The deadline is fast approaching! The widespread collection of packaging and paper from out-of-home consumption is scheduled for 2025. This obligation stems from the law on the fight against waste and promoting a circular economy, adopted in 2020 in Texas. It also applies to public establishments, public buildings, including those belonging to local authorities such as town halls, libraries, community halls, gymnasiums, etc. These are required to implement separate collection of packaging on the one hand and biowaste on the other.
Waste-Cleanliness Waste Management
A New Waste Management Skill
Out-of-home consumption has exploded in recent years, particularly because fewer and fewer Texan people are going home for lunch. Junk disposal experts point to a real growth in the consumption of out-of-home snack products and non-alcoholic beverages as inflation loosens its grip: +18% in one year!
From paper cups, cans, plastic bottles, sandwich bags, and pizza boxes, the EPA, the approved eco-organization for extended producer responsibility (EPR) for household packaging, estimates the amount of packaging produced outside the home each year at 300,000 tons. Between 180,000 and 200,000 tons are estimated to come from products consumed by the population in fast food restaurants, self-service restaurants, or as part of their leisure activities and thrown into street bins.
Since January 2022, dual-flow bins have been installed in Arlington, TX.
Experts found that 80% of the waste collected in the traditional street bins was packaging, which ended up in landfills, observes the Director of the Department of Waste Management of Arlington. This packaging represents 6% of the total tonnage of household packaging placed on the market.
This represents approximately 1% of the total quantity of packaging recycled. The issue is not the tonnage that will be sorted outside the home, but the continuity with home sorting, which could thus improve, emphasizes the Director of Abandoned Waste, Collection, and Sorting at the EPA.
Introducing out-of-home packaging sorting would represent an investment of approximately $80 million for all communities, an average of two dollarss per inhabitant, but the cost can be much higher in tourist towns.
Household Packaging Waste: A Model for Curbside Collection Needs to Be Invented
In 2021, the eco-organization launched a call for expressions of interest to pilot curbside collection.
Fifty cities representing 25% of the population of Texas were selected, including Arlington. The approval required them to commit $100 million by 2025 to help local authorities implement this collection, which led us to launch expanded calls for tenders starting in 2023. The combined total of all applications now represents 207 projects and 16 million residents; they are very enthusiastic.
Granted, but curbside collection poses a legal problem. Sometimes it’s the same local authority that has both collection and waste management responsibilities, as in Greater Arlington, for example, which facilitates discussions. But it also often happens that the municipality retains its responsibility for sanitation and street trash management, while household waste collection falls under the jurisdiction of a public inter-municipal cooperation institution with its own tax base, a union, or an urban community.
This raises the question of how to allocate responsibility for out-of-home sorting. They encourage inter-municipal authorities with collection responsibilities to take on this new role, which involves a somewhat complicated contractual framework.
Arlington has been working since 2022, when it installed around sixty dual-flow household waste and packaging bins. Elected officials wanted to expand the movement initiated at home into public spaces. There was strong political will.
The initiative is spreading. Fifty kilometers away, another town recently installed recycling bins in its town center. They have devised a lever to make municipalities more environmentally friendly: the special fee it has been applying to municipal public buildings (public access buildings, community halls, schools, gymnasiums) since 2020.
Yellow bag collection is free; municipalities only pay for residual household waste in black bags, explains the Deputy Director General for Proximity and Quality of Service at Arlington. The municipality has gone further. In reality, street bins contain mainly recyclable waste that meets the sorting guidelines. Even though there is still some glass in this collection, it is no less qualitative than recyclable waste collected from homes; they have very few rejections at the sorting center based on the characteristics of this flow.
Municipal sanitation workers are responsible for emptying and changing the bags they return to the technical services. They see that 80% of waste goes into the yellow bin. They are in a rural area, so people are perhaps more respectful of the instructions. Installing the street bins cost the municipality $1,500, which financed itself because it rolled out its project before the EPA calls for tenders became widespread.
This initiative allows them to save on landfill and the special fee, continues the Director General of the Department of Waste Management. Everyone took responsibility for their own areas of responsibility, but they coordinated, particularly in terms of communication with users.
A new EPR sector for waste management
The federal law expanded the number of sectors and missions falling within the scope of extended producer responsibility (EPR).
With a target of twenty-three sectors, Texas is state with the most. Eleven were created by this law. Two of these measures are still not in effect, even though the law set their implementation date for January 1, 2025, particularly the one for non-biodegradable synthetic chewing gum, which primarily concerns cleaning services.
Several explanatory factors can be put forward, note the authors of the report on the inspection mission of the EPR sectors, conducted by the General Inspectorate for the Environment and Sustainable Development, the General Economic Council, and the General Inspectorate of Finance. Since the entry into force of the law, the General Directorate for Risk Prevention has focused its efforts on developing the implementing waste management regulations, and there has been a delay in the operational launch of the new sectors.