When asked if Greenpeace was contributing to the nation’s environmental problems because the group uses direct mail, Peter Bahouth, a former Greenpeace executive director, once told ABC News that “accusing environmental groups of paper pollution is a bit like saying that we need to get the ambulances off the street because they’re loud.”

You can check for yourself by looking at the IRS Form 990 which most non-profit organizations are required to make available to the public. More than 1.5 million non-profit groups are listed at GuideStar.org, and many post their Form 990s for public review.

Why do major ecology groups use the mails? Just take a look at mail and the waste stream.

How much garbage is produced each year?

According to the latest-available figures from the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States produces 13 billion tons of nonhazardous solid waste each year. The EPA calls this material Subtitle D waste. (See: RCRA: Reducing Risk From Waste, EPA, EPA530-K-97-004, September 1997, page 5.)

Thirteen billion tons in the mid-1990s! That seems impossible. Is there an environmental organization with similar numbers?

Yes. As an example, Greenpeace has research showing that we produced 11.3 billion tons of Subtitle D waste in the 1980s.

The United States,” says the Natural Resources Defense Council, “produces between 12 and 14 billion tons of waste annually. This includes mining waste, oil and gas waste, agricultural waste, hazardous waste, food-processing residues, demolition debris, incinerator ash, and medical waste, in addition to municipal waste. The management of most of this waste is not regulated by U.S. federal law — it is exempt — and of the total, municipal waste accounts for only about 210 million tons.” (See: Too Good To Throw Away: Recycling’s Proven Record, Chapter 2)

The problem, of course, is that more recent Subtitle D figures are needed to better understand waste issues, information which the EPA has not made available to the public.

What is municipal solid waste?

In general terms, “municipal solid waste” or “MSW” can be seen as a limited number of items which are part of the overall waste stream. As the EPA explains: “our trash is made up of the things we commonly use and then throw away. These materials range from packaging, food scraps, and grass clippings to old sofas, computers, tires, and refrigerators. It does not include industrial, hazardous, or construction waste.” (See: Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2006, EPA, page 2)

Does MSW equal all the stuff that goes into local landfills?

No. Although omitted from the 2006 MSW report, the EPA has plainly stated in the past that “some people assume that ‘municipal solid waste’ must include everything that is landfilled in Subtitle D landfills,” but this is NOT correct. (See: Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2005, EPA, page 25)

“It has been common practice,” says the EPA, “to landfill wastes such as municipal sludges, nonhazardous industrial wastes, residue from automobile salvage operations, and construction and demolition debris along with MSW.” (See: Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2005, EPA, page 25)

But wait a minute. Doesn’t the EPA say that the number of landfills has declined substantially during the past decade?

The EPA says two things: “while the number of U.S. landfills has steadily declined over the years, the average landfill size has increased.” It also states that “since 1990, the total volume of MSW going to landfills dropped by 4 million tons, from 142.3 million to 138.2 million tons in 2006.” (See: Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2006, EPA, page 8)

In other words, older, smaller and less ecology-secure landfills are being replaced with a small number of larger sites which can benefit from new technologies and better management.

While the volume of MSW material thrown away has dropped by 4 millions tons per year, the amount of available landfill capacity is actually growing. As The New York Times has reported:

“It became clear in the early 1990’s that there was a glut of disposal space, not the widely believed shortage that had drawn headlines in the 1980’s.

“Although many town dumps had closed, they were replaced by fewer, but huge, regional ones. That sent dumping prices plunging in many areas in the early 1990’s and led to a long slump in the waste industry.

“Since then the industry and its followers have been relying on time — about 330 million tons of trash went into landfills in the United States last year alone, according to Solid Waste Digest, a trade publication — to fill up some of those holes, erase the glut and send disposal prices skyward again. Instead, dump capacity has kept growing, and rapidly, even as only a few new dumps were built.” (See: Rumors of a Shortage of Dump Space Were Greatly Exaggerated, August 12, 2005)

Where can I get more information regarding the landfill glut?

