, and to a lesser degree, freight transportation. So this country's waste disposal problem, while real, pales in comparison to the challenges of unsustainable production and consumption, and the materials that become waste are at the center of that challenge. Now, recycling can reduce the impacts of those materials by a necessary, although modest amount. Most of the benefits of recycling occur when collected materials displace virgin resources upstream in the production process. Reduced emissions from landfills and incinerators are a much smaller benefit from a climate perspective. Recycling can also conserve energy and reduce other forms of pollution. But to be of benefit, recycling needs to be done well, and our current recycling system is delivering some mixed results, especially as we continue to export contaminated recyclables to countries that lack adequate infrastructure, such as these plastics, which weren't properly removed by processing facilities in the US, and they were shipped out in bails of paper and sold to a paper mill in East Java, which then dumped them in the countryside. This is not the consequence of recycling that anyone wants to see. So recycling is necessary for a sustainable future, and it can be done well, but even if it's done well, it's insufficient by itself. Looking back at Oregon's consumption-based inventory, as a state, we currently recover around 40% of our solid waste, and if we could bump that up to 90% recovery, it would reduce climate impacts, but only by about 3%. So while recycling is necessary, it is also insufficient, and we need to activate some additional solutions. Those include waste prevention, reuse, clean production, material substitution, and sustainable consumption. These should be equal if not higher priorities. Just as an example, this graph shows the relative environmental impacts of delivering drinking water in a single-use plastic bottle, with that bottle either disposed of in Oregon, in blue, or recycled in red. You can see that recycling the plastic bottle reduces impacts. That's a great thing. However, there is a far better option, and that's just to skip the bottled water and drink from the tap. Those impacts, including the dishwasher, are shown on this graph in green, and if you struggle to see them on this graph, it's because they are almost zero when compared to the impacts of using a single-use product and recycling it. We should reduce first and only then recycle. Now, as I just explained, most of the benefits of recycling are a consequence of collected secondary materials displacing virgin materials in manufacturing. The environmental benefit of recycling is all about that market, but policy in this country largely has it backwards. Most policy focuses on collection and emphasizes the importance of individual consumer behavior, as opposed to producer responsibilities and roles. Indeed, if you go out and you ask your neighbor, do you recycle? They'll probably say, yeah, I recycle, but we as individuals are not recyclers. We are really the beginning of a supply chain, a supply chain that collects materials to be recycled by industry. And this confusion is so pervasive and deeply rooted that most people aren't even aware of it. Now, the reasons for this are rooted in history. As this country urbanized, cities were faced with a public health crisis, infectious diseases, spread by putrecible waste being dumped into streets. New York City responded by forming the Department of Sanitation, the first U.S. city to make waste collection a municipal responsibility, and other cities followed suit. Fast forward to Earth Day, 1970, activists in places like Ann Arbor and Austin began operating drop-off centers for people to recycle. And 10 years later, they wanted to expand the reach of these popular services. Industry and the federal government weren't interested, but progressive city councils were. Recycling collection was added to the portfolio of these cities as a logical extension of their role in waste collection. And over time, more than 10,000 cities in this country joined the recycling crusade. And as a consequence, this country has an inconsistent, crazy quilt patchwork of collection programs that are all struggling against the headwinds of unfavorable economics. These collection programs all act as taxpayer or rate payer subsidized supply chains to industrial users, whose payments for those materials come nowhere close to covering the cost of collection and processing. In Oregon in 2018, rate payers spent more than $200 million, paying to collect and process recyclables, and that was net of the revenue provided by the end markets. Industry benefits from and promotes recycling, which conveniently places the responsibility on someone else, since recycling is viewed as the domain of individual behavior and responsibility. And it's no accident that we think this way. The twin drumbeats of recycling and individual responsibility keep the public and policymakers distracted from other issues and solutions like waste prevention or producer responsibility. And the PBS documentary frontline documentary Plastic Wars provides some evidence of this strategy. So I'll briefly mention what's happening with recycling in Oregon. As a state, we were highly dependent on Chinese end markets. And when China closed the door to those exports in 2017, our system really struggled. Collection programs dropped materials, increased costs, rate payers, or both. The state convened a recycling steering committee which spent two and a half years studying the problems and alternatives. And we identified that on the surface, recycling is challenged by the following factors. The public is deeply confused about what and how to recycle, and this confusion leads to high levels of contamination, which in turn results in higher costs for the rate payers who currently pay most of the cost of our system. There are inconsistent recycling opportunities across our state, and we have a race to the bottom among processing facilities that are largely unregulated and really struggle to sort out all the garbage people are sending them and unable to assure that all materials are being sorted and recycled responsibly. We're continuing to landfill materials that could be easily recycled, and that's a missed environmental opportunity. There are inequities in access to service, working conditions, and the distribution of burdens from pollution related to recycling. And there's a loss of public trust as we cannot ensure that materials are being recycled responsibly. So these are the problems we see on the surface, but many of them are the consequence of some deeper root challenges. The first is that environmental benefits and economic signals are not aligned. Recycling can reduce costs to society through reducing pollution and climate change, but these benefits are not reflected in the economic signals that industry and local governments are responding to, and this leads to an under-investment in recycling. Second, Oregon's laws for recycling were not designed for today's challenges. They were designed 30 to 40 years ago when things were very different. Program economics were driven largely by newspaper recycling, which is largely evaporated. Plastics are much more ubiquitous today. 30 years ago, nobody anticipated that we would mix our recyclables together, or that we'd need processing facilities to sort them out, or that we'd export them to distant lands with less environmental regulation and infrastructure. And finally, there is a significant gap in the responsibility involving consumer brands. These producers have the unique power to influence changes in packaging and product design, create market demand for recycled materials, and reduce price volatility, but they are largely absent from our current policy framework. The Oregon Steering Committee researched options and debated for two years, but ultimately found consensus on a comprehensive proposal that addresses product labeling, consumer education, access to collection, processing facilities standards and regulation, responsible exports, waste prevention designed for the environment and social equity. It's a shared responsibility proposal that would continue the parts of our system that work well and improve the parts that don't. Ratepayers would continue to pay for the majority of system costs, while producers would pay for approximately one-third of those costs. This proposal is the basis of a bill which is currently under consideration in our state legislature, and which just passed out of its policy committee last week. In the interest of time, I'm going to stop here and we'll look forward to a robust discussion after we hear from the other presenters. Thank you very much. Thank you, David, for that excellent presentation. You mentioned plastic wars, the frontline documentary, which you're featured in. We also at ESI had an opportunity to speak with one of the producers of that documentary, Emma Schwartz, and we released that interview as I think the latest episode of our podcast, The Climate Conversation. So if you would like, I definitely recommend watching the documentary. It's awesome. And I think it's probably freely available because it's PBS, but it's really good. But if you'd also like to listen to the discussion we had with Emma, it was a really excellent conversation. I thought I learned so much. So thank you so much, David, for that excellent kickoff to our panel today. And now I get to introduce our second panelist, Jennifer Wright. Jennifer is an environmental program supervisor