Earth Protect Blog

By Carolyn Sackariason

Aspen Times

ASPEN » The City Council agreed on Monday to implement a program that will prohibit food in landfill trash and recycling centers, as well as spending as much as $700,000 to carry out the new law and directing staff members to pursue new funding sources to offset the costs.

The move, decided in a work session, is part of the council’s “Race to Zero” agreement and includes reducing organic material going to the landfill by 25% by 2025 and 100% by 2050, along with 70% diversion of all waste from the landfill by 2050 in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The new law, which must be approved by ordinance, would not take effect for a year and would affect only the commercial sector at first.

“The restaurants produce most of the food waste that we generate here in Aspen,” said Liz Chapman, senior environmental health specialist for the city.

The 12-month grace period will allow city staff members to train and equip businesses, as well as allow time to receive equipment with the current constraints on the global supply chain.

Council members said they’d like to have incremental steps and incentives for restaurants to divert food more quickly than a year’s time.

“I’m thinking about intermediate steps, because if somebody tells me to do something like filing my taxes, I might not start until 11 months and two weeks,” said Councilwoman Rachel Richards. “I would be a little nervous about having a lot of things wait until the last minute. …” The prohibition of waste in the landfill will slowly expand over the next 10 years to the entire town, according to Chapman.

“This will allow city staff to keep up with education, monitoring and enforcement,” she wrote in an email prior to Monday’s meeting. “It will allow the community to slowly adapt to a new way of dealing with waste, and it will allow the organics hauling companies to slowly add the trucks and staff they need to keep up with an expanding demand.”

The council also agreed to allocate $100,000 to make the waste specialist position full time rather than the current part-time status. That individual is Ainsley Brosnan-Smith, who works in the city’s environmental health and sustainability department.

Chapman said enforcing current recycling rules and securing trash is already a challenge, and adding this program will just put more stress on current resources.

“We need additional staff if we are going to make this organics diversion increase successful and not create more problems than we’ve already had,” she said. “We cannot keep up with it as it stands.”

If formally adopted, up to $500,000 will be spent to subsidize the costs for organic collection, since restaurenters who were polled in a survey conducted in recent months said their main concern would be the financial burden placed on them.

Only 17 restaurants responded to the survey, even though city officials reached out to 84 of them three times via email and followed up with 67 of them in person, according to Chapman.

“It is very difficult for that sector of our community to make time to communicate with us,” she wrote in an email.

Brosnan-Smith said there are 102 restaurants in Aspen that don’t divert their organic material.

“That means all of their food waste is being thrown away,” she said. “We were trying to target those 102 restaurants to get their feedback on challenges they face and barriers to waste reduction.”

For those who did respond to the survey, they indicated that they were interested in the city writing legislation to increase participation but also are concerned about wildlife safety.

Pitkin County provides for free all-metal bear-proof organic collection containers to any business, or HOA, when they subscribe to an organic collection service.

Despite that support, participation has stagnated and demonstrates voluntary participation is not an effective or sufficiently fast way to achieve the council’s adopted waste goals, according to Chapman.

The most common barriers cited by restaurants in the survey were lack of space and the increased cost to implement a new diversion program, with several respondents suggesting that the city provide some financial incentives to businesses to increase participation.

Over the years, the city has increased the diversion of organic material to compost from zero to 700 tons a year through a variety of voluntary policies, programs and incentives.

However, that’s only diverting 3% or 4% of organic material found in the municipal waste stream, which is below the 37% of organic material identified in the 2015 composition study of municipal solid waste in Aspen, according to Chapman and Brosnan-Smith.

Staff members estimate 10% of the retail food sector in Aspen is diverting organic material to the composting facility at the Pitkin County Solid Waste Center; national studies indicate that between 60% and 80% of a retail food businesses waste is organic.