March 7, 2024 Juneau Commission on Sustainability Q&A Solid Waste Session

All right, can you hear me now?

Welcome to the March edition of the Juneau Commission on Sustainability Sustainability Session. Oh, we're getting some feedback.

Ah, technology. Here we go. Turn your volume all the way down. You're— it is great. Test, test.

There we go. Fixed. All right, third time's the charm. Welcome to the March edition of the Sustainability Sessions.

Past sessions we have talked specifically about composting. Our last session and this session are both question and answer sessions more specifically focused— or sorry, more generally focused on solid waste issues here in Juneau.

This series is going to be continuing next month with tentatively a session on cruise ship waste. Stay tuned with the JCO— or with the CBJ Facebook and online for more information on that. With us tonight, we have Diana Robinson and Stuart Ashton from CBJ. They will introduce their roles more in a minute. They're going to give just a very brief presentation on how solid waste is handled in Juneau, but most of our agenda tonight is going to be questions from the public.

We are accepting them both in person and online. I have my iPad here, so if you enter a Q&A online, I will be able to see that and read it out here in the room. And I believe we are recording this session just for all of your awareness. So with that, I will turn it over to Diana and Stuart. Awesome.

Thank you so much.

Share my screen. Marion, are you sharing your screen right now? I have not, but I have a spotlight. Ah.

I've changed the spotlight rules on me. Okay.

Are you able to share? There we go. All right.

Okay.

As Nick said, my name is Diana Robinson. I am the environmental project specialist for the Engineering and Public Works Department. My role is all things environmental and sustainability, but it is largely waste at the moment because that is one of the bigger issues facing our community right now. Stuart, go ahead and introduce yourself. Hello, my name is Stuart Ashton.

I'm the RecycleWorks Operations Manager. So if you frequent the junk vehicle, household hazardous waste program, recycling program, those are my areas where I keep them going. All right, so we just wanted to give a brief overview about who does what in Juneau with waste. So we, we kind of have two main functions. There's waste hauling and then there's the landfill.

Alaska Waste is a private company and they are— they hold the public certificate for waste hauling in Juneau and Waste Management, another private company rather, owns the landfill here in Juneau. And then CBJ As Stuart mentioned, we have our recycling center that's in the landfill, the junk vehicle program, and the household hazardous waste program.

And, uh, just, just to give you an idea of, you know, who is regulating what, where, uh, Alaska Waste and waste hauling in the state of Alaska is regulated as a public utility, and that is, uh, through the Regulatory Commission of Alaska. And then landfills are regulated environmentally through the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation and the Environmental Protection Agency, kind of situation dependent. And then for recycling household hazardous waste, junk vehicles, there are certain DEC or EPA rules and statutes that we also follow, but typically those apply more to the landfill. And then we also— let me go back— we also have some other recyclers in town, including Juneau Compost, which accepts food yard waste and other organics. Skookum Sales and Recycling, which is our big scrap metal recycler, and then DNS Recycling accepts some scrap metal and e-waste, correct?

Yeah. Okay. Okay, and here's just a brief rundown of CBJ's RecycleWorks programs. So we have our recycling center that diverts an average of about 5%, at least in 2023, from the landfill's annual volume. And CBJ contracts with Waste Management for that service.

Household hazardous waste, which are things like household cleaning chemicals, pesticides, paint, cooking oil, We— it's really important to keep those out of the sewer system and out of our water here. So CBJ has a really great program where it's open 4 days, 3 days a week. 3 Days a week. 3 Days a week. You can bring by your household hazardous waste free of charge, and Clean Harbors, our contractor, will take that.

We especially encourage cooking oil. And then lastly, we have our junk vehicle program. We contract through SCUCOM for that, and they crush and ship those vehicles out of town for us.

Okay, and here's a brief rundown from 2022.

In 2022, the landfill received about 25,000 tons worth of municipal solid waste. That, that's just your regular trash, things from businesses, things from residences. It does not include what's called C&D waste. That's construction and demolition waste. That's roughly another 5,000 tons annually on top of everything else.

It's counted different. It's kind of a diff— different beast. CBJ diverted about 1,200 pounds of recyclables last— or in 2022, rather, and about 355 tons of household hazardous waste. Let me do that one too. And Alaska Waste, which I think, Stuart, you got updated numbers for, maybe it was 2023, but on average they do around 600 tons of commingled recycling per year.

And then the past couple of years, Juneau Compost have diverted about 250 tons of food waste from our landfill as well.

Okay, and this is just, this is based on national averages. From the EPA, and this is the most recent study that they've done, which was in 2018, unfortunately. And this is just to give you an idea of what the average, you know, trash can holds. So, you know, obviously it changes per season, but this is just to give you an idea of, you know, the— what's taking up space in our landfill right now. Okay, and then finally, this is just are, are recycling over time.

You can see that there has been dips since around 2018. There are a couple reasons for that. One is China's National Sword program, which was— and we can talk about that more later, but basically China stopped accepting recycling from outside countries in 2018, 2018, 2019. And then 2020, obviously we all know what happened in 2020. And then you can see on this bottom graph, that's just kind of changes over time of the amount instead of the rate.

And I'm gonna stop that there, that presentation there. And yeah, let me stop sharing my screen. Good. All right. All right.

Thank you for getting us started. So Q&A, like I said, we'll accept both in person and online, but I just want to start us off with one question that came up in several different versions when we had our meeting.

Last month in the Valley, which is this question of if people drop stuff off at the recycling center or if they put it in their commingled recycling bin on the curb, what percentage of that stuff is actually getting recycled and how much of that stuff ends up getting dumped in the landfill? That was something people were very interested in before. I'll let you take that, Stuart. Oh, this is my favorite one. Recycling has changed since 2018, as Diane has mentioned, and it's no longer stable.