with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources Lands Quality Bureau. In this role, Jennifer leads a team of professionals within the financial and business assistance section who work with Iowa citizens, businesses and communities to provide financial and technical assistance, resulting in cost effective improvements, opportunities for increased productivity and positive environmental impacts, working together with our stakeholders. Jennifer and her team continually strives to achieve a cleaner environment and stronger economy through the sustainable use of natural resources and effective waste management and pollution prevention activities. Jennifer, welcome to the panel today. I will turn it over to you. Thank you. You get my presentation. Can you all see that? Yes. Okay. All right. Well, thank you for having me here today. I'm actually here to speak about one of the programs that we administer in the financial and business assistance section. And it's called the Iowa waste exchange. It's a little bit of a misnomer because it's actually materials exchange program, but the program was created in 1990 by our Iowa state legislature. And then we have a program called the Iowa waste exchange. And we've been able to get back into our groundwater protection act and the funds that were provided for that. And so they, they said, established it as a waste exchange. And we've just continued with that name. It's funded by a percentage of our landfill tipping fees. And it's that funding has primarily stayed the same over the years. We've determined that we've been able to get about a 650% return of the waste exchange. And so we've been able to do that. And we've also tried $400,000 in funding to a. Regional council of government. In the code. We are not. DNR does not receive any funds. It's almost like a pass through. To a council of government. Or possibly a community college for them. To in essence be out in the field. Trying to find materials to match. That are a little bit of like light consulting services. Based on the fact that we provide them about an average of $400,000 per year. And yet they are able to say, bring an annual savings back to Iowa around $3 million. We were able to determine that they have about a 650% return on that investment. Let me go back. The program is free to business industry. predominantly but also to citizens if they have a need for a material that they want or they want to match. It's confidential and it's non-regulatory. It began as a pilot at our Indian Hills Community College but it since evolved to becoming a very comprehensive program with five area resource specialists and at one point it was coordinated and managed by the state's Iowa Economic Development Authority. We have a sort of a cooperative agreement with them that they collaborate on this program with us. However it is our program, it is part of our code chapters and therefore we brought the administration back to the DNR in 2006. So some key statistics. Since the 30 years that it began we've been able to divert obviously a little over 4 million tons of waste. An average that equates to about 135,000 tons each year. We've saved Iowans almost 120 million dollars and we've been able to do that through diversion first and foremost that's the primary calculation. And then the second is which was 105 million and then the second savings of about 14 to 15 million comes from all other work that we do for business and industry clients. And that would be like a waste sort. Perhaps we assist them in writing a grant or a standard operating procedure or any waste management plans that are required. So we put a rate to that and then we equate that to the service so that we can show that benefit beyond diversion. They've served almost a little over 67,000 clients in the 30 years that we've been in existence and our focus is on agricultural pursuits, business and industry, schools, colleges, government, municipalities, institutions including hospitals and clinics. We've also supported nonprofits and our private citizens like I mentioned in the previous slide. And as I kind of touched on in the last point about the diversion and the other savings, the services we provide are not just identifying marketable waste streams. We do waste sorts. We will locate markets and value added byproducts. We'll like you said write grants, loans, SOPs, waste management plans. We also do a lot of presentations at conferences, workshops and other speaking events. We tend to author guest articles and always have special events like at various fairs across the state. This is just a map of our primary service areas. As mentioned in the first slide, we started with 10 boots on the ground and now we're down to really what is five broken out into five specific regions. Three of the service reps are full-time employees and two are halftime. In fact, one, two and three primary service areas are my full-time service reps and four and five are halftime employees. It looks a little odd and imbalanced. It seems like wow, one has a lot of burden on the plate, but it's broken out on industry and where we have the larger industry and larger population bases. Clearly in region one, it's not as predominant from business and industry. It's more ag and it happens to also be more collectively smaller population bases. My last slide is just to kind of talk a little bit about some of the fun and interesting projects we do. Our reps never rule out any way through. In addition to industrial sludges and recyclables such as the general paper cardboard plastics, we've matched everything from stuffed animals. As you can see up in the top where the little girl is holding her lamb chop stuffy down to construction and demolition materials up on the far right. We have a program within Iowa DNR's financial and business assistance. It's called the derelict building grant program where we go into rural communities of populations smaller than 5,000 and we assist them in deconstructing or renovating blighted structures on their main streets so that they can either rebuild them and use them for a new purpose or if they deconstruct they can divert the materials from the landfill and that's where the Iowa waste exchange area reps come into play. We also have done fun things like art installations down at the bottom. We have a picture where there's four gentlemen standing in front of a wall of what is perceived as circles but it's actually two semi loads of some off-spec washing machine windows that came out of one of our whirlpool when they used to be here in Iowa and they actually light up in different neon colors and it's a really fun interior art installation for one of our office buildings in downtown Des Moines. In addition to some of those findings like the manufacturing and businesses have old inventory that they didn't know they had such as these unique co-coolers which we ended up distributing to small stores throughout the state. The group works on a variety of projects. So in addition to providing matches as described on this slide we also have assisted in addressing debris from a fire at a hog confinement facility. We assisted them in establishing an on site composting pile for all those swine mortalities. We've assisted at special events such as Project AWARE which is a river cleanup initiative across the state every year, home and race for the Cure Earth Day festivals and as I had mentioned in the couple slides back also doing different fun events at the Iowa State Fair but also assisting those county fairs and the main Iowa State Fair with recycling and other initiatives like this year we're working with Iowa State Fair on a big composting education project. So that's all I have and in the interest of moving this along move it to the next speaker if you need to get ahold of me attached is my contact information. Thank you. Thank you so much and you said that's all that I have that was a lot that was a really cool presentation about a really innovative program that's making a positive impact for residents of your state so thank you very much for bringing that to our audience today. We are going to move I guess we're moving eastward we started in Oregon we spent some time in Iowa now we're going to move on to Charlotte and now I get to introduce Amy Ossaker she is the executive director for Envision Charlotte. Amy is responsible for developing strategic plans for community outreach fundraising vendor and partner relationships since she joined Envision Charlotte in July 2013 Amy has used her two decades of expertise in strategic planning relationship management marketing and creative problem solving to help Envision Charlotte become a global model of urban sustainability Amy's background is a blend of corporate nonprofit and entrepreneur expertise Amy welcome to our briefing today I'm looking forward to your presentation. Thank you very much so you want me just I will launch right in and share my screen right here we do this over here. Well thank you for having me today I'm I'm excited to always talk about Charlotte and the program that we have going on with not only the city of Charlotte but many of our corporate partners and our community at large. Envision Charlotte is about 10 years old we do sustainable projects for the city of Charlotte and we like to call ourselves a public private plus partnership and the plus stands for utilities and universities we like to bring them into the fold as we're rolling out our projects recently we embarked on the transition to the circular economy and so what is the circular economy I'm sure most of you out