Press here to see our complete report.

How much MSW is there?

While the overall waste stream consists of some 13 billion tons of nonhazardous materials, MSW is just a small fraction of that amount. In 2006 we generated 251.3 million tons of MSW — 1.93 percent of the non-hazardous waste stream. (See: Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2006, EPA, page 7)

Do 251.3 million tons of MSW go into landfills?

No. MSW in 2005 included 251.3 million tons of material before recycling, composting and energy recovery. The amount left to landfill was 138.2 million tons. (See: Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2006, EPA, page 9)

Aren’t we landfilling more MSW than ever?

No. MSW generation is down. Recycling and composting are both up. The result is that MSW landfill use has declined.

For instance, the EPA reports that we landfilled 138.2 million tons of material in 2006 — that’s down from 142.3 million tons in 1990 — a time when we had 50 million fewer people. (See: Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2006, EPA, page 9)

How long will it take to pack our landfills with MSW?

More than MSW goes into landfills, so the issue involves a wider array of waste than MSW by itself. No less important, we are now adding landfill capacity faster than we are using it.

The New York Times has reported that between 2001 and 2005 the nation’s three largest trash collectors — Waste Management, Allied Waste Industries and Republic Services — “buried 882 million tons of waste. But the remaining permitted capacity of their combined 410 dumps did not shrink. It expanded over those four years by more than one billion tons. The three companies now expect expansions of another 1.8 billion tons. At that level, their combined capacity could handle the nation’s trash sent to dumps for about 26 years.” (See: Rumors of a Shortage of Dump Space Were Greatly Exaggerated, August 12, 2005)

Not only are the three largest private companies increasing landfill capacity, the same is also true for other private and public facilities. This is happening because we are landfilling less and also because landfill technology is improving — we can get 30 percent more stuff into a given amount of landfill space than in the past, according to the Times. Equally important in the case of paper-based materials, scrap that used to be landfilled is now being exported to China. In fact, in 2007 the Chinese bought scrap paper worth more than $2 billion from the U.S.

Will we soon run out of landfill capacity?

No. In their most-recent annual reports, the three major collection and disposal companies told the Securities and Exchange Commission that they have enough landfill capacity today to last for decades — without further expansion.

We will develop new landfill sites using the latest and best environmental techniques — certainly as good as the technologies we use today and no doubt better. However, efforts to reduce, reuse and recycle should continue not only because they limit landfill needs, but because such practices are inherently good for the environment and for us all.

If annual Subtitle D waste totals 13 billion tons or more, why have we not run out of landfill space already?

Because much of the “waste stream” is nonhazardous industrial and production water, mining debris and agricultural waste that is left in place and not landfilled.

Is there any source which shows billions of tons of Subtitle D waste broken into categories by weight?

Yes. An official 1988 EPA study entitled, “Report to Congress: Solid Waste Disposal in the United States,” (EPA/530-SW-88-011) details Subtitle D categories. On page 11, Volume 1, is a table showing more than 11,387 billion tons of waste, including 158 million tons of MSW. In 1988, of course, we had a population of just 244,498,982 people, far fewer than today.

How much MSW is in the form of paper products?

Paper and paperboard products amounted to 85.29 million tons in 2006. However, paper-based products have traditionally had high recovery levels. While the general recovery rate for MSW is 32.5 percent, the recovery rate for paper-based products is 51.6 percent — meaning 44.02 million tons were diverted from America’s landfills. (See: 2006 MSW Characterization Data Tables, EPA, table 2)

Given that we live in the Internet era, wouldn’t it make sense avoid all landfill issues and just use email? After all, with email there’s no environmental impact.

The presumption that email has no environmental impact is simply untrue.