We can't rely on it. The prices are going up month to month. It's the Wild West now. To answer your specific question about how much of it gets recycled, a part of that is the information is— a lot of it is wrong. Juno's recyclables, all of it, if you put it correctly in the correct places, It gets recycled.

That's it. It does. If you do it right, it gets done correct. What does that process look like beginning to end? Okay, yeah, obviously with— if you've come to the recycling center at the landfill, you bring your source-separated materials, you dump it in there.

Waste Management has operators with equipment, they put it in a baling machine that the city owns and puts it in a nice little square, put it in a bigger square that goes on the barge down south, then it gets trucked to a train, then it gets trained over to the facility where it gets sorted, cleaned, separated, packed up again, and then shipped off to mills or different places depending on the material it is around the country.

All right, thank you.

Questions from the audience?

Yeah, in back. What happens to the recycling if it's not done correctly? Okay, the materials that go into the recycling, again, for commingle and for their source-separated CBJ program, if it's garbage, if it's a plastic that's not number 1 and number 2, if it's just something that doesn't go there, then it goes all the way down to the Washington area. It goes to that facility that I mentioned called a MRF, a materials recovery facility, where they process it, clean it, sort it, and if it's not what it's supposed to be, it goes off the end and it goes into a landfill.

But there's probably going to be a lot of related questions, so like a comprehensive answer that kind of addresses like what is bad, you know, like what is not good. Like, I mean, there's just a bunch of other questions that I think are kind of obviously there, so could we just get a description more? Like what is good, what is bad? Like, oh, as far as—. What is a scenario where someone goes and drops something off and then it makes it not Not good.

Okay, sorry. With our source separated, we accept corrugated cardboard. So if it's corrugated cardboard, which you look at the side and it's got the holes, the ridges in it, that's one section. So anything that goes in that section that's not that gets thrown away. In the, uh, the source separated CBJ program, we accept number 1 and number 2 plastics only.

And if it's a number 1 or number 2 plastic, it goes to the CRIX+. If it's not that potentially goes to landfill. And the same with the rest of them. Tin, if it's not a piece of tin, goes in the landfill, and so on. Common issues you see that, and what are, what are the, like, do all the recycling that it's with get tossed, or like, what are the consequences for different actions, and what are the most common poorly done things?

You're looking for a little more information regarding what the recycling looks like now, and like, what are issues facing it? It's the same as it always has been, and it's the question of where does my recycling go? Correct and false. If you do it correctly, it goes to the correct places. If you don't, it doesn't.

Exactly. And the vast majority of this material is getting cleaned in some form. The more we do, the better prices it could potentially catch. So we really want it to be the best stuff. So the better you can sort it, the cleaner it is.

I'm not asking you to scrub every bottle or whatnot, but definitely rinse it out and no food debris or greasy stuff. So things like that. You know, just make it look a little decent, and that's the best we can, we can do. Yeah, just kind of, no, go on from what you were saying. So I think a good rule of thumb is if it has food on it, then it's not good, right?

And then for our program, the CBJ source separated program, if it's not a 1 or 2 plastic, then that goes out. The Alaska Waste curbside recycling, I believe, is 1 through 7, correct? Yeah, they take all of them. Yeah. So, so it depends on also what where you're recycling, right?

Alaska Waste curbside. If you have curbside recycling, that's Alaska Waste, that's commingled. So you can put all of those materials together. It'll get separated out once it gets down to that MRF in Washington. However, but again, if you're coming to the recycling center and you're putting 3 through 7s in our plastic recycling, that will get thrown out.

So who is sorting that to throw that out? So there are very fun, and I highly, if you're interested, I highly encourage you to, to look these up on YouTube, but they have these incredible sorters and it's kind of a combination of human sorters that are literally standing by a conveyor belt and they've been doing it for so long that they just know by sight what's wrong and what's right. And then there are also optical sorters which can tell the density of different plastics. And things like that. I can kind of pick out different materials.

And it's kind of like a— it's just a very fancy Rube Goldberg machine that kicks out different materials into different piles, basically. And there are many different types of them, but they almost always involve some element of humans double-checking the process. Yeah. That's happening when it—. After—.

Yes, in Washington. Yeah. Yeah. So how much of that, how much of that is going to the landfill? Oh, okay.

That's perfect. We, the, our material, because it's source separate, and I say ours by the CBJ, the stuff that's brought in sorted by the public and the residents, or by the residents and the commercial. The last, every once in a while we have got our meetings with Waste Management, or like, can we do better? Well, you know, what plastics, what are we doing, kind of figuring things out and just hear, hear what we can do to improve upon it. And one of the first questions we always go over is what does our contamination level look like?

Thankfully, they've got good communication with the facilities down there. And so while we don't get exact measurements because our material is so small into this place that it's going, because of Waste Management, our relationship with them, that's why we're actually going to this actually really cool facility. We have extremely low numbers, and we're looking at less than 2% potentially in some areas. Even the commingle that comes from Juneau is very, very very clean. Now it's going to be dirtier because it's completely unsupervised and it just happens when you're picking up that money.

But Juneau in general, from my experience and what I have heard from the recycling people that are doing this for us, we do very, very well.

So we have a question online that's kind of the reverse of what we were just talking about. We're talking about how much of what we try to recycle winds up getting trashed. Do we have any sense of how much material that is recyclable that is getting thrown into the landfill instead? Yeah. So let's see.

Basically, well, you guys can't see this chart.

In the presentation, I have a graph that has the diversion rate. That means that of, well, gosh, I, can put on the website, basically.

So the, the long— the short answer is it's really hard to know. Every city is different. You know, we have those national averages that I mentioned that kind of give you a ballpark figure. You know, there's roughly 22% of our waste stream is food waste, for example. So, you know, Figuring out those numbers is, is a lot of reverse math.