there know what it is but I'm just going to break it down really quickly it's pretty much zero waste so right now we're a linear society where we buy something we use it we throw it away. A circular society is how I like to refer to it as like a forest when a forest has a tree it grows it dies it brought a re-nutrients the ground there's zero waste so how do we become more circular and design outweighs have less going into the stream and also using those resources at a higher level. So in 2018 we hired Metabolic a firm out of the EU to look at Charlotte and analyze our waste streams and help us create a long-term and short-term strategy to transition over to the circular economy and if you go to our website which I'll have up at the end the full report there and it is actually very fascinating looking at where we are and where we could go as we transition. The first thing they did was study our waste streams and I find this to be just a very sad slide if you look at the total waste going into our waste stream and then they segmented it out and then you see how much is going to the landfill you see how much is being recycled and composting it's a very depressing slide but as we like to say it's also huge opportunities. So we took this slide and they broke it down into areas of focus for us in the short-term and then long-term. So the first five areas they wanted us to focus on are an innovation center plastic organics textiles and concrete within this study if you go in there's all kinds of different business models and opportunities and if you put them all together you could see just focusing on basically those four materials we would divert about 150,000 tons of waste we could create up to 450 jobs that's about a 6.4 million dollar potential profit and then a reduction of almost 380,000 tons of CO2 per year. So we have started focusing on a lot of these different areas I'm only going to talk about one of our programs we have several programs going on but one that is most relevant to today but I do want to mention that we are building an innovation center we call it here in Charlotte the innovation barn because it used to be a horse barn it's kind of fun interesting story you can go see on our website but it will be open in June 2021 and it will be a place to engage the community and our corporate partners on how to design out waste put less waste into the system and then how do we get waste back into production and out of the landfill. So again that is going to be opened in June of 2021 but the one program I want to focus on today is our smart C recycling. So as some of the other speakers have talked about today curbside recycling is challenging you have over 2,000 recycling programs around the United States you know if you're in Charlotte you can recite you can put glass into your curbside recycling if you're in Iardale right up the road right next to us you can't recycle glass so it's very hard to figure out what you're putting in your curbside recycling and what you shouldn't and in Charlotte we only have about 11% diversion rate to the landfill which the national average is 35 and going down as more and more communities stop recycling because as was pointed out earlier the numbers are upside down. So we decided to do a pilot program with the project goals to reduce contamination control material destination and increase landfill diversion. One of the areas that we were looking at is that we believe that there should be more individual accountability around recycling. Right now if you put something in curbside recycling if you put the wrong materials in it you could contaminate your entire neighborhood so there's no way to understand whether you put it in there or your neighbor put it in there and we did a lot of research over in Europe and other places in the in the world where they had bends where you have five different bends in a common area and you still have a ton of contamination because there is no individual accountability. So we launched a program back in January where individuals could opt into recycling materials that they use in their household and we started with two different types of materials PET plastic bottles and aluminum cans so what you would do as an individual you could opt in and you could ask for one of those two smart bags you would receive those bags they're very clearly marked as you see down here that you would only recycle aluminum or you would only recycle PET. Those bags also were equipped with smart technology we like to incorporate smart technology into all of our programs but these had an RFID chip and a QR code and the QR code was so that when you got your bag you went on an app you registered your bag so we knew you had the bag and then you would fill it up with the material once it was full you'd go on the app you request a pickup we would dynamically route and come out and pick up that bag we bring it back to the innovation barn we dump it out over time AI would do this for us but we would analyze the bag if you did well and were compliant we would award you reward you points and then you would receive a new bag rinse repeat and so over the three months we tested this program and we had excellent results so first of all we looked at the bags the overall size we were looking to basically get about two weeks of materials so that we were only driving out to houses every two weeks and it was actually on average three weeks each bag contained about two pounds of materials the bags were returned full and we had one percent contamination and what was nice too is when we knew you did something wrong like send in a green p-e-t bottle we sent you a letter and then we could see that the next week or the in two weeks your contamination rate went down we did find that the app was a little bit challenging so we need to simplify that but the users loved being able to see the points that they got and where those could go to in the end and we did need to clarify the program there's some things that we need to look at like do we want to drop off new bags or would we want to just take the bags and dump the materials on the truck when we come by and one of the interesting findings was 97 percent of the people who participated did it because they wanted to know their materials were being recycled so we were super excited about this program we just halted it because now we're looking to scale it up and what we want to do is we want to create a hyper-focused local MRF materials recovery facility to process 25,000 households and why we think this is important is right now so many companies so many different governments are putting money into MRFs and it's we're still having a 40 percent contamination rate so if we were to actually sort the materials within a household and you only opt into the materials that you use in your household you don't have to have the resorting uh the sorting equipment which is lowers the cost we want to continue to look at plastic bottles and aluminum but we'd love to add additional bags for materials that you can't curbside recycle that MRFs cannot handle like bubble wrap air pillows could we start collecting those in these bags and sending them back to people who would like to put those back into their materials we also want to track and monitor a variety of things first of all equipment costs you're going to have less equipment costs truck efficiency you're going to have smaller trucks they could be electric that's less road wear and tear we are going to be looking at contamination rates since we'll be self-sorting plus we can let people know when they're doing it wrong and we want additional collections they just announced that Pringles for example is setting up 336 recycling collection places all over Europe to collect those MRFs are never going to add a place for Pringles cans but we could add a bag so if you have teenagers that eat lots of Pringles you could opt in and take one of these bags fill it up and we could return that back to Pringles so that's one of our really exciting programs that we're testing like I said we're hoping to move it up to 25,000 households that's about 10 percent of Charlotte's overall curbside recycling we have a ton of other programs that we're doing around behavioral changes but this was the most relevant to today's conversation and I look forward to lots more questions and if you'd like to see some of the other programs that we have at Envision Charlotte feel free to check out our website so thank you for having me thank you very much for that really cool overview of a very cool program I struck with the urge I kind of want to go to Charlotte and just eat Pringles just because I know that the cans can be responsibly taken care of we go through a lot of Pringles we don't have a teenager but we have a seven-year-old who likes the Pringles and you know what I like Pringles they're not a sponsor today just I'm getting hungry it's that time on the east coast thank you Amy for that excellent presentation I'm looking forward to learning more about it when we get into the Q&A and perhaps suggestions for what we could be doing to make more of these kinds of programs possible our fourth speaker is Bob Powell Bob is the founder and CEO of Brightmark Bob has spent the majority of his career working in the renewable energy industry most recently he co-founded a virtual energy team that helped small and large commercial and industrial customers make intelligent energy decisions prior to that he was the president of North America for son Edison president and CEO of solar power partners and he was also the