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.

The Recycling Conspiracy

In a downpour last Saturday, my Jeep was one of nearly 900 personal vehicles snaking through the County Stadium parking lot in my long-adopted home of Durham, North Carolina.

Collectively, souls driving these vehicles dropped off 14 tons of electronics and another 36,000 pounds of paper.  It is one of several events held each year to make it convenient for residents to recycle e-waste, items not accepted curbside for bi-weekly pick-up nor in garbage disposal.

That’s an average of 32 tons per vehicle, obviously considerably less in my two-door Rubicon.   I had begun assembling items to take for collection a few months earlier and still forgot several items.

In a community northwest of Durham, the waste is stripped down and each element, including precious metals recovered, are returned to manufacturers to be made into more products of this type.

If we lived in a world with “full-cost” accounting the components of every product we buy including food would go full circle like this.  Then there would be zero waste and the built in financial incentives would result in zero litter, for that matter.

This would be both because the cost of waste, litter removal and recycling would be built into the marketplace and because the value and cost would be built into the product instead of shifted onto the general public, more specifically taxpayers.

Today in the U.S., only 27% of e-waste (anything that plugs in or runs on batteries or a motor) is being recycled, 19% if you go by items vs. tonnage.  This includes 40% of computers, 33% of monitors and copy devices and only 17% of televisions and mobile devices.

In other terms, Americans generate 4.41 tons of e-waste each year and of this only 850,000 tons or one quarter is being recycled.  The rest ends up in landfills or incinerators rather than being captured and reused by the marketplace.

The good news is that we are recycling nearly two and a half times as much as we were a dozen years ago but as of 2012 on average, each American household was spending $1,312 on new electronics annually, accumulating an average then of 24 distinct products.

Different than other appliances, the the vast proportion of the environmental impact from electronics is in their production, not their use.   Using one ingredient – aluminum - as an example, recycling reduces that impact by 90%.

On top of that, reuse compared to disposal, using computers as an example, creates 296 jobs for every 10,000 tons disposed each year.

Cost is often given as the reason these items can’t just be placed in curbside, single-stream recycling.  The prohibitive cost is apparently separating them from other recyclables.

You would think that curbside administrators would be working furiously to resolve this just as they have had to do with every other recyclable item, but there is more than bureaucratic inertia slowing that process.

You probably have to be my age to remember The John Birch Society, but the ultra-conservative group is still around.  They made everything a Communist conspiracy beginning in 1958, when I was ten years old.

Before it became popular within the Republican Party, this society sought to purge moderate and liberal Republicans from that political party, even labeling moderate Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower a tool of Communists.

The group lost influence, credibility and membership after the 1970s but it still exists and its ideology is promoted by other groups less tainted or rebranded.

About a year and a half ago, the Society’s bi-weekly publication The New American that curbside recycling is a conspiracy to undermine American values, this time by environmentalists.

It doesn’t take much to suspect the group’s finger-prints were on so-called regulatory reform legislation passed recently by North Carolina lawmakers, giving new life to landfills - mega-landfills – and surrendering public roadsides to billboard blight, eroding the state’s brand as “Beauty Amplified.”

When I relocated to Durham in 1989, nationwide there were already 1,000 curbside recycling programs.  Within two years there were 4,000 and now there are more than 10,000 in addition to tens of thousands of recycling centers.

But curbside recycling began in 1874 in Baltimore, Maryland, nearly two decades before the founding of The Sierra Club, a connection ripe for conspiracists I suppose.

Trash became a national policy issue for Congress in 1965, the year after the all-aluminum can was introduced and four decades after landfilling became popular, ironically promoted as a way to reclaim wetlands.

Obviously conspiracists would see linkage, although municipal dumps date to 500 B.C.

Recycling, beginning with paper, dates at least to the first century of 1000 A.D..  Patriots and American Revolutionary War soldiers were big recyclers.  Recycling peddlers in the 1840s were among America’s earliest entrepreneurs.

The Salvation Army made recycling philanthropic in 1865 and materials recovery became a municipal function in New York City in 1897, at the dawn of the Progressive Era when recycling and reuse programs shot up, ah, definitely a conspiracy then!

Recycling became a patriotic duty in America during the two World Wars and there you have it, recycling comes full circle as a Communist conspiracy.

Durham’s Food Scrap Entrepreneurs

A few months ago, a start-up in Durham, North Carolina where I live began Tilthy Rich Compost, a business that picks up food scraps from subscribers on a weekly basis, then turns it into compost a few miles from downtown.

Currently, the service area is approximately a five mile radius of downtown and expanding.  Pick up is mostly by bicycle for neighborhoods and a truck service for commercial clients.

