Durham’s 1982 Recycling Social Entrepreneur

I hate playing cards, in part because of the childhood essential tremor manifest in my hands.  Even if that wasn’t the case, I’d be lousy at it.  My facial expressions instantly give away what I’m thinking.

Recently I overheard a friend explain that when the surrounding county rolled expanded pilot curbside recycling out to nearly all of the 11,000 households outside of the City of Durham, not enough was budgeted for roll-out carts.

So a stop-gap was to identify which households didn’t immediately use theirs and then scoop them back up for redistribution elsewhere.

Not exactly results-based accountability but it reminded me that the history of Durham’s acclaimed city-wide curbside recycling dates back to a social entrepreneur in 1982.

Just as I retired he was recognized with several others for social innovation during Durham’s Annual Tribute Luncheon, but unfortunately not for that one.

Dave Kirkpatrick is a serial social entrepreneur who upon graduation here in 1982 from Duke University, locally founded the non-profit SunShares, an early pioneer in both recycling and solar power.

With training in both physics and history analysis, he also saw business model potential in grassroots sustainability, as we would call it today.

His social enterprise was one of the first handful in the nation to incubate the practice of scalable curbside pickup of recyclables, a first using subscriptions.

A year before I arrived in Durham, Kirkpatrick’s quiet intensity had spurred the same City Council members who had spearheaded a billboard ban as part of a broader effort to roll back corrosive blight to set their sights on reducing other types of litter and waste.

In 1988, SunShares teamed with the City to ramp up curbside pick-up of recyclable community wide.

Dave looks more like an economist than a missionary, but he has made his life’s work in enterprise a testament to his faith that waste, including the blessing of natural resources, is sacrilege.

In 1994, five years after I first met him, he moved on to other social enterprises including SJF Ventures, a series of funds for clean tech.  Three years later and a year after Dave was nationally recognized, Durham, where he still lives, made it unlawful to place certain items in trash.

I thought of Dave when a few years ago a local government coordinator let it slip that 80% of Durham’s nearly 70,000 households actively use curbside recycling.  According to some studies that is more than twice the rate nationwide.

Understanding a little about the real value in community benchmarks, I quickly asked, “How do we follow up with the 20% who don’t.”  The answer came back simply, “We don’t.” 

Nor did there seem to be any curiosity to do so even after it was suggested a personal visit might be useful to explain how it works and the benefit to them and their neighbors as well as to gather intelligence.

Just maybe they were newcomers or from areas without recycling or from countries that don’t yet value the practice?  It can’t just be assumed they are all dolts.

Many public servants, about 7-in-10 based on national and sector-wide surveys of workplace engagement, fail to embrace the importance of continuing public education or worse, or just don’t care enough to practice the philosophy of “each one, teach one.”

They may also fail to grasp that the 80/20 principle works both ways.

It could be that the 20% who are not recycling in Durham may also be generating a far disproportionate share of the waste still going into landfills, just as this is approximately the same percentage responsible for littering roadsides and businesses.

Regardless, telling themselves a story that those who don’t recycle; just don’t care, is a huge mistake.  Sure, its 14,000 households but a dozen or so interviews would help shape an effectively targeted direct communications strategy.

Non-profits and local governments deserve credit for scaling up recycling from those early beginnings making feasible private-sector involvement such as Sonoco, which began more than a hundred years ago as the Southern Novelty Company.

It made its name creating packaging for products, but starting in the 1920s very gradually moved into the recycling of that packaging.  Now it operates 40 materials recovery facilities around the country serving 125 cities and towns such as Durham.

Sonoco also consults now with more than 15,000 retailers on how to lessen their waste footprint.

But it was experimentation by non-profit social enterprises such as Dave’s that finally bridged the gap between recycling and what was needed to make it scalable for governments and businesses as a public-private venture.

We’ve come a long way since Dave’s pioneering 1982 startup at a time when even in cities, only between 7 and 9% of Americans were recycling.

But while passionate proactive public advocacy is seemingly in short supply, the job is far from finished with prolific waste stream ingredients such as plastic grocery bags and food scraps yet to be widely incorporated.

Once again, passionate social entrepreneurs may be needed to provide the bridge.

Devolving To Local Government by Delegation, By Neglect

Many people, rather than insist that local governments do the jobs for which they were created and are best suited, seem to harken instead back to the late 1700s.