CFO for Pacific Gas and Electric and a partner at Price Waterhouse Coopers Bob thank you so much for joining us today Dan thank you very much it's it's great to be here great speakers tough acts to to follow up on here so I'm really excited to be here today for the for the briefing and at Brightmark we represent what we believe to be a one of the solutions and we fundamentally believe that there are many paths like the the old proverb goes many paths to the top of the mountain and what we hope here at Brightmark and our goal is to totally eliminate waste so with that what do we do at Brightmark well at Brightmark we we are the commercial and the practical developer of solutions on the ground that drive environmental solutions to what we think are some of our most profound environmental issues of the day if I may there we go so what are we tackling at Brightmark we're tackling two of the largest issues that I think we all see out there one is the plastic issue the plastic waste issue many of you all have seen the study that told us that by 2050 if we don't change our course there will be more plastics in the ocean than fish and as someone who spends a little bit of time in the ocean whether it be diving or out at the beach I see it all the time and it is a crisis that we must address the other one is part of the climate crisis would be the greenhouse gas emissions that are the result of our human activity and behavior associated with waste so we tackle both of these and what we believe is as I said there are multiple solution points here in order to get there and solve these problems I think waste reduction from a consumption perspective is one that's very powerful as well and then redesigning systems that are more efficient and then where there is waste that's created reusing and creating fully circular solutions that eliminate waste are also a key to the solution so many paths so what I like to talk to you about is the two paths that we're on to eliminate the issues so the two things are we take and I'll talk a little bit more in detail on each one of these in a moment here we take food animal organic waste and create negative carbon renewable natural gas negative carbon so as Dan said much of my career has been devoted to renewable energy solar wind and even solar and wind and I'm still super excited about renewable energy resources in this case solar and wind are actually positive carbon solutions albeit low carbon solutions so how do we create a world that is a zero carbon future we need to have some minuses together with the pluses so renewable natural gas represents particularly in the animal waste area among the most negative carbon solutions out there that's one of the reasons why we're extremely excited about that so we're going to eat food crops are going to be grown and there's also going to be and I happen residing california and we have issues with the brush creating fires there will be organic materials that are produced and where there are materials that are produced we need to solve the environmental aspect of those we also are engaged in plastic renewable technology which creates fully circular plastic to plastic solutions for plastic products so plastics from a what do we do after we use the plastics you may not be familiar with the fact that of all the plastics that we use only nine percent are recycled eleven percent are actually used in waste to energy applications so eighty percent of these plastics that we use are currently not either recycled or even used in incineration waste to energy that is a big problem and that's a problem that we're here to solve and we have a technology that will deal with all of the non-recycle plastics one of the reactions to the plastic problem is to ban the plastics and I think being very thoughtful about alternatives to plastics and finding better options is super important the reality is we can't ban all the plastics and why is that imagine in this year going through the crisis with with the covid that we all went through without plastics cars are more fuel efficient and safer as a result there's so many different applications everywhere in our computers you name it that are either unfeasible or actually you're not able to replicate them so we must deal with the plastics after we use them so like to first focus in on our technology so our technology as I'll describe in a second is a patented technology that was invented over 15 years ago to remake plastics and ultimately create usable products and make plastics out of plastics so the 80 percent that is not either recycled or used in incineration we can take all of those plastics in our process and we can do it on a global economic scalable basis so the first uh testament to that is our project in Ashley Indiana that we started construction on with a 260 million dollar investment uh two years ago in April of 2019 we actually will complete that facility this year and at on an annual basis we'll take 100,000 tons of plastics a year out of the environment so what do we create right now as we are completing and starting up this this Ashley facility 18 million gallons of ultra low sulfur diesel and naptha which can be used to either blend into gasoline or be used to remake plastics and we also produce six million gallons of wax as well that can be food grade wax can of wax etc so some of you all may be asking the question well you're producing diesel and then something that can go into gasoline that feels like incineration that isn't a really good answer for the environment i would agree with you and uh i'll detail more in a moment here but you should know that our ultimate goal is full circularity to create non-combustible products so a little bit of a history lesson on uh really how things have changed environmentally that uh drove us to having to initially produce diesel and naptha a couple of years ago when we were designing this particular project there was no demand for recycled feedstocks to make plastics or very little demand there was not an economic way for us at Breitmark to create fully circular solutions well thanks to government regulation whether it be extended producer responsibilities or other forms of regulation well waste even china's sort of green fence keeping us from sending waste products to china have now made it so that it is now viable for us at Breitmark to use our technology to create fully circular products so we're on a journey toward full circularity i'm happy to say that in the future that's where we end up with this technology let me briefly describe what our technology does it utilizes and some call it advanced plastic recycling it utilizes a form of technology known as paralysis and our patents sort of perfected that process so in our process what do we do we take all the 80 percent that's that's thrown away and has no use goes into landfills oceans and waterways and will shred those plastics oftentimes they come in these big bales that you might have seen and we turn them into pellets the pellets you saw on the last page there so after we pelletize the plastics we put them into our stainless steel vessels that take the plastics heat them up and there's no combustion so there's no emissions inside those vessels it's all contained in an oxygen starved environment that ultimately creates a vapor that's then cooled into liquids and that's where our usable products come from so the liquids that we use as I said can be used to fully reproduce plastics our process is 93 efficient and runs on a 724 basis thus making it economic so I think it's really important to point out that our goal in creating a world without waste is to close the loop so the plastic renewal technology that we have will take the post use plastics and as I said we'll break them down into ultimately liquids that will then be utilized to make virgin plastics but not out of crude oil not out of natural gas extracted from the ground so a fully circular loop so in our process we significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions as compared to pulling crude oil and natural gas out of the ground so two good environmental impacts there and as I said we ultimately can create a majority of the outputs of our system into new plastics 70 to 80 percent total so our commitment is to make sure that all future facilities that we renew plastics with are fully circular and what we want to do is create that world without waste in plastics so let me turn to renewable natural gas renewable natural gas as I said is negative carbon and many of our applications are on farm applications we have one speakers from Iowa hopefully we get to announce soon some projects in Iowa that are negative carbon that will take animal manures on dairy farms and create renewable natural gas that otherwise would create methane in the environment which is one of the most contaminating greenhouse gases we have 29 projects across seven states as you can see almost 32 000 tons of co2 that has been pulled out of the era as a result of our projects to date and you can see here greenhouse gas emissions are reduced by 400 when we replace traditional vehicle fuels the process is one that can use either food animal or other forms of waste as I said dairy farms are most typical application so what do we do we take the waste we put it into a digester which is in some ways almost like a process of fermentation and after three weeks the manures the waste are converted into clean burning renewable natural gas that avoids methane emissions we take that gas we clean it up and we inject it into the into the natural gas pipelines