According to the Scientific American, “e-mailing, number crunching and Web searches in the U.S. consumed as much as 61 billion kilowatt-hours last year, or 1.5 percent of the nation’s electricity — half of which comes from coal. In 2005 the computers of the world ate up 123 billion kilowatthours of energy, a number that will double by 2010 if present trends continue, according to Jonathan Koomey, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. As a result, the power bill to run a computer over its lifetime will surpass the cost of buying the machine in the first place — giving Internet and computer companies a business reason to cut energy costs, as well as an environmental one.” (See: Digital Diet, April 2008)

Not only is energy consumption a concern, so is landfill usage. PC Magazine offers these examples:

___”A pile of our obsolete computers could make a 22-story mountain that covers the entire 472 square miles of the city of Los Angeles.”

___”Three billion units of consumer electronics potentially will become scrap between 2003 and 2010. That’s nine gadgets thrown away for every person currently living in the U.S.”

___”As little as 0.014 gram of mercury is enough to contaminate the fish in a 20-acre lake. The 300 million computers that have already been discarded contain enough mercury (about 0.5 gram each) to poison the Great Lakes eight times over.”

___”Nearly every large electronics and semiconductor manufacturer that began operations in the 1970s or earlier has an EPA Superfund site (deemed the worst toxic waste sites) in its history. Forty-one million Americans live within 4 miles of one of these sites.” (See: Measuring America’s E-Waste, March 17, 2008)

The important point, of course, is that email offers great value and utility, but email — like every other product and service — is not environmentally cost-free.

How much advertising mail is included within MSW?

Advertising mail totals 5.89 million tons before recycling. However, 2.28 million tons is recycled, a recovery rate of 38.7%. (See: 2006 MSW Characterization Data Tables, EPA, table 4)

So how much of the waste stream is advertising mail?

Using EPA data, as a Nation we have 13 billion tons of Subtitle D waste. We also have — before recovery — 5.89 million tons of advertising mail. In the worst case, advertising mail thus represents 0.000453 of the waste stream — about 5/10,000ths. After recycling, of course, the percentage is even lower.

How can we increase the percentage of advertising mail saved by recycling?

We now have thousands of local governments that collect paper — but not all paper. We would have significantly-higher recovery rates for ad mail if local communities collected all paper and not just newspapers. Given the worldwide demand for U.S. scrap paper, such enhanced collections would keep more material away from landfills while at the same time bringing additional money into the U.S.

Technorati Tags: billion, EPA, landfills, mail, postal, tons, vision

But if it’s fair to raise questions about landfill capacity then it’s equally fair to provide some answers. Are we running out of landfill space? A balanced postal system with a vision of the future may be surprising.

According to much-quoted statistics from the Environmental Protection Agency, the number of landfills in the United States dropped from 7,924 in 1988 to 1,754 in 2006.

Source: Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2006, EPA, page 8)

The EPA chart plainly shows that the number of landfills in the United States has fallen 77 percent since 1988. Given such a decline, the natural assumption is that a massive reduction in numbers must also mean that national landfill capacity has shrunk.

The problem: Such assumptions are not true.

The EPA states in its 2006 MSW study that “while the number of U.S. landfills has steadily declined over the years, the average landfill size has increased. At the national level, landfill capacity appears to be sufficient, although it is limited in some areas.” In fact, the EPA says that “since 1990, the total volume of MSW going to landfills dropped by 4 million tons, from 142.3 million to 138.2 million tons in 2006.” This is a remarkable figure when you consider that the U.S. population between 1990 and 2006 increased by more than 50 million people.

Our landfill supply nationwide has not merely increased, we have a vast overabundance. While the number of landfills has declined, the measure that counts — landfill capacity — has increased enormously.

Because we have a growing volume of nationwide landfill capacity, disposal costs are low. This is the best possible evidence that a landfill shortage does not exist and it’s also good news for local homeowners: If there really was a landfill shortage then local garbage disposal fees would soar.

Why do we have a landfill glut? Four reasons stand out:

1. Consolidation
2. Recovery
3. Technology
4. China: The New Market

Consolidation

The best example of changing landfill numbers occurred in Wisconsin. Between 1986 and 1991 the state closed 850 landfills, opened nine new ones and expanded 12 existing sites. The result? Landfill capacity in the state increased by 44.5 million cubic yards. (See: Landfill Capacity in North America, 1991 Update, National Solid Waste Management Association, table 3, page 4)

You can see where this leads. A scary headline will say “Wisconsin Lost 850 Landfills” but that’s plainly not the whole story. A more sensible headline would say “Wisconsin Lost 850 Landfills, Capacity Grew.”