You know, at the end of the year, we can look at what went into the landfill, compare it to what we know we recycled, and then compare that to the national averages. But I, I will say, especially things like cardboard and the metals, we could really do with increasing those diversion rates. There is, there's an enormous amount of cardboard going into the landfill right now. And, uh, if you wanted to pick one material to really focus on, cardboard or either of the metals, that's, that's your biggest bet. But, um, yeah, it's, it's kind of a moving target.

We will be doing what's called a waste characterization study in May, uh, and basically what that means is we're hiring a highly specialized contractor that's going to come up here and sort through our waste over the course of a week. And they're, you know, we're going to target businesses versus residential versus multifamily to kind of get a really good idea of what our waste stream looks like. And that'll be able to give us better numbers to compare against our yearly recycling so we can get a better idea of what we're actually— how much is left in that waste stream.

So in past Q&A sessions that we've been to, we've all been told that The landfill has a lifespan of 10 years left. Okay, so then my next question, my next thought is, okay, what happens if we do nothing? That's always the wrong answer. Let's just do nothing. And the other alternative you have from those charts that we've seen, build a new landfill.

Second one, the middle one, incinerator. Well, that's the third one, incinerator. What's one that's in the middle? Transfer station. Ship stuff.

Ship it out. Yeah, those are our alternatives. We can do nothing and just wait for 10 years and then whatever. But currently our choices are to ship it, landfill, and incinerate. But on top of that all, what I've gathered is that those two companies In my opinion, both the curbside and the landfill people don't really have an incentive to divert.

What happens at the end of 10 years? We do nothing. Well, if we do nothing as a community, basically we will end up shipping our waste south. That— yep, yep. Well, minus recycling, but that's still gets shipped stuff, right?

Real quick, yeah, very, very, very, very likely that's what's going to happen. But the takeaway is that we don't know, we can't answer that because we're not the ones that make the decision.

Um, someone else is— some another company is going to make that decision, right? If we, the community— yeah, sorry, I was like, oh, that's—. We like as a community don't come up with— you don't, um If we just kind of like let things go as is, we'll lose like control of—. Yeah, we lose our opportunity. There's an opportunity, as you mentioned, the landfill has roughly 10 to 15 years left.

That's best guesstimations that we have. Obviously that can fluctuate a little bit. Alaska Waste, it's their responsibility to pick up the garbage in this town. Garbage will get picked up. So even if we do nothing or whatever happens, that's their job and they do it well everywhere and they're going to continue doing it.

Where it goes, that's the big question. And again, we can't speak for them, but it's either going to be one of those options, and it could be any, any of, any one of them. It could be any combination of it. It literally is whatever a private company wants to do.

So please, is DPJ working on any sort of advancement towards a strategy of owning our own and developing our own? Like, is that—. If you're saying likely it'll get shipped, so then is that because the efforts that I don't know about that you may or may not be making aren't feasible. So that's just the most likely scenario for what, you know, one of those two businesses would probably end up doing. Oh, shipping itself.

CBJ, we are going to be performing a high-level study to look at kind of the logistical and economic feasibility of those options that Doreen mentioned. So, you know, how much will it cost to build a new landfill? How long will that take? What kind of resources do we need for that? Versus, you know, a waste-to-energy incinerator, which is another option that a lot of folks in this town, they remember the incinerators that used to be at the landfill and think fondly back on those days.

And there's been a lot of talk, I mean, gosh, since the '80s in this community about some kind of waste-to-energy incinerator. So we'll also be looking at the same issues with that. It will be you know, how much do we have enough, high enough volume to run an incinerator? That's really a big question for those. And it may prevent that too.

Yep, yep, exactly. And, you know, how much is that going to cost? Almost certainly a lot more than a landfill. That's a, I think that's a pretty fair thing to guess. And yeah, more of those logistical, like, where would it go?

And the feasibility study was on the incinerator or just on any? This is on, it's a very high-level look at all of these options to kind of inform our, our decision as a, as a community, like what kind of path do we start wanting to go down to. Because we could, we could sink a lot of time and a lot of money into looking at all of those options in depth. But, uh, which is what this division has been doing for the past 3 decades. Juno has been working towards this feasibility study, which we're extremely excited about, because the level that we can get now, especially with the waste characterization study combined with that, um, that study is going to give the options that have been presented to the city for the past number of decades.

Nothing has really changed. Garbage stays the same in this town. The population has stayed the same in this town. All of our numbers are just right there. We're kind of like a hold there, which is good in some senses for this one.

But a study is basically just the higher level of what we've been doing for many, many years. And it's really— this is now the time. We have less than 10 years as a community to make the choice. Again, it's— we didn't know the rough times, so this study is basically our Hail Mary to say if we, we the collective want to decide this, this topic, this is the time. And, uh, yeah, yeah, exactly what Sarah said.

During, uh, during our last Q&A session on solid waste, multiple people independently had questions about plasma gasification. So is it fair to say that the updated kind of options study, we'll call it, but also, you know, different from studies of 20 years ago, that it includes modern incinerator-type technologies? Yes, yes, very much so. And we'll also be applying for— the Department of Energy has what's called the National Renewable Energy Lab, and they do a lot of work with waste-to-energy incinerators. And we are going to be applying for, and on top of these other studies, what's called technical assistance from them that they give, they'll give you 40 free hours just to also kind of help us narrow down.

There's a lot of options in waste-to-energy technology in this day and age. As Nick mentioned, a lot of technological advancements have really grown by leaps and bounds. So, you know, that's, I mean, that's a whole kettle of fish unto itself, like which kind of incinerator. Would we want. But yeah, this, the main study will really just give us kind of those big picture bullet points so that we're all operating from a common set of facts about incinerators, landfills, and transfer stations so we can all have a really fruitful conversation, hopefully.