The company will even return the finished compost to you if you wish, for use in your garden or landscape.  They also offer the service to restaurants, commercial kitchens and cafeterias.

At our house, we only eat at home a few days a week, but they have a smaller bucket for people like us and a larger bucket for families that eat at home regularly.

The new company is emblematic of Durham’s distinctive entrepreneurial personality, in particular social entrepreneurship.

Forty percent of the nation’s food supply goes to waste and I am sure Durham is no exception.  Residential food scraps alone make up 12.4% of municipal waste across America, a greater percentage than plastic.

In restaurants, according to the report Wasted, analysts at the Natural Resources Defense Council calculate that 4% to 10% of food becomes waste during preparation before it gets to the consumer.  Another significant portion is served but not eaten.

Approximately 10% of fast food is discarded because it has been prepared but not purchased within safe time limits.  At home, Americans throw out approximately 25% of the food and beverages they buy.

Often, if you are like us, food products are discarded either because  plans change and they spoil or because I in particular am one of those people perpetually confused by “use by” and “best by” date labels.

Even before consumers buy groceries, a food industry consultant estimates that up to one in seven truckloads of perishables delivered to supermarkets has to be thrown away.

Analysis in the United Kingdom estimate that if food scraps were removed from landfills there, greenhouse gas abatement would be the equivalent of removing a fifth of all cars in that country from the roads.

By the time I retired four years ago, 90 cities and towns in the U.S. had begun offering food waste collection, double from two years before.  North Carolina composts below the average for the Southeast.

I suspect though, that a personalized and scalable service such as Tilthy Rich Compost will always be in demand.  In our part of the country, as a developer-friend of mine jokes, soil so easily becomes compacted that it almost qualifies as impervious.

We need all of the compost we can get.

The Straight Poop on Dog Waste

Let’s talk poop, dog poop to be exact.

Anyone who reads this blog knows I love dogs, especially English Bulldogs. I was surprised with DOGIPOT pet stations appeared in Rockwood Park near where I live; and now I know it isn’t just a gesture by the often entrepreneurial, customer-driven folks at Durham Parks and Recreation.

There are nearly 70,000 pet dogs in Durham County.

Dog waste in North Carolina contributes 20%-30% of the fecal coliform in the state’s water supply.

Just one gram of doggy pooh contains 23 million fecal coliform cells and, in addition to pathogens, pet waste contains nitrogen that fosters algae that soaks up oxygen in water.

On average in this state, nearly half of dog owners DO NOT pick up after their pets. Judging by people I see routinely letting their dogs poop right in someone’s front yard, even in tony neighborhoods, many people don’t have a clue that “picking up” after your pet isn’t just an anal-gesture of politeness or fastidiousness or just for those of us with a lawn ego.

I’m writing about this because I never let my dog Mugsy (shown in this blog in his favorite position) near the strip of grass along the curbs of people’s homes, even though it is public-right away.

To the amusement of neighbors and friends, I’ve always been able to successfully train my bullies to go in the considerable amount of ivy growing in my yard or on mulch. Whether or not I run out of bags during a walk in a park, I always try to take Mugsy up in the high rough or in thick brush to relieve himself.

Now I know that I have still been contributing to the problem, or Mugsy has, because parks are primarily storm run-off areas and waste left even in areas clear of sight and human traffic will probably get into the water supply just as quickly, if not more quickly.

Now Durham’s water is well treated but that doesn’t mean we can just throw anything in there….this is about public health, saving tax dollars and being environmentally responsible.

A thoughtless individual who used to live next door would walk his dog down a private drive by some nearby apartments to let his dog do his “business.” Every time the owner of the duplexes called out to say that this man and his dog were trespassing, his loud retort would have made “Michelle Backmann” proud.

“It’s a free country and my dog can go where it wants.”

Actually it IS a free country…free to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…but it is not free of responsibility and it has never been, nor is it free when it comes to protecting life.

Pick up after your dog. When you see others who don’t know they should, ask them to be considerate and use some of these facts to help them understand that it is in their best interests…in the public’s interest.

Hopefully, elected officials won’t cross the idea of DogiPots off their list just because they’ve been deemed an experiment in a few parks as a trial. They work. Expand them to all parks. Offer them at cost to neighborhood associations and residents. They would fit nicely on the post for mail boxes, every block or so.

However, I believe those of us with pet dogs should pay a fee to offset the costs. Yes, having a pet dog is part of that “pursuit of happiness” thing for many of us. It is our reward, but it comes with a price.

Considering the fact that the 46 million households in this nation that own 78 million pet dogs contribute a major portion of the $48 million spent overall on pets and pet care, we believe its worth every penny.