so you may actually have renewable natural gas in your homes created by projects like these for Breitmark and it would also say that the other great advantage here is the solid material that comes out of our process is also utilized to put on farms as a more stable fertilizer content thus reducing nitrogen and phosphorus runoff into waterways that ultimately can make it into places like Lake Erie and the Gulf of Mexico where we've seen algae blooms so another powerful environmental benefit so we're big in terms of making our commitments and this team is really optimistic about the future and we've got the grit to deliver real solutions environmentally so our commitment is in the next five years with our plastic renewable technology we're going to pull 8.4 million metric tons of plastics from landfills and the natural environment and use that plastic to create plastics again a closed loop solution we also have committed in the next five years to offset 22 million metric tons of CO2 with our projects both from the plastic renewable side and then as i just said on the renewable natural gas side so big expectations big commitments and this team is here to help solve this problem so i think the future depends on all of us to solve these problems and we're super optimistic and so let's make the future bright and we at Brightmark think we have the opportunity to do that so thank you very much thank you Bob for that overview of your technology and and your bold plans for the future really appreciate your presentation we have one more speaker but i'm going to take a quick moment just to remind our audience that we have covered an awful lot of ground we've been to Oregon Iowa Charlotte now we've heard from an innovator from the private sector all of the presentation materials that you've seen so far will be available online www.esi.org so if you'd like to go back and look at any of the programs or the projects or the technologies that we've covered so far you'll be able to do that pretty easily we'll also have an archive of this webcast so you can watch it as well and we'll also eventually have written summary notes so if you need to orient yourself quickly to what the content of the briefing was or is you can do that pretty quickly one quick other reminder one other bit of logistics if you have questions after we hear from our next panelist we will have a Q&A and if you have questions you're welcome to send them to us either by email EESI at EESI.org or you can follow us on Twitter at EESI online and now it is my pleasure to introduce Sarah Nichols Sarah is a waste policy expert and leads the Natural Resources Council of Maine's state and local efforts to reduce waste and litter in Maine she provides the environmental voice for all materials management related policies that come before the state legislature in Maine prior to joining the Natural Resources Council of Maine in 2014 Sarah spent several years working to improve recycling programs in rural communities Sarah I think you and Bob might be in the running for the nicest backdrop of your zoom today but we'll turn it over to you and really looking forward to your presentation great thank you so much Dan and good morning or good afternoon to everybody thank you so much for taking time out of your day to join us for this discussion and thank you to EESI for the invitation so yeah my name is Sarah Nichols I am coming to you from NRCM's office in Augusta Maine we are an environmental advocacy organization and often confused with being the state agency so I just like to make that very clear at the outset we've been protecting the environment Maine for about 60 years and I have the pleasure of leading our efforts on all of the waste related policy I'm our resident trash talker so I'm going to spend my short amount of time here today talking to you about a big policy initiative that we're working on here and I'm just in general and just a huge environmental policy advocate I feel you know we all have to share this share the air share the water that we drink and we need policies in place to make sure that we're all protected and can all live on this planet for a long long time that's really what sustainability is all about so you can go ahead and switch my slides thank you okay so I'm just going to I'm going to touch a lot on a lot of the themes that you've already heard today but put them in a main context so right now in Maine and everywhere else in the United States we're making more trash than we recycle the amount of trash we're making is going up too so not only are we trying to recycle more of that pie but then the pie is growing and we really need to focus on shrinking the pie and increasing the much more recycling so our state has had a goal to recycle 50% of our waste since 1989 and we have never reached that goal and in fact we're going backwards our recycling rate is estimated to be about 36% and I say that because this is the estimated recycling collection rate that's what we guess we are collecting but if we had more rough robust accurate data and we knew how much was actually recycled the rate would that would be much much less and then meanwhile our per capita waste disposal rate is increasing so we're going in opposite of that state goal as well so it's clear that the business's usual taxpayer funded model of recycling a disposal is not working and it's in a different form you can go to the next slide please so after waste reduction and reuse recycling is our best strategy to address the environmental and health problems associated with our packaging waste problems so a big part of the equation here is the money that is costing taxpayers we really need to work on solutions that bring much need to support for municipalities who are struggling to pay for and manage our recycling programs right now in Maine is estimated that our taxpayers pay 16 to 17 and a half million dollars per year to managing packaging waste either through recycling or disposal we have about 1.3 million people here in Maine and our DEP our state agency reports that it costs an average of 60 percent more to recycle than to dispose of waste so you can see you know that this is not fair and it puts our cities and towns in a difficult situation where they must choose between raising taxes or cutting recycling programs we do not believe that the answer lies in throwing even more taxpayer dollars at the problem but rather in shifting those costs to the producers of waste so you go to the next slide so we are this big piece of legislation I mentioned we're really targeting packaging waste here packaging makes up about 40 percent of the waste stream and much of it isn't designed for the recycling in mind and the type of packaging we have is changing all the time without regard for whether or not there is a recycling bin or a market for that material and by packaging I mean things like cereal boxes and amazon packaging and yogurt tubs takeout containers, juice boxes, flexible packaging basically all the stuff that ends up in your in your household I really think there's a surge or tsunami in trash and packaging materials and it's just leading to more plastic pollution it's costing taxpayers a lot of money unnecessary strain on already struggling municipalities and it's really harming our environment our health and it really does affect the health of low income and minority populations the most where this waste is created and where it ends up so this packaging waste problem is not going to get any better without meaningful changes in policy so you can go to the next slide please so I'm going to talk to you about extended producer responsibility it's a special type of policy that makes the producer of the product or package responsible in some way for the end of life management but really it's just the polluter pays principle so right now producers are not doing enough to help communities make recycling more effective and part of the reason is because they're not the ones responsible for cleaning up the mess created by their businesses they don't currently internalize any of those costs and rather they externalize those on our municipalities and taxpayers who have little to no control over this waste and my favorite new analogy to use is the analogy of my kids cleaning up after themselves at home I have a four and six year old voice and you know when especially when my six year old got old enough I had to start picking up after himself and now that he has to do that low and behold there's less mess in the first place and plus it's just more fair that they're the ones who clean up after themselves and not leave it for long so by applying this polluter pays principle to packaging main can bring relief to our cities and towns and give them the resources they need to improve the long-term effectiveness of recycling it also provides the right incentives for producers to reduce their packaging waste and design it to be recycled because if they don't then they're the ones who have to clean it up I go to the next slide so in Maine we have eight extended producer responsibility laws for other types of problematic waste including paint and beverage containers electronic waste mercury containing products and there's 33 states with 120 EPR type laws across 14 product categories we do not yet have a EPR for packaging program in implemented in the United States right now but Maine is one of 11 states pursuing it I have the other ones listed here California Hawaii Maryland Massachusetts New York Oregon Washington Colorado New Hampshire and Vermont are also in different