I have, after this question which I have, there's a few questions in the chat I can bounce to you that are not coming through the Q&A app. But, yes. Oh, you're seeing them? Oh, okay, good. All right.

My question is, it's understandable why no assembly member or mayor is eager to be the person who says, here's where the landfill is going to be, because it's easy to say we want a new landfill, but nobody wants it in their neighborhood. Nobody wants it in a specific spot. There's going to be an environmental cost anywhere we put it to species to what, you know, people don't want. To put a new landfill anywhere, but we have to do it. So what can we communally do as far as pushing on the assembly, pushing on the mayor, and communicating with our neighbors about the need to— like, the opposite of NIMBY, I'm hearing, is YIMBY, like, yes in my backyard, that we have to— sometimes you just have to say yes, I need to, I will accept that we have to do the thing.

Oh, you know, that's, that's a phrase people are using now in urban development. Well, nobody wants giant blocks of like condos or high-rise Apartments, but also we have to build them, right? So they have to go somewhere. So like, how do we as a community, how would you see a good strategy of pushing the assembly, pushing the mayor to say, hey, this is our Hail Mary, we have to do this, we have to agree as a community that either we're going to put this somewhere or we're going to be kind of at the mercy of private shipping that can put whatever price they want on it for us because what are you going to do about garbage, you know? Yeah, absolutely.

And I will say this current assembly, we have some assembly members that are very passionate about addressing this issue. Uh, the— this— it's been the subject of conversation in the Assembly for 40 years. Um, it's not easy. A lot of good, very intelligent, hardworking people have put a lot of time into this and kind of walked away empty-handed without a solution. So, um, they know they have a big job ahead of them.

But I, I think just, you know, In your communications with them, if you ever reach out, maybe just asking for status updates or, you know, communicating that this is an issue that you're very passionate about. Always helpful. Coming to meetings like this is also very great. I will plug the JCOS, the Juneau Commission on Sustainability. They have monthly regular meetings the first Wednesday of every month.

Solid waste comes up very often. There are also solid waste subcommittees. And really, you know, I was just reading an article today about how to talk to your family about climate change. And I think waste is another one of those things, you know. Your friends and your family trust you the most, especially in this day and age with so much stuff, so much noise on the internet, so much stuff on social media.

Have conversations with your neighbors. Have You know, talk to them, see, is this a big deal to you guys? Like, maybe it should be. Yeah, I think really just the more the community talks about it and keeps this at the, you know, the top of the list. It's kind of interesting.

You look at the previous year's assembly goals, solid waste is almost always in the top 3. Like, for the past 40 years, it's pretty wild. Yeah. Yeah. We have these 2 studies that we've been talking about, what we preach about.

We need those studies. We can talk about this option, this option, this option. These studies eliminate eliminate most of the guesswork. They will literally say, here are your options. Exactly.

Yep. So, so right now, it's really like, I think these conversations are amazing because that's really kind of prepping the scene for these bigger conversations, right? But yeah, once, once we get a little further down the road with these studies, we'll be able to do more community engagement, more public listening sessions, just surveys, all that good stuff that we, we love to do for community development reasons. And yeah, you know, the most often solid waste issues come up in what's called the PWFC. It's the Public Works and Facilities Committee.

It's one of the assembly committees. And it, gosh, it's not a month goes by without solid waste being one of the talking points. So it, you know, if you have the time and the bandwidth to check out those meetings, you know, maybe keep an eye on the the agendas to see if there's something you're interested in. I would highly recommend that also, maybe just— and again, like, if you know your assembly, your assembly member, just have a conversation and say, this is something I'm very passionate about, and I think we really need to give a lot of attention to.

Yeah, I'll just put in a quick plug for, you know, the Juno Commission on Sustainability. I didn't take very much time at the start to introduce who we are. But we are a volunteer board that is appointed by the Assembly to advise them on matters of sustainability. And so it has a pretty wide variety of backgrounds of just people from the community. And this is something that over the past year we have increasingly decided now is the time to focus on.

And so we've been kind of pushing some memos up through those Assembly committees, up through city staff like Diana. Trying to make sure that, you know, those of us who are just kind of doing this on the side but are representing a cross-section of Juneau is getting that message out that the dump is a problem. You know, if there's a private sector solution, great. But if we wait 10 years and all of a sudden the cost of disposing of trash goes up 5 or 10 times because shipping stuff down is expensive, that hits every Juneauite in their pocketbooks. So we really want to make sure that we're being proactive about this issue.

And I mean, there are other problems with the current landfill. I mean, I think probably everyone in this room has driven by it and smelled it from Egan. I see a couple people taking deep breaths as they think about that experience. So yes, short answer is people are noticing and trying to get some momentum going on this. Hence the, the waste characterization study, the future options study.

I have a little bit of a backlog of online questions here, so I'm just going to do a couple more about future, kind of the future options study and incineration specifically. And then after that, we'll go into a speed round of can I put this in the recycling bin questions.

So first of all, could implementing an incinerator in Juneau help other Southeast communities? I love that question. Yes, the long and short answer. Yeah, and that's something else, you know, the other Southeast communities for a long time, most of them, I think, maybe with the exception now of Petersburg, we recently heard maybe they're going to reopen their landfill. They all ship their waste south.

And we, we talk closely, especially with Sika, because they're the next kind of biggest sized community, and they, they directly handle and contract mostly for the shipping of their waste south. So they're, they're just a really good litmus test for, you know, how that functionally operates in Southeast Alaska.

