Last night we had a spirited discussion on KALW’s “City Visions” on the prospects of turning the mountains of trash we’d otherwise send to landfills into energy.  You can listen to the audio here.

My takeaway is that despite all our efforts to reduce, reuse and recycle, there will always be some (hopefully small) percentage of garbage that we simply cannot avoid sending to landfills.  Some of that waste may be too complicated or expensive to reuse, from pizza boxes with glue to “urine-stained carpets,” as Rob White from Sierra Energy pointed out.

San Francisco is one of the national leaders in waste reduction policies, as Jack Macy described, and is able to address about 80-90% of its waste.  But there’s a remaining 10 percent that may dwindle further but will still be shipped to landfills somewhere.  At this point, hundreds of tons of garbage a day exit San Francisco for landfills.

I understand the concern from environmental advocates that waste-to-energy facilities have polluted local communities and that the promised results haven’t been delivered.

But as we argue in “Wasting Opportunities,” technologies have improved, and the state has an overriding interest in trying to figure out how to reduce landfilling and meet renewable energy goals.  It would benefit all stakeholders to engage in a process to determine under what standards it might make sense to deploy some of these higher-performing technologies.

Not all waste-to-energy technologies will make the cut, but with proper, evidence-based analysis, some may shake out and provide environmental benefits.  At that point, we can address the siting concerns to ensure low-income communities of color are not overburdened by deployment.

But if we don’t take action soon, the status quo on trash is simply not sustainable.