stages of considering EPR policy for packaging there's also a federal proposal and the break free from packaging for plastic pollution act that has an EPR for packaging in there but I put this map up to show that while it doesn't exist yet in the United States big corporations are already paying for recycling programs in over 40 countries five provinces in Canada have it too and some of these programs have been in place for more than 30 years so this is how we know how it works and why it works and that it works so in these places recycling rates are are double domains because producers have a direct economic incentive to produce less wasteful packaging that can easily and profitably be managed by municipal recycling programs and because there is a sustainable source of funding for recycling collection processing and education that's having the funding for that is could be the very difference between having a recycling program or not so that's part big part of the reason why it works and I think it's interesting to note that these EPR programs have about the same similar per capita cost is our taxpayer funded system but twice the effectiveness so you get a lot more bang for your buck with EPR just by shifting those costs from property taxpayers to the producers of waste who can internalize their costs just like they do all of their other costs of doing business okay you can go to the next slide so this is very abbreviated for short presentation but people like to kind of know how does you make this switch and how do you how do you fund this kind of system so right now we know that municipalities raise money from property taxes to fund all of the operational costs with recycling and waste disposal programs you can click here thank you the passage of an EPR bill though there's a new stewardship organization that's formed whose primary role it is is to collect fees from producers based on the weight and type of packaging that they produce and then reimburse means municipalities for the costs of managing that packaging this material specific so and they do more than that too the stewardship organization would provide assistance to producers to help them reduce their costs and they would do the same with municipalities they can help assess the program collect all the data and help us make continual improvements to the system the stewardship organization in Maine would be selected by our DEP and include representation from all stakeholders in the waste system producers haulers for cyclers municipalities and basically I like to think that the stewardship organization connects the waste makers to the waste takers with oversight by the states and this oversight helps make sure we have transparency and accountability within the system and not necessarily letting the fox watch the penthouse so you go to the next slide so I talk about EPR for packaging and my kids pretty much exclusively all day long but there are sister policies from EPR system that I think are extremely important to make the whole system work so the first is I do believe that we should be banning problematic materials there's there are certain materials that are just low hanging fruit we did not need to be using and making and for instance that might be a plastic shopping bag we have banned those in name and and when we when we go to to ban something there's there was something like 25 states that did it arts excuse me 25 towns we did it first some of the towns just banned plastic shopping bags but didn't do anything to discourage a switch to paper our state law has a five cent fee on paper bags so we can really encourage a switch over to reuse I think another interesting example of this is another bill we're working on it was originally proposed to ban all single use plastic water bottles but the way we the real issue is we don't want to switch from that type of container to another problematic wasteful container we want to switch to a more reuse refill system so that bill is really morphing into trying to get more refill stations set up and eventually make that switch so we're we're kind of skipping that that wasteful step and next I think it's really important to create incentives for people to do the right thing and put the put the material this is more consumer based in the right in the right then a really good example would be a beverage container deposit law main has had one in place for a long long time since the 70s there's 10 states that have this type of program I really consider it the gold star of recycling programs because you get high high rates of return and you get a really clean recycled commodity coming out of that because it's not mixed with other kinds of wastes I'd love to see more states moving in that direction or per unit fees this might be something like your coffee shop would charge five cents for taking a disposable cup or or give you money back for bringing your your reusable cup in things like that or charging for cutlery instead of that so next so packaging rules I think this as a really interesting and this is a type of policy that you'll see coming I think to the United States more and more these are recycled content standards for instance we're working on a bill here in Maine to set a minimum recycled constant standard for plastic beverage containers I this is a pretty easy place to start we need to do more this basically a demand side intervention recycling doesn't work if there's no market for that material and we're really trying to create that market demand for those and I really see that as a sister policy to our bottle bill okay a lot more to go there but that's just a little taste and you can go to the next slide so this is my last slide and this really ties to what the federal government could be doing to help at this point so one of the things I'm really excited about the EPR policy that I described is all the amazing data we will be able to collect right now you know Maine we we have pretty poor data I rely on an allocated 2011 waste characterization study done by a university to say what's in our waste stream and say what the EPR law will have regular waste recycling litter audits so we'll actually know what's in our waste so we can measure it and you know like I said we don't know how much is actually recycled we know what's collected so we need to do better at that so but in Maine and other states we like to compare our progress with the nation as a whole and let's just say the national numbers leave a little something to be desired not only that but states all calculate things a little bit differently and depending on the data you can get skewed or inflated results and that's not helpful these numbers are used for all kinds of things like national reports and climate benefits of recycling and jobs it's just really important data to have right and right now the EPA is actually in the process of soliciting feedback on how they would calculate the nation's recycling rates NRCM is signed on to a letter by the Container Recycling Institute along with Conservation Law Foundation the ReLoop platform with some observations and suggestions and one of the biggest issues that we see is that the EPA has consistently and significantly undercounted our waste so the amount generated or the denominator by perhaps is 30 to 45 percent is missing from the equation and that can really inflate our recycling rate which leads to all kinds of problems and it doesn't add the urgency that we really need that David touched on at the beginning if we think we're doing a good job at recycling it's that's not necessarily the case and we need to focus more on waste reduction and reusing refill opportunities and making if people think that they're everything that they're putting in their bin is actually getting recycled and it's doing good it's not going to help us get to the place that we really need to be and we also need to make sure that we count the right things as recycling and make it a little bit more standardized one of the most important things i think we need to be doing is making sure that any incineration or waste waste to fuel isn't counted as recycling but as something else you're not recycling anything when you're doing that you're more it's more destroying and it's not doing anything to take away the pressure of putting more waste into the system if we have businesses who rely on feeding more waste it's more like a hungry trash monster so we should just call it like it is and not make sure not to call that recycling okay and i think um that is about all i have and there's my contact information and i'm very excited to for the discussion is into questions thank you and thank you sarah um that was a very good trash talk um that was good these briefings there's a point when i'm like kind of regretful how few puns i work in um and so i really appreciate that you talked about talking trash and being a trash talker that that made it you couldn't see me because my camera was off but that could have been great so thank you for that um i'm going to invite our panelists to um join us for the discussion um and uh while i do that uh or before i do that um there is still we have about 20 ish minutes maybe a little less um if you still have a question or if you have a question there's still a way to submit it follow us on twitter at esi online send us an email esi at esi.org sarah i'm going to use your presentation as um as a bit of inspiration for our first question um you know esi this is part of our policymaker education uh and we're primarily focused on federal policymakers so congress of the