Seaswah and Southeast Conference— Seaswah is the Southeast Alaska The Solid Waste Authority, I think. Okay. Which is very closely related to Southeast Conference. They, they have done a few different studies. They're, they're hoping to do another one this year for regional solid waste solutions, and they all— it often comes back to Juno, can you please help us by building a bigger landfill, building a waste-to-energy incinerator?

And, you know, it frankly, this is the first time we've gotten this close to the landfill closing. And so the time crunch has really brought this more to the forefront. So we, we're starting to look into those options also. That will be— I don't think it'll feature in a big way in our overall study, but we are also working with Southeast Conference to maybe incorporate some of that into their next study. But yeah, it would be amazing.

Tlingit and Haida are trying to build a regional tribal recycling center here in Juneau, and we're hoping that maybe we can also at some point turn that into a Southeast Alaska regional recycling center. There's a lot of steps between here and there, but we are, we're speaking with them currently about that. All right. Also from online, has CBJ considered applying for federal grants to build an incinerator? Uh, so there are some out there for sure.

Um, we, we just haven't gotten anywhere close enough to, to getting to that point. Um, it's, uh, especially right now with a lot of the, uh, uh, bipartisan infrastructure Build and all, all of the really great infrastructural dollars that are coming from the federal government. You know, it's really easy to say apply for all these grants, but if you don't have a plan for it, it, it can go sideways very quickly. So by doing these studies, that, that'll really help lay the groundwork. If we want to go that path, then that's the point that we can start pursuing some of those grant opportunities.

All right. Oh, real quick, I'm gonna jump in there. How many grants do you think that you apply for regularly? Well, last year was 4, just me. Yeah, that was your first year.

Yeah, we're among the other things we do, we're, you know, we focus on getting as much money as we can from grants. And yeah, we, it's a big part of, we really want that money. Yeah, we, Engineering and Public Works actually hired a grants manager last year, and oh my gosh, she might be the third busiest person in our department. She is just— holy cow, she's, she's writing grants left and right. So yeah, we have a question in the room.

Yeah, speaking of which, whatever happened to the idea of the zero waste substation that's going to be— supposed to go to Loman Creek? That was like a big deal. EPA just put out their final, their final report saying, hey, you guys are good to go. What's going on up there? So, so what you're referring to is we received through Senator Murkowski's office last spring congressionally directed spending for a municipal composting facility.

And there's a little sliver of that we're going to use for site planning for what right now we're calling the Zero Waste Subdivision, but it's It's a terrible name, and if you have a better one, please let us know. And it's, it's going to do really high-level things like where will utilities go in the future, where will roads go, where will stormwater— stormwater is very important in this site. And we're still on track with that. There are still— the fun thing about federal funding is there are a lot of hoops to jump through to actually get the money. So we are only just to the point where we can officially ask EPA to please give us the money.

Now that we've gone through what's called a NEPA process to approve the site for that. That is still very much a priority. Stewart and I are the only people working on solid waste issues other than our director, who, you know, she has a lot of other things on her plate. So really, it comes down to capacity. We're working— we're still working on that, but We really want to get the, this study off the ground so that we can start having a better idea of what kind of stuff we want to put in a zero-waste subdivision.

So, you know, it could be things like maybe we want a big new recycling center there. We already know that we're going to have a build a bigger composting facility there. Maybe there's a reuse center. Maybe there's, you know, I don't know if anyone here is familiar with like a Habitat for Humanity ReStore. We could have building materials that get reused and sold there.

There's a lot of opportunities, and as we kind of go through this process with the community engagement I mentioned, we're going to, we're going to get to a point where we'll be able to start having those conversations with the community about what we want to have in there. And the place that we're referring to is the Lemon— the former Lemon Creek gravel pit, which is that big empty area behind Home Depot and Costco. Kind of Anchor Street and then, yeah, right there. Where everybody's taking all their stuff that's usually going in the trash. Yes, exactly, where there's a lot of illegal dumping happening now.

Informal dumping. That's right. I like that, informal. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely.

So a question from online was asking whether building something like an incinerator could create jobs. And since we are just talking about the zero waste subdivision, I've also heard people describe it as a resource recovery subdivision or.

You know, other potential names. So you want to talk about— I mean, you said there's right now the two of you working on solving this. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, once the landfill closes, they'll still have some operations that they'll be doing there.

But, you know, at some point that will come to an end. And so there will be some job loss from, for example, the closure of the landfill. Yeah, an incinerator, a new landfill.

I mean, trash creates jobs. It really does. Recycling creates jobs. Composting creates jobs. And the more, you know, depending on which way the community decides they want to do this zero waste park, it could be very well that, you know, we, we have facilities that we lease out to small businesses that just, you know, maybe, maybe you just wanna do this thing with this one piece of waste stream.

So, you know, there's, there's a lot of ways that it can go. But yeah, there are, yes, lots of jobs in trash. I have a follow-up question to that. Is there— so since Juneau has a really vested interest in diverting waste right now, and some of our biggest, like, for example, corrugated cardboard being one of our biggest culprits, right? Is there a market for a small business owner or even a part-time small business contractor to start doing work directly interfacing with like businesses and construction sites to divert that waste.

Like, is there a market in that, that someone can like grab a van, drive around once a week, collect all the cardboard? Because I know we at our store, my husband's store, we're disposing of, you know, entire carloads of corrugated cardboard at the recycling center every week. But if there was someone they could pay $45 a week to do it, I'm sure they would. Yeah, I think there are a lot of little things like that. Something that Stuart and I—.

Cooking oil too. That's exactly where I was going to go, Mary. Simpatico.

Yeah, I, I would love for the city to have someone who just goes around to the restaurants, collects cooking oil, and brings it to the household hazardous waste facility. So if anybody wants to start a business and they've got a truck, but please. Yeah, I think there are a lot of small things like that. Stuart, I know that's kind of maybe more your wheelhouse. I don't know if I thought of anything.

