Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti made headlines recently by unveiling the city’s version of a “Green New Deal,” complete with ambitious goals to create a zero-emission transportation network, a zero-carbon electricity grid, and a Los Angeles that “won’t send a single piece of trash” to the landfill by 2050.
The goals in the new sustainability plan [PDF] are necessary to meet our environmental and sustainability needs, but how can the city make them feasible to achieve?
I discussed the zero-waste goal in particular on KPCC radio’s AirTalk program, along with my UCLA Law colleague Cara Horowitz. My comments were drawn largely from the 2016 CLEE report “Wasting Opportunities” on boosting energy recovery from municipal solid waste to meet climate goals.
The bottom line? Achieving zero waste will require significant reduction of materials in use, increases in recycling and composting, and — yes — some type of energy recovery from whatever is left over. You can listen to the broadcast here.
A few weeks ago, I gave a keynote address at the Southern California Conversion Technology conference in Los Angeles, held by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works. The conference covered a wide range of technical and policy issues related to the deployment of advanced technologies to convert municipal solid waste into energy.
It’s a subject we covered at Berkeley Law in a recent report entitled Wasting Opportunities: How to Secure Environmental & Clean Energy Benefits from Municipal Solid Waste Energy Recovery.
The conference material, including presentations and video of the various sessions, is now posted on-line. You can access them here, and my keynote video is below and also posted on my video page. We had an interesting discussion in particular about the need to engage environmental justice communities in the process, as well as other pressing policy matters that affect the industry.