administration primarily um i'm going to um we'll start back where we began with david and then we'll go through the panel if you have any comments um but i'd like to invite comments or i'd like to invite answers or perspectives on what federal policymakers could be doing if there are things the federal government say could be doing to promote these types of programs to promote these types of innovations if there are things the federal government could do that would be a bad idea that would actually hinder the success of some of these programs um or innovation um or you know at least help us understand maybe where the right balance is between a federal support role for this and states and local governments doing doing their best and and doing what they can do better so david i'll begin with you and then we'll we'll go to jen and then the amy and then the bob and then the sarah all right thanks so much dan i'd like to talk for just a minute about the disconnect between costs to society and the prices that are paid for materials um using fewer materials waste prevention reuse recycling and all of its forms it typically reduces environmental impacts and those impacts have real benefits to our real impacts to our society disease disability death caused by pollution the impacts of climate change rack up costs in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars a year and waste prevention and recycling can reduce those costs but we are under investing in them because the price signals that industry and government are responding to are not accounting for those impacts so what could the federal government do first of all um address these virgin material subsidies let me give you one example cheap shale gas you know is great for certain sectors of the economy it is it creates incredibly fierce headwinds for both plastic and paper recycling because the primary economic value of that recycling is in the displacement of fossil fuels primarily natural gas when natural gas is cheap recycling is worthless so the fact that we have such incredibly inexpensive and subsidized virgin resources is a significant challenge and on the flip side the fact that we don't account for the cost of pollution so putting a price on carbon putting a price on human health all of these things would make materials pay and the users of those materials pay their real cost to society and with that more recycling and prevention could happen so the federal government could play a critical role there in getting the economics right thanks um Jen do you have comments to share oh i'm having a hard time hearing you and i wonder if i can see you speaking but i can't hear it maybe what we'll do is we'll move to amy and give you a moment to figure it out and then we'll come back to you at the end so amy i'll turn it over to you um what could the federal government what could federal policymakers be thinking about to either uh you know help these programs or stay out of the way of successful programs or be on the watch for things that could hinder progress thanks for the question for us it's it's a little challenging because in charlotte we tend not to do a lot of policy around these type of issues just given the nature of our state however i do think the federal government can have a huge role in convening you know when you have over 2000 recycling programs across united states they're all different and they're so you know i learned so much just on this call alone needless to say what else what other innovations are going on around the united states i think that federal government has a real opportunity to do more convening bringing out more best practices and kind of vetting some of those opportunities in addition i think some standardizations around measurement i think all of us would like to see a little bit more you know ways to measure truly what's going to landfill what's being recycled so that there's more standards across the the entire united states um so those are probably my two areas again we stay we tend to stay out of policy so it's more of the let's see how we can do this with the carrot versus the stick i'm glad you said convening because that i think is an underappreciated role of the federal government in a lot of these challenges um bob um sure uh yeah so it's a really interesting question and by the way david what you've said about measuring the true cost of environmental aspects is really really important and you know it's my view that a lot of the problems we have right now environmentally are because we have a measurement issue we don't know how to measure it and we don't know how to price it so um so further thoughts on this are um and and i previously have spent a lot of time working in renewables so i've seen uh what the federal government can do to help us and inset the right behaviors so one of the things i have in my mind is that um the federal government should target the outcomes you know the uh what is the waste problem and what are we trying to solve and uh perhaps allow for innovation in getting there and i say that because what i've seen you know both in good and bad is the good side is really trying to regulate outcomes the bad side is trying to pick winners and losers from a technology standpoint um and uh one example would be what i talked about before which is gosh bob this first plant in indiana you're creating transportation bills well um as you then saw ultimately what i will do because now i have people actually will buy it and pay me for it is create a fully circular solution if i'd been cut off in the early stages from doing that i might not ever get here and then we're left with uh you know a massive plastic waste problem that we can't ban our way out of we just can't there's too many good uses immediately now so i would say um the that is um one thing to consider and as i saw in renewables there are solutions that drive these outcomes that we want when there are demonstrated solutions to the problems that's where and in solar and wind we have the investment tax credit the production tax credit when you verify that you're solving the problem you can incent uh with those types of programs so a little history lesson on solar in 2008 when i started working exclusively and renewable energy on solar the cost of a solar panel was over 10 times what it is now in that time we were not competitive on par with coal fire generation other forms of generation with much dirtier outcomes because of the incentives that we're solving the problem we are now able both with solar and wind to produce on margin competitive and sometimes better pricing so incent what drives the outcome the technology that gets there is huge and i would also say allow the states to also innovate around the outcomes the lcfs program for negative carbon renewable natural gas in the state of california is a fantastic program so allow the states to innovate as well so there's a couple thoughts gen welcome back can you hear me now yes okay um i'm happy to go back to you if you have thoughts about sort of what policymakers could be thinking about and then we'll go to sir yeah for us is a little for me it really strikes to i would like to see a little more consistency in the standards across the states and some of that has to do with the measurements too um you know they the the proposal about a national recycling standard we responded to um with a larger group through a swamo but like the state of iowa doesn't actually we don't track recyclables yet we do give the federal government numbers every year um but we have to extrapolate those through our waste characterization studies in the different programs so to have some expectations about what they're looking for and how to get that consistent across all of the states would be helpful i think that um establishing a federal um epr would be great i mean we have a deposit a bottle deposit system here in iowa but and it works but we've seen um its success diminish over the years if we had a federal deposit system it might bolster that program for us um but i think sarah made the point like if you have these programs in place we often are complimented in iowa about our recyclables they're clean they're we have we have contamination i'm not going to deny it but we have less contamination than some other states because of the fact that we've had a bottle deposit system in place for 30 plus years so it's become it's kind of become the norm for a lot of people and for the state of iowa we have some fairly robust grant programs to fund um innovation and managing waste but we just don't have the funds as robust as we used to and so it'd be great if there were opportunities from the feds to almost be to match at one point i was in the energy side of things and there's a state energy program that's a federal department of energy grant program it'd be nice to have that from the EPA less so about all everything always being competitive grants and maybe funding states and state agencies to do some of these more innovative um specifically related to infrastructure development like in our state we need and you know expanded anaerobic digestion and i'm delighted to hear that breitmark is is coming to iowa and doing that so those would be my thoughts thank you so much um we actually covered uh state energy program and a briefing a few i'm going to say a few weeks ago because i don't really have a concept of how time works anymore but it was our energy efficiency means briefing uh means business briefing and we had someone from the state of connecticut talking about state energy program it's a