I mean, we have things like refrigerators are going to rapidly become an issue. Right now we don't have anyone in town that drains refrigerants from refrigerators, so it's kind of a funky process to get them down south because of those refrigerants. So, you know, somebody wants to start a business just draining refrigerators, do that too. Shred— shredding tires, just also there's all sorts of things. And, you know, there's a lot of cottage industries that kind of crop up around material reuse.

I think things like deconstruction, for example, I think that that's a very ripe market. We all know we have very limited materials coming into this, into this community, and there is a lot of perfectly good stuff that goes in the landfill. I think, you know, I know some people have tried reuse businesses in the past. I know that, like, land cost, rent on warehouses, that's astronomical. So that's kind of also what we're hoping to accomplish with this zero waste park is to be able to front those infrastructural costs so folks can, yeah, maybe start a little business and, you know, have a contract with the city and all that fun stuff.

Thank you. Did we have a question in the very back? I was just kind of relating it to the marketing for small businesses and You touched base in your first couple slides about construction materials, and I can't remember the percentage of that, but, um, I see my husband as a contractor and I see a lot of demolition and drywall, but I know that it's only a certain percentage is accepted. So what are they supposed to do with it? Um, percentage of what?

I'm sorry, sheetrock. Is only allowed into the landfill. Yeah. Oh, oh, disposal. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's the only place you can bring it right now.

There, there are lots of—. Right. Oh, you mean the landfill does? Yeah. Oh, because the bulk load, uh, working with them to coordinate how much you can bring in at one time.

If you're just suddenly bringing in a bunch, then that's going to cause problems with them. I know the landfill manager, and if you talk with him and communicate, he'll very likely work with you and try to figure out how that doesn't become a problem. But ultimately, since they are the place it has to go to, they're the ones who have to answer that question and tell you how they could do it. I can tell you how I would do it, but that's their—. Yeah, how would you do it?

That's your—. Okay, I would, but not in this form. Fair enough. Yeah, and that's a really good point. Sorry, Nick, to bring up.

CBJ has no control over the business decisions that the landfill makes. And I cannot stress that highly enough. They decide what they accept. They decide their hours. They decide their rates.

We're really— which is what really brings us back to— we're always kind of harping on that idea of control. Like, the city— it would be fantastic if the city, the community could have some level of control over waste in this system. But right now we really just have recycling. Sorry. No, go ahead.

Can you answer this question? If the city were in control, do you see that that could be— that construction materials could be handled? Yeah, and you know, the funny thing about the current landfill is that it was built in the '60s. It was kind of an informal dumping ground to start with. As we all know, it's built in a wetland right next to a wildlife refuge.

It's not ideal conditions. It's also what's called an unlined landfill. So there's not much of a barrier between the soil, the groundwater in that landfill. And I, and I know some of the issues with what they can accept. I know sheetrock can react once it gets wet, and there's all sorts of gas issues and odor issues.

Modern landfills are incredibly highly engineered. And yeah, I, Sometimes there's just entirely separate set up what they're called cells. So it's like areas of the landfill that you can dedicate to just, you know, just drywall, just whatever.

I want to jump on this one. Yeah, let's do it. Go for it. Almost every other community in this nation has that option. That's what we're talking about here is that Sitka, Haines, Wrangell, Gustavus, every single town in Southeast Alaska, your elected officials make Every question you have, you would be asking them and they would say, we don't have the money for it or we're going to do this or whatnot.

Where you're asking us the questions because we're supposed to be the matter expert about it. But this is the control aspect that we've been harping on and we apologize for having to say it over and over again. But all these questions are super great and I want to answer every one of them, but we are not the people to do that. Yeah, and that's the big one is if you go over to SITKA, you talk about the drywall, they know exactly how they do it. You talk about this, this material, this material, all the materials, SITKA over there, they say how much the rate is, what they— all the things that we don't control.

All the other communities via the people. You want Saturdays and Sundays open, you get to go to your assembly members and convince them, and if you can, it's open Saturdays and Sundays. Yeah, and, and kind of more to your point, it— yeah, if the city— and, you know, there, there are more than one option. You know, the city could build their own landfill, operate it. That is a very common thing in this country to do for a municipality.

We could also contract with a company like Waste Management to do all of that because it's also very expensive and requires a lot of knowledge and all that good stuff to build and operate a landfill. So there, there are many ways that we could, yes, as CBJ dictate like those decisions. But yeah, it comes back down to this process that we're starting where we're starting to look at those options in more depth. And then from there, we'll be able to to kind of drive that. But, but yeah, that's, drywall I know is a, is a big issue with this landfill in particular.

Yeah, we had a, a comment from our online Q&A that it seems like the impending demise of the landfill is an opportunity here in the city to get more involved in that waste management stream. 100%. 100%. This is, this is the time to do it. You know, we've got kind of a couple— we've got a couple-year window to do these studies, make these decisions, and then building a landfill, building an incinerator, obviously they both cost a ton of money and they also require enormous environmental review processes.

So anything we do, we need to start planning now, we need to start applying now, and it's— yeah. So that touches directly on an online question that I've been sitting on for a little while now. Nothing has changed in Juneau waste disposal over multiple decades. How is there not a plan if the playing field hasn't changed? Well, because the garbage gets picked up.

Well, we definitely have some— I have some gripes with the landfill. I also have gripes with Subway. We've cut our critiques, but ultimately there's regulatory levels on the state and federal level for Juneau's garbage, and that's just federal and state law. And they're doing their jobs. Well, we can— the smell, there's a bunch of stuff here, but that's ultimately what it came down to, is that at any point this assembly could have said we want it, but they haven't.

And that, you know, I'm going off of some time before my birth, but historically, Juneau has liked it being this way.