The Wisconsin example explains why landfill numbers are falling. Older, less efficient and less environmentally secure landfills are being replaced by larger, more efficient and more environmentally safe facilities. In other words, if you replace 20 thimbles of milk with a single one-gallon jug, it doesn’t mean you can’t store more milk.

“It became clear in the early 1990’s that there was a glut of disposal space, not the widely believed shortage that had drawn headlines in the 1980’s,” says The New York Times.

“Although many town dumps had closed, they were replaced by fewer, but huge, regional ones. That sent dumping prices plunging in many areas in the early 1990’s and led to a long slump in the waste industry.

“Since then,” says the Times, “the industry and its followers have been relying on time — about 330 million tons of trash went into landfills in the United States last year alone, according to Solid Waste Digest, a trade publication — to fill up some of those holes, erase the glut and send disposal prices skyward again. Instead, dump capacity has kept growing, and rapidly, even as only a few new dumps were built.” (See: Rumors of a Shortage of Dump Space Were Greatly Exaggerated, August 12, 2005)

Three companies — Waste Management, Allied Waste Industries and Republic Services — collect more than half the nation’s trash. Rather than running out of landfill space, they have sufficient capacity to operate for decades assuming no further expansion of existing sites, no additional sites and no benefit from improved technology.

• As of December 31, 2006, says Waste Management in its 2006 Annual Report, “the weighted average remaining landfill life for all of our owned or operated landfills is approximately 28 years.” This is an increase of one year when compared with the 2004 Annual Report.
• “”We have a network of 161 owned or operated active landfills with remaining operating lives ranging from 1 to over 150 years,” according to the 2007 Allied Waste Industries annual report. “Based on available capacity using annual volumes, the average remaining life of our landfills approximates 38 years.”
• Republic Services said in its 2007 Annual Report that it “owned or operated 58 landfills, which had 9,707 permitted acres and total available permitted and probable expansion disposal capacity of approximately 1.7 billion in-place cubic yards. It said “the average estimated remaining life of all of our landfills is 27 years.”

In fact, however, it would be short-sighted to assume that there will be no further capacity increases. As the Times points out, “in the last four years the three companies have “buried 882 million tons of waste. But the remaining permitted capacity of their combined 410 dumps did not shrink. It expanded over those four years by more than one billion tons. The three companies now expect expansions of another 1.8 billion tons.”

Recovery

During the past five decades American attitudes toward recycling and ecology radically changed. Concerns regarding green issues — once largely restricted to environmental activists — entered the mainstream and impacted such issues as automobile mileage, global warming and “smart” zoning.

Environmental concerns also influenced landfill policies and materials recovery. Figures from the EPA reflect a sea change in national thinking.

What we now know is that economic and population growth are both possible even as landfill usage declines. Figures from the 45-year period between 1960 and 2006 show a dramatic change in the way we reduce, re-use and recycle:

• The generation of municipal solid waste almost tripled from 88.1 million tons to 251.3 million tons.
• The volume of material landfilled amounted to 138.2 million tons in 2006 — that’s LESS than the volume of MSW landfilled in 1990 when the country had 50 million fewer people.
• The amount of material landfilled per day per person in 2006 was less than the amount landfilled in 2000.

Combine reduced landfill usage with increased landfill capacity and the result is diminished demand for landfill space nationwide.

The bottom line? Despite a vast population increase, nationwide landfill use is down and materials recovery is up. Seen another way, a larger population is sending less to landfills. Efforts to reduce, reuse and recycle are paying off. No less important, with improved technology and increasing collection efforts, even better results may be possible.

