In our series, A Matter of Degrees, we ask the city of San Diego why it has yet to enact a recycling ordinance that could significantly reduce what’s buried in the Miramar landfill.
Yesterday we told you about the city’s policy to charge extra fees on construction and demolition waste headed for a recycling plant. The practice encouraged hauling companies to dump their loads rather than recycle. Now, KPBS reporter Joanne Faryon tells us the city could legislate companies to recycle their construction waste, but 40 feet stands in their way.
At the new Edco recycling plant, workers stand at an assembly line sorting wood from metal, drywall from concrete. Once it’s sorted, it can be recycled. This plant opened a few months ago. It’s the only plant of its kind in the county. And it was banking on a city of San Diego ordinance to bring it business. An ordinance that would mandate half of all construction waste be recycled.
That was back in 2005. But so far, the ordinance has yet to go into affect.
Steve South is president of Edco, the company that built this plant. He though if he built it, they would come. But so far, this plant is operating at one tenth its capacity.
South : The city of San Diego has such an ordinance but it’s triggered once there's facility in the city. This facility is approximately 40 feet outside the city of San Diego. It’s right across the street from the Lemon Grove shopping center, so technically it’s not in the city of San Diego.
Almost a third of what’s dumped at the Miramar landfill is construction and demolition waste. And with the landfill expected to fill up in just five years, there are questions as to why the city doesn’t enact its own ordinance.
Ric Anthony is a recycling consultant and heads up the city’s own citizens environment task force. He wrote a letter urging the mayor to trigger the ordinance once the Edco plant was operating.
Anthony : I think this is a real consensus issue it’s just government inertia that we're not moving forward, so here's our chance to see if we can make a democracy work. We go around the world telling everybody they got have democracies, yet we can't even get our elected officials to listen to us.
Several cities in the state and even the county have regulations that require construction companies to recycle at least half of its waste. The county of San Diego just passed theirs last month.
And some construction companies do recycle their waste voluntarily, even though it’s more work and costs more.
Whitney Dorn is with DPR construction. They’re finishing the interiors of four new buildings in Carmel Valley. Their goal is to recycle 75 percent of their waste.
Dorn : There's a statistic out there that for every square foot of construction built, there something like three to five pounds of waste that goes to the landfill, and a lot of that waste could be recycled elsewhere.
Mayor Jerry Sanders refused our request for an interview. City officials say they are taking a second look at the recycling ordinance. In the meantime, the city is proposing piling garbage higher at Miramar landfill to extend its life, or find new land in the area to bury more waste.
For KPBS, I’m Joanne Faryon.