And again, that's fine. This is the whole point of bringing this up now, again, being this loud, is just that this is a special time period that if you don't do it now, you might not be able to, we might not be able to, or if we do, we have to figure something out based on what somebody else has already designed for their private business and how that would work. And so the current landfill, you said, has been operating since the 1960s. Is it fair to imagine that whatever solid waste solution the city settles on could last just as long, if not longer. A well-engineered landfill that had the— has the benefit of a little more forethought than the one that we have now.

Yeah, I mean, gosh, you can get over 100 years out of a well-built landfill. But kind of going back to the question, there have been a number of studies, a number of plans that over the decades have happened. The most recent I think the most recent big one was that 2008 one, right? And, you know, it laid out just, I think it was like 12 steps, like, here's what you gotta do. And I think we got to step number 3, and it was very hard and very discouraging.

And the Assembly, it just kind of disappeared from the Assembly for another 10 years. So that's also kind of been a, it's been a bit of a roller coaster in that regard. But everything that we do have currently will need— needs to be updated because laws change, technology changes, cost changes. So the, the new study will be able to use some of the conclusions of that, but they'll also need to redo some of the research. Yeah.

And talking about EMB, we— CBJ funded a landfill feasibility study in 1991 that identified some you know, some really potential, some potentially great locations. Well, great is relative for a new landfill. So we also have some groundwork that's been laid, but again, that is 30 years ago, and laws change, cost change, technology changes. So we need to update some of that information.

Right. In the Yellow Jacket.

Okay, so the existing, uh, waste management providers have the permits to do what they do for us.

Does the city and borough of Juneau have an option to take this over? Yes.

When can this happen? And then what would be the steps to make this happen? There are multiple different avenues. There's buying the certificate from the waste hauler, and that way we have the commodity, and then we go to the landfill or the end result, and we're the commissioner, then we make decisions. The state of Alaska actually details in its ordinances a way for a community to take that.

Haines just did it, as a matter of fact, or they tried to do it. Haines is the—. I forgot. Haines also does not control their landfill. They're like us, and they have been trying to get it back or take over it for a long time.

As a matter of fact, in 2015, they went to the RCA, the state agency that would handle that. And I don't— I'm not sure how it went, but there was two votes and they wanted control, but they don't have it for some reason. I actually have to reach back and get the history. Um, but yeah, there's, there's, there's many different— or there's multiple different ways for the entity at CBJ to control in some form, but there's too many of them to list and how to do that. It's—.

We're talking about negotiating with private companies, and so I could, I could list how I think it might go, but It's indefinite. So just to kind of— I know a lot of us in this room and online are probably at the last Q&A, but so the way that the kind of— you kept talking about control. The waste hauler, so Alaska Waste, has the sole license in this community to haul waste. And, you know, part of their responsibility to the RCA, it's like a water utility, electric utility. They have to justify any rate increases.

To the RCA, but they also decide where they take those materials. So if they decide that, hey, it's going to be cheaper for us to build a transfer station and just skip over our landfill and send it south, they can do that. They'd have to justify it financially, but they could do that. They— the RCA does not just give out new certificates like they have some kind of equation, some kind of calculation based on, I think, population and surface area for like number, a number of these licenses that a community can have. And we get one and we don't, we, CBJ does not control it.

We've tried to purchase it in the past. I think the last time we did that was roughly 2009 and it was to the tune of $12 million. I can only imagine that it is much more than that now.

So these have been some really good questions about the big picture future of our landfill. We are, what, 3 minutes from our scheduled end time, and I promised people online that we do a speed round of what, what is recyclable, and then maybe we can finish off with one or two more big picture questions if people still have them. Yeah, and Stuart and I have talked, we want to do this for these for a while now, but we are also—. I'd just like to ask one question though. I've had my hand up for 20 minutes, so I want one question at the end.

I will come to you as soon as we're done with the speed round on what's recyclable. But also come talk to us anytime you want to chat about this stuff, please. Happy to do so. Yes, their email information is on the screen. All right, so for the people who had asked online, For number 1 and number 2 plastics, does it matter if it's colored or clear?

No. No. All right. What metals are recyclable? All.

Yeah, all metals. The ones we accept at the recycling center are steel cans and aluminum cans. The others you can, I believe, take to either DNS and SCUKEM. Are tin cans still there? Tin.

Tin and steel. Steel cans used to be made out of tin. So we still call them tin cans, but they are sealed. Those cans lined with plastic. Yeah, but they're still, they are still recyclable.

Yeah. How about plastic grocery bags? That is, that's a funny one. I just highly encourage you to reuse them as many times as possible. That's the best thing to do with those.

But Fred Meyer, you can take, I believe they have a drop-off still that you can take your plastic bags to, but we do not accept them at the recycling center. Recycling center. Okay, pizza boxes. Pizza boxes. If it doesn't have any grease on it, it can go in the recycling.

If it does and you have a backyard composting pile or you're a subscriber to Juneau Compost, rip it up, put in your compost bucket. Take the stickers off too.

All right, any in-room follow-up on the speed round of where do I properly dispose of this? Or else we'll go to—. Costco wax boxes. Yeah, so cardboard boxes that are waxed? Nope.

Nope. So in the trash with those? In the trash. After you've reused them as many times.

Yes, reduce, reuse, recycle in that order, right? Yeah, refuse first. Refuse, reduce, recycle. Yeah. Yep.

All right, any other speed round questions? All right. You'd had your hand up for a while. Given the criticalness of this situation, because it's not just about the 10-year time span, it's what's happening right now to our water, to our land. Yes.

