May 14 - FL - Bill to Repeal Yard Trimming Ban and Turn Waste Hierarchy on its Head Passes Legislature
The Florida legislature has passed 2 bills that would repeal a longstanding limitation on the landfilling of yard trimmings and allow landfilled green waste to count as "recycled." The governor has until June 1st to take action on these bills.
According to the US Composting Council, HB 569 and SB 1052:
- Will hurt the environment. Only a fraction of the methane that is generated will be captured by the collection system (estimates vary considerably: the EPA puts the capture rate at 75%, while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that over the landfill's entire life that rate may be as low as 20%). The methane that escapes is 30 times more harmful to global climate change than the carbon dioxide that would be generated if the yard trash were composted instead of landfilled. That does not count the missed benefits to the environment from NOT using the compost that would be generated, including improved water quality, reduced irrigation needs, healthier plants and improved stormwater management. As Florida State researchers have shown, compost's benefits would help improve yields in a number of crops.
- Contradict ... Florida Statutes, [which] define "Recycling" as "any process by which solid waste, or materials that would otherwise become solid waste, are collected, separated, or processed and reused or returned to use in the form of raw materials or products." Burying yard trash in landfills, methane collection or not, is NOT recycling, because there is no return to use. Directing the DEP to award recycling credit for disposal defeats the purpose of tracking waste reduction and recycling quantities, and is contradictory to the EPA hierarchy of reduce-reuse-recycle.