Source: Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal
in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2006, EPA, page 9

Technology

We not only have vastly larger landfills, we are not only putting less in them, we also use them more efficiently. A given amount of landfill space will hold about 30 percent more content today than in the past.

Waste companies and municipalities, says the Times are “burying trash more tightly, so that each ton takes up less space, increasingly using giant 59-ton compacting machines guided by global positioning systems that show the operator when he has rolled over a section of the dump enough times. They cover trash at the end of the day, to keep it from blowing away, with tarps or foam or lawn clippings instead of the thick layers of soil that formerly ate up dump capacity.” (See: Rumors of a Shortage of Dump Space Were Greatly Exaggerated, August 12, 2005)

We don’t know what benefits technology will provide in the future, but what we do know is this: To date landfill usage has become substantially more efficient due to better management practices. It is entirely possible and reasonable that in the future we will also see improved landfill efficiency, thus limiting the need for additional landfill capacity.

China: The New Market

The richest woman in China, Zhang Yin, is worth $3.4 billion. But unlike other Chinese entrepreneurs who have made their money by exporting to the West, Zhang built her fortune another way: She’s the “queen of waste paper,” China’s largest importer of scrap paper. (See: China’s Richest Woman: From Waste To Wealth, China Daily, November 20, 2006)

For many years there has been a growing and massive trade imbalance with China. For the period from 2000 through 2007, our balance of trade with China showed a loss of more than $1.2 trillion.

Not only is the trade imbalance growing, it is likely to increase as China begins to export big-ticket items such as cars, trucks and planes.

All figures are in millions of U.S. dollars.
Source: Foreign Trade Statistics, U.S. Census Bureau

There is, however, one area where the U.S. is a major exporter to China. According to the U.S. International Trade Commission, “the United States shipped 7.7 million metric tons of waste paper to China in 2005.” Between 1995 and 2005, the USITC reports that “Chinese imports of wood pulp and waste paper from the United States increased by 500 percent over the same period, while imports of finished paper declined by 12 percent.” (See: The Effects of Increasing Chinese Demand on Global Commodity Markets, pages 1-4 and 4-14)

In the U.S. we measure large weights in terms of tons, however the measure used for waste paper exports by the USITC is metric tons. While a single U.S. ton weighs 2,000 pounds, a metric ton is substantially larger, weighing in at 2,204.62 pounds. In effect, the 7.7 million metric tons of scrap paper sent to China in 2005 is actually equal to 8,487,787 U.S. tons.

The huge and growing Chinese market for U.S. scrap paper created by Zhang and others has important landfill implications in the United States. The waste paper shipped to China each year for recycling into paper, cartons and other products represents nearly 8.5 million tons of paper that will not be deposited in American landfills. Instead, it will now bring needed dollars back to the U.S.

What is the value of the scrap paper we send to China? According to the U.S. International Trade Administration, U.S. scrap paper exports to China were worth almost $1.5 billion in 2007.

Technorati Tags: billion, China, export, landfills, mail, postal, recover, recycle, tons, vision

And yet while the Internet is surely important there’s another story to tell: A traditional paper-based media is now more widely used than a decade ago. That media? The mailstream.

Did you know:

___Nine million jobs inside our borders could not exist without an efficient and effective postal system.

___Between 1996 and 2007, ad mail volume increased from 72 billion pieces a year to 104 billion — a huge gain, especially given the growth of email and online communication in general.

___U.S. advertisers will spend more than $60 billion marketing through the mails in 2008.

___America exports scrap paper worth almost $1.5 billion to China — scrap which includes some of the nearly 40 percent of all advertising mail we recycle each year.

___The mailstream reaches 148 million delivery points.

___Even if we do not build additional landfills, because of new technology America has a growing volume of landfill space.

___We have more forest acreage in the United States today than we had in 1920.

Postal2020.com is the meta site for the mailer community. It’s the place to find news, information, facts and figures regarding the postal system, the site to exchange ideas and the online space for all things postal.

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Technorati Tags: China, exports, forests, history, landfills, mail, Mail & Jobs