Back then, rather than handling general upkeep, local governments would issue ordinances obliging each person in the city to clean or repair that portion of the street abutting their house or shop.

Researchers call this period “government by delegation” or “government committed to a policy of externalizing the costs of action.”

That all changed after the American Revolution but it seems that local administrators in communities such as Durham, North Carolina where I live are trying to return to the era of “government by delegation” by neglecting community upkeep while pushing it off on volunteers.

In 1800, near the end of George Washington’s two terms as the first president of the United States, there were still only “thirty-three towns with a population of 2,500 or more, and only six of these urban areas had populations of 10,000.  Only 5% of Americans lived in cities.”

“By 1820, the number with over 2,500 had increased to sixty-one, but only five had populations over 25,000 and 7% of Americans lived in cities, while a third of England did with a comparative population.

Within that span, New York City had also exchanged its Royal Charter to transform as a municipality under the authority granted by the state legislature.  It had also set up a public work force to clean its streets and wharves.

Rather than relying on the inconsistent efforts of residents by eternalizing those responsibilities, NYC had “become an institution financed primarily by public taxation to handle public concerns,” beginning with community upkeep.

By 1805, it had done the same with public health.

In short, following the Revolution, cities and towns moved from externalizing “shoulds” upon residents to implementing scalable, consistent solutions in the public interest.

Today, there are 89,004 local governments in the U.S. including 3,031 counties (down since 2007) and 19,522 municipalities (up since 2007) and 12,884 school districts (down since 2007.)  The majority are special-purpose districts such as fire, water etc.

Local government concern for overall community upkeep upon which these institutions were originally anchored more than two hundred years ago, may have peaked following a spike of renewed emphasis during the Progressive Era, which also gave us city manager forms of government, planning, beautification and urban forestry efforts etc.

Today, local governments seem more likely to neglect community upkeep or to leave it to elected officials as a one-off add on or hope that residents who cite it as a high or very high priority overall in scientific polls will become fed-up and try to fill the void.

Local governments have devolved back two hundred years into “government by delegation,” forgetting the lessons of their origin and the American Revolution.

Rather than fall back to well-meaning efforts by volunteers to fill this void which, while cathartic, are never adequate or scalable enough, maybe we need another Revolution.

Or maybe we need historical exhibits like one in San Francisco right now entitled Urban Olfactory which recreates the smells of neglect in cities past to remind us of the gaps local governments must fill.

One of the major reasons for this current state of neglect is that local government accounting never connects the dots between sources of revenue and areas of expense.

This is why periodic reports are so inconsistent and incomplete when they report that various public facilities have or have not resulted in a deficit.  They only rarely incorporate tax revenues generated by facilities beyond their doors.

Blinded the news media fails to dig down into the numbers.

Durham local governments are again pinching down efforts at community upkeep this year due to a problem that is self-inflicted.

Ostensibly, the reason is to avoid tax increases even for items of neglect.  This way of thinking resulted in bonds to repave streets recently at many times the cost to taxpayers that periodic tax increases would have meant.

Those of us who have worked to pass bonds over the years, did so based on computations of the miniscule increases they would mean to our taxes.  But this is where the problems plaguing local governments today begin.

Instead of immediately increasing taxes after a popular vote, local administrators and elected officials cross their fingers hoping that economic growth will absorb the costs instead, which it sometimes does.

But instead of levying the increases when voters approval was given and then issuing a refund if and when the revenues aren’t needed, local officials walk themselves into a trap when growth in the economy is not sufficient to hide the costs.

Plagued by looming debt service, they don’t want to explain to tax payers that the cost of bonds weren’t levied after each favorable vote and now need to be levied years later when memories have dimmed.

So instead, they double down the squeeze on things they think we won’t notice such as community upkeep.

Only we do notice.  And left no explanation other than ineptitude, we are left mumbling to ourselves that local officials just don’t get it or they lack political will or they fail to connect the dots between community upkeep and curb appeal to economic development and increased valuation.

Only they do get it.  They are just mired in a trap of their own creation, one that is inscrutable to residents.  Rather than fix this paradigm, they say things like, “if it matters enough, people will get angry and let us know.”

And that is the stuff of revolutions.