Dallas Morning News Op-Ed
Zac Trahan, Texas Campaign for the Environment
The Dallas City Council is scheduled to vote Wednesday for the first time on a comprehensive waste and recycling plan to guide us for the next generation. The proposed Local Solid Waste Management Plan outlines an ambitious goal to reduce our waste by 80 to 90 percent by 2040, which would make Dallas a national leader on waste reduction.
While it’s exciting to see Dallas offer such a bold plan, a look at the fine print shows that it needs important changes before being adopted. As currently written, this plan would make Dallas a recycling laggard — not a leader.
On the surface, the plan looks good. It calls for Dallas to become a “zero waste” city by 2040. Obviously it is almost impossible to get waste to absolutely zero, but through reduction, reuse, recycling and composting, it is possible to reduce our discards by 90 percent or more. Reducing waste means more jobs for Texas, saving taxpayer dollars, protecting our land and water, and keeping our city beautiful.
However, a peek under the hood reveals potential problems.
One immediate concern is that the plan could open the door to trash-burning facilities. Most zero-waste plans have a no-burn, no-bury policy and dictate that any conversion of waste to energy include only disposal, not recycling; Dallas’ plan does neither. Nor does Dallas’ plan rule out incineration as a possible form of “advanced waste diversion.” Burning trash is, of course, atrocious for the environment and, over the long haul, one of the most powerful disincentives to reduction, reuse and recycling. This plan is not worth adoption until it spells out that Dallas will not support incineration in any form.
Another concern is that while the plan has big goals for 30 years from now, it requires almost no real action within the next decade. For years, we will hear politicians tell us how we cannot expect apartments to offer recycling, we cannot deal with single-use bags, we should hold off offering municipal composting or anything else beyond what we are already doing. They will point to this plan to bolster their claims, noting that it does not call for concrete action on any of these items until the ’20s. Granted, none of these steps can be taken overnight, but putting them off for another decade is the opposite of leadership. This is overly cautious at best and outright cowardice at worst.
Perhaps the low sights set by this plan have something to do with the undemocratic, unaccountable process the city used to write it. An advisory committee was put together to give its input, but it only met twice and its deliberation was minimal. There was just one public hearing, last summer. The city paid pricey consultants to write the plan and used impressive lists of stakeholders to give the appearance of public input. Ultimately, however, it was sprung on residents at the last minute with the least possible public involvement.
There is a name for this: greenwashing. It is the process of calling environmental destruction environmental protection, and praising business as usual as a great achievement for the planet. City leaders are patting themselves on the back, but this could commit us to years of stagnation. We hope Mayor Mike Rawlings and the City Council will delay adopting this plan until it can be improved.
The good news is that we could transform this plan into one of the best in the country if we take the time to listen to the public and have the courage to expect real changes. In the meantime, it is merely a testament to what might have been. Dallas deserves better.
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