And we need to be doing everything possible to own our own landfill. It seems that you guys are grossly overworked and understaffed, and it seems like we should have more than 2 people on a solid waste team here. So is there any and especially in the timeframe that we have, is there any movement or discussion towards growing your team? We would love that. Whether or not we get funding to do so, that is a different thing all entirely.

Yeah, I mean, Stuart personally drives around to the various different, like, divisions and departments of the city to pick up, like, e-waste and things, like, he, which is not his main job. It started out, just was doing it to be nice and now it has become a whole separate issue. But we're going to— we're definitely going to be growing right now where we're at right now. The staffing levels we have for how Juno has done this has been fine. It's— it's up until this point we're at.

Yeah. If we want to make that next step, then absolutely not. Then absolutely not. But this is—. That's going to be part of the questions because we're at the 10-year mark and we still are like, we've had like 10 questions just of this of like, what are we— how are we not—.

How do we not have a plan forward? Yeah.

So, and, and there's a reason that we contract out a lot of this work, and that is because of staff capacity. It probably comes to no surprise to anyone in this room that it is very hard to grow government and add more positions to government. My position didn't exist until November of 2022. Before that, we had Stuart for 10 years, and that was really— right? Then they had, yeah, yeah, Jim Benard for 11 years before me.

So before that, we just had one person, and then as of a year and a half ago, we now have— we have doubled our staff. But yeah, this is, I mean,.

My boss is very, very concerned, like she's very protective of my time. We'll put it that way. She does not like me taking on new side quests, as it were. But yeah, I agree with you. I think if we want to move, if the city decide, the community decides they want to mobilize on this in a big way, it's gonna take more than just Stuart and I for sure.

And if I may, I think that's also one of the roles J-COS has played is pushing for this to be front of mind for assemblies and all assemblies are equally friendly to action. Like, in a given 2 years, you might have a very different profile of who's fighting for and against. And so the profile of the assembly right now, and the one that hired Diana, is a certain way, both because of community pressure and because of J-COS pressure over the last, um, however many years it was. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do have a very proactive assembly, but they do also have a million other things on their plate, as we all know. Like, the school is taking everybody's school issue.

I mean, there is a school meeting right now that I think probably stole several people away from— to— for this event. Um, yeah, it's, it's, it's hard to grab that attention for, for any amount of time. But, um, but yeah, this, this assembly, you know, uh, Assemblymember Wade Bryson, he's the, the chair of that PWSC committee that I mentioned. This is like his baby. He's been trying so hard to get any movement in solid waste.

Yeah, he wanted to be here tonight, but like I said, there's other, there's other things going on. So, but, but yeah, we need, we need big action. Thanks for your work. Oh, thank you. Thank you for coming here both times.

I appreciate that. You know, to end on that, when you're talking about like the urgency, which I definitely agree with, we'll, we'll say I've been here for 10 years in this, you know, roughly in this spot, and my predecessor Jim Bonner, who started, who was the first person brought on, he started, you know, of course. So we basically have about 20 years of the primary 2 people that have done that. Before that, it was in different divisions. We're exactly where I believe we need to be.

What Jim taught me a bunch of years ago, what he said was going to happen in 15 years or what might happen here and that, he was very, very accurate. And this is a slow crawl, but it kind of had to be. We needed an assembly that was open for this. We needed more people to care to be here. We needed— we need now.

Because all these things are up on everyone's mind. Every time you doom scroll, you're hearing about how plastics isn't worth it, but you have to do this and all this type of stuff. So I really appreciate that the people here and on Zoom, they're coming here because you are the ones that are going to be the ones that are going to help us dictate where we go in this town. It's because you care. So we're right where we need to be.

We don't need any more staff right yet. I would— my back would appreciate another one right now, but we run a very slim division because we want to be able to say our division only costs this, and this is the type of stuff we do. We want more. Yes, we're gonna have to pay for it. And I, not to speak for you, Stuart, but I've heard you say that this is kind of the most action in many, many years, the past year and a half between, yeah, my position creating, being created, and then our current director who was our former deputy director.

This is also kind of her baby when she, well, when she has bandwidth right now.

But, but yeah, so that's fine. All right, uh, we are past our scheduled end time. I see there's one hand that's been up for a minute in the back. I'd love to get to you and then we'll wrap up. Okay, I just, uh, I just wanted to ask, since it's, uh, Juno voters have made it clear in the last year and a half or so that they have no vote, we have no appetite for bond issues, uh, do you guys, uh, see that as a problem?

Uh, you think maybe, uh this can be funded in some other way, or—. Oh, that, that, that is a question when the community decides how we spend money. There are many, many different ways. And also, until we were able to do that high-level study, I know you kind of joined us later, but we're, we're going to do a high-level study to hopefully get a, like, price range for all of these options. Um, once we have that, we'll, we'll know, like, what order of magnitude we're dealing with, right?

Um, and then at that point, we'll be able to start looking at those funding mechanisms. But Yeah, I think, um, I, I, it's pretty fair to say that we're not going to get, um, a grant that's going to pay for fully for either any of these options. So, um, there will come a point that we need to decide, we and well, largely the Assembly, um, what their appetite is. And, and that goes back again to like keeping a nice solid pressure on the Assembly that this is a priority issue for you guys if it is.

All right, with that, thank you all for coming out tonight. I know there was a lot else going on this evening, but it was good to see you all again. The next sustainability session will be April 18th. We are tentatively going to be talking about cruise ships and sustainability in Juneau. Our guest list is not confirmed yet, but we're working on it, so stay tuned.

Thank you. Oh, sorry, Nick. For those in the room, I have a signup list if you're not on our zero waste email list. I do send out about a monthly newsletter just to kind of update folks on what we're up to. And if you're in the chat, if you go to our solid waste planning page, there is a button that you can click on to access that as well.

And I'll turn it back to you. All right, that's all. Thank you, guys.

Thank you.