Dallas Morning News
By Tristan Hallman
Original article here

Dallas City Council members don’t want to waste any more time waiting for apartment complexes and businesses to offer recycling programs.

With a unanimous vote Monday, the council’s Quality of Life Committee directed city staff to draft an ordinance within the next two or three months that would mandate recycling programs for multi-family properties. The committee members also want city officials to look at mandating recycling services for commercial properties, but the timeline on such an ordinance was fuzzier.

The committee’s strident push for mandating recycling programs at apartments came a year earlier than a previous timeline called for and after council members reviewed data on the lack of voluntary participation from apartment complexes.

“We call ourselves a well-managed, cutting edge city. A growth city. Lots of new business. Dallas is on fire,” said council member Rickey Callahan. “Well, we need to get on fire with recycling.”

The decision was met without stiff pushback from the Apartment Association of Greater Dallas — which wants to see more details — and with backing from environmentalists such as Trammell S. Crow, the son of the famed late Dallas real estate developer.

“We need strong leadership,” Crow said at a Monday morning news conference. “We need it at the top level.”

Dallas has offered recycling services for single-family homes for years as the city tries to divert recyclable materials from landfills. Commercial property trade associations say the majority of their members are now offering single-stream recycling programs. And hotels are making progress, city officials said.

But apartments have been a recycling wasteland. Danielle McClelland, the city’s Zero Waste program manager, told the City Council’s Quality of Life Committee on Monday that voluntary participation among apartments has “not gone as well as any of us would have hoped at this point.”

Less than a quarter of apartment complexes in Dallas — which house more than half of the city’s residents — offer recycling services. The Apartment Association of Greater Dallas gave a variety of reasons: cost, lack of interest from residents and management and a shortage of space for big blue recycling bins.

Corey Troiani of the Texas Campaign for the Environment said the apartments “haven’t made a good-faith effort” to offer recycling.

The need for apartment complexes and commercial properties to participate is simple, McClelland said: “That’s where the people are.”

The council was due to consider mandating recycling programs in 2019, according to its Zero Waste Plan. But Dallas has been falling short so far on its zero-waste goals, and the situation didn’t figure to improve in the next year.

An ordinance, which would have to be approved by the full City Council, could mandate recycling programs for new construction and phase in existing apartments according to size. Other cities, such as Austin and San Antonio, only mandate recycling for apartment complexes with a certain number of units.

But those minimums are relatively low — five or more units in Austin and three in San Antonio — and Dallas could go a different route. Most of the complexes in Dallas have more than 200 units, and the city could start with mandates in those complexes first and work their way down to smaller complexes during the following years.

Apartment Association of Greater Dallas Executive Director Kathy Carlton said Monday she knew the mandate could be coming. She wants to work with city staff to address some of the potential pitfalls, such as easing parking space requirements to free up space for recycling.

“We more are concerned with some of the devil in the details,” she said.

Council member Philip Kingston said he felt past excuses from apartments didn’t hold water. He said he wants to see “the strongest possible mandatory recycling ordinance.”

But city officials have plenty of other questions to answer. How do they handle the differences with commercial waste? Can the city’s brand-new recycling facility can handle a major increase in materials? Should the city eventually mandate recycling of certain materials? Will the changing market for recycled materials support the stepped-up efforts? What if people still choose not to recycle even with the programs offered? And what will be the added costs for renters already pressured in recent years by rising rents?

White Rock council member Mark Clayton said there may be some reasonable concerns, but “at some point, you just got to tell people, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’”

“It can’t be a, ‘We’ll-get-around-to-it-in-10-years’ approach,” he said.

Houston Chronicle
Guest Op-Ed by Rosanne Barone, Texas Campaign for the Environment

HOUSTON — Mayor Sylvester Turner was right when he said the city’s newly approved recycling contract is a “win for Houstonians and the environment.”

After months of negotiations at City Hall, on Jan. 10, the City Council approved a 20-year single-stream recycling contract with Spanish resource management company FCC to replace the current Waste Management deal which is set to expire next year.

A new sorting facility will be built, and, when it’s completed in 2019, Houstonians will again be able to put glass in our green curbside bins, as well as single-use plastic bags, helping to keep them out of storm drains until we decide to live without them altogether.

But this decision is about more than just a new place to put our bottles, cans, cartons and paper. It’s about demonstrating that we are a society interested in healthier ways of existence. As a society, we can continue to remind each other, and the next generation, that there is no such thing as throwing trash “away.” Far too often, “away” ends up in our bayous, our rivers, our bays and our gulf.

And it’s about employing every option to decrease the amount of material going to landfills. That might be what we’ve always done, but in reality it is not a dependable solution for managing what we don’t use. Ask anyone who lives next to the McCarty Road landfill in northeast Houston, Greenhouse Road landfill near Katy or the Blue Ridge landfill in Fresno, who cite problems with windblown trash, noxious odors, methane gas releases and drainage ditches flowing with landfill “discharge.” Or ask someone who lives near one of more than 50 landfills in Texas that are leaking toxins into groundwater monitoring wells.

Landfills of today are the toxic dumps of tomorrow, contributing in the meantime to the illusion of “throw it away.”

It’s about becoming accustomed to the types of practices that are better for us in the long run, choosing reusable because it’s wiser and renewable because it’s safer.

It’s just something we have to do as we work towards to a more equitable city, where our exposure to air pollution, toxic-waste sites and roadside trash isn’t determined by our ZIP code. Recycling access remains a basic service for those of us who live in houses, so why not for those who live in multifamily buildings, 40 percent of Houston’s population? Not only should we have recycling wherever we live, but also where we work and go to school.

The new contract is both a tangible and symbolic commitment to the simple improvements that support a cleaner environment, while increasing our revenue and making the city more efficient. In Houston, the city is “the environment” — a paved, flood-prone, palm-treed, World Series-winning mix of distinctive, history-making innovation. Last year challenged us in many ways, and now in 2018 we are off to a running start on building a more sustainable future. I can’t wait to see what we will do next.

Rosanne Barone is the Houston Program Director for the Texas Campaign for the Environment.

Bookmark Gray Matters. It never ends up in our bayous, our rivers, our bays or our gulf.