it's a great program i just wanted to mention that and sarah um eager to hear from you um additional um sure i'll just uh i'll try to be brief i know we just have a few minutes left i mean we can get to another question or maybe my comments can lead into another question uh and i i pretty much already covered that we need better data i would love for the EPA to do a really good bang up job and how they're going to start calculating their recycling rate and not do that in a way that hinders progress um so more on that but uh i'm i'm growing increasingly concerned with the environmental justice aspect of managing waste and states one by one can pass more protective laws new jersey just passed a pretty pretty progressive um environmental justice law that takes consideration the people living next to polluting facilities uh or waste you know waste facilities or production facilities but the more states that do that great but then those facilities are just going to move to other states i'm still going to be impacting people in other states or waste is going to be shipped to another country where they don't have the environmental protections that we do and we would do a better job at managing those here so i could see the the federal government playing a better role and um in making it so that the waste and the production facilities don't follow the path of least resistance um and focus more on the health related impacts of this whole materials management system thanks um and we are kind of getting close um but i want to make sure everyone has an opportunity if they would like um to comment on sort of the environmental justice element that you mentioned sarah um i think it's fair to say that our waste generation and disposal habits have a disproportionately negative impact on communities of color in low income communities um i'll open this up to anyone on the panel who would like to chime in but um i'd like to hear other thoughts about what we could be doing better in waste management to um address and advance environmental justice goals hey uh dan i'll jump in here so the legislation that i mentioned we're working on in origan addresses this across the entire life cycle of the recycling system we have a collection program um in origan that provides inconsistent service generally lower income rural residents and people of color are less likely to have access to recycling opportunities then when the recyclables are collected mixed in their sense of these processing facilities the working conditions in those facilities are very dangerous and dirty um and in some cases they're not even paying a living wage so there are local uh social equity issues there um there are there are the impacts of our exported recyclables uh improperly sorted and sent to countries that lack adequate disposal infrastructure or regulation and i showed some pictures of that and finally there's really an equity issue in terms of who pays for and who benefits from our recycling system the benefits of our recycling system are in providing feedstock industries and reducing pollution impacts wherever those facilities are located most of that is not in origan so our current system has people in origan as rate payers paying to reduce pollution and human health impacts in other states and nations which once you look at it really strikes us as rather odd so our legislative approach addresses all those issues i don't have time to go into all the details but if anyone wants to reach out um we're happy to talk more thanks for that um other perspectives from around the panel on um uh there are sarah's earlier point david's points or um other perspectives i mean i i'll give a couple um and uh so one of our core values is around diversity equity and inclusion and that has a lot of different there are a lot of different ways that we can live our values a value associated with that i think one david you mentioned which is living wages we're committed in our projects and we do employ people um on our on our projects on the ground where we're solving problems is we're absolutely committed to pay not just a living wage but a thriving wage and many of the folks we employ are not white collar engineer types of folks yes we do employ those as well but we employ people maintenance you name it and there's all there's a value in each and every one of us and we want to celebrate that so that's that's one way that we believe we can do it another way is actually looking at things like where we cite our projects um i won't give specifics but i will tell you that there are citing decisions we make about the communities that we go into they're in and around uh you know more disadvantage lower economic communities um i will refuse to make bad decisions around that that would negatively impact so and it isn't you know so we're solving a problem but um property values all those kinds of things trucks going in and out i think we need to be more equitable about how we do that and thoughtful and consider it and then the third and final thing for me is part of it applies here in the states and part of it applies globally as well some of the solutions in some communities um that have a higher cost may not work in other areas the reality is um you know there are communities in the states that are of lower means and our ability to impose the same solution could actually lower the standard of living of communities globally so when we think about imposing solutions we need to solve the uh the standard of living equation as well and so that's something we think about a lot too so those are the three aspects that i thought made sense from our perspective thank you very much bob um i think we are just about out of time um this was awesome thank you very much david jen amy bob and sarah for five really really interesting and excellent presentations i learned a ton um and i kind of i had a chance to know what we were going to talk about beforehand and i still learned so much about these really cool programs um that are making a difference and um hopefully for our audience um helping inspire some thoughts about what we could be doing better um whether it's policy whether it's environmental justice or or other things and i know since we've been thinking a little bit more about these issues at esi i know as a consumer um i've been thinking a little bit more about sort of my own decisions and um just just really really kills me to have to throw plastic away uh it just uh it really bugs me um and um we're actually just started composting and things like that so it's um not possible to fix any of these problems um as an individual but um i think the the leadership um that you all are showing and the um and the way that you're mobilizing your communities to work as one for these problems is uh it's a great message and um also generating results which is especially important given the urgency of the moment when it comes to climate solutions so thank you all so much um we will go ahead and wrap i will ask my colleague uh dan o bryan to share his screen um thank you very much uh members of our audience if you have a moment we would really appreciate it if you would take our survey that helps us a great deal understand um the relevance of our topics if you had any technical issues we want to hear about it all and if you submit a response i can guarantee that we'll read it we absolutely take your feedback very very seriously we're always looking to improve um let me also thank my colleagues at EESI for making today's briefing possible i'll start by the person uh who is um pretty much our briefing's go-to-person dan o bryan this is our third briefing in three business days so thank you very much dan i'll bryan the other day and i'm the other day and technically because dano's been here more than me thank you for everything you've done over the last weeks to um pull off this really great run of briefings thanks also to sydney o'shaughnessy amber totteroff annam again and omri leport for um everything that you've done uh as well also um i'd like to use this opportunity to thank uh savannah burtrance savannah uh joined the esi yesterday as our new policy associate um she was a former intern and she's back um and i'm looking forward to working with her so thanks very much she's been on the ground with us for a day and a half and uh i just wanted to thank her for her contributions so far and of course we have five fabulous interns saline hamsa jocelyn kimmy and rachel uh they're helping us with questions they're helping us with tweeting they're helping us with written summaries all of that so thanks for all of your good work um we uh have uh our next briefing on the calendar is next friday april 30th 2 p.m it's the fourth installment of our congressional climate camp series we will be looking at adaptation and mitigation double whammy's things we can do in the near term in many cases with bipartisan support to um advance mitigation and adaptation goals for climate so urge everyone to tune in to that and lastly if you missed anything if you want to go back and look at slides if you want to re-watch any of the webcast uh if you want to contact any of our speakers using the contact information they included in their slides everything is available online at www.esi.org and while you're there i hope you take a moment to sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter climate change solutions it's really the best way to keep up with all we're doing with that i wish everyone a very happy rest of your tuesday thanks again to our panelists and we will see you next time thanks