WMREI Charts Recycling Trends

by David Brill

Since the 1980s, the United States has seen a dramatic increase in municipal recycling programs, and two surveys funded by the Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI) of The University of Tennessee (UT) will allow researchers to assess the successes, failures, and costs of these programs.

Consider, for instance, that in the late 1980s, the nation boasted fewer than 700 publicly operated recycling programs. That number grew to 4,000 by 1994.

For the most part, these programs emerged from a convergence of increasing public environmental awareness and state laws requiring local governments to implement comprehensive solid-waste-management plans.

Though recycling programs have increased nationwide, to date, municipal solid- waste managers still contend with a dearth of available data on the effectiveness of these programs in terms of reducing pressures on both municipal landfills and local budgets.

In fact, waste managers hoping to establish recycling programs are often left wondering why some programs have succeeded while others have failed. They also struggle with how best to balance citizens' demand for recycling programs, which rarely break even, with competing demands for improvements in schools, parks, and other amenities.

A UT research team has received a $100,000, two-year grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to help devise answers to these and other pressing questions.

"Currently, many municipalities are pouring money into their recycling programs without seeing much of a financial return on that investment," says project manager Jean Peretz, a research scientist with WMREI. "Others are failing to regard recycling as a full-cycle process. In particular, they may be doing a good job of collecting recyclables but struggling to find--or nurture--markets for what they collect."

As an example, Peretz points to a recent newspaper article on Wisconsin's recycling program indicating that the state has stockpiled tons of discarded newspapers but lacks an adequate market for them.

The UT research team hopes to address such problems by providing waste managers with the data they need to design successful, cost-effective programs.

The project will tap the expertise of Peretz, who has conducted research on decision-making tools available to public officials; Robert Bohm, a UT economist, who will oversee the project's economic aspects; UT political scientist David Folz, who will conduct the surveys; and Bruce Tonn of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), who has worked with Peretz on decision-making issues.

The grant will be administered by the Joint Institute for Energy and Environment (JIEE), a research consortium comprising UT, ORNL, and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The EPA-component of the project will build on data produced through two WMREI-unded surveys. Eventually, researchers will distribute the findings through reports, articles, and a site on the World Wide Web.

The first survey, which was launched in April, builds on a 1990 national poll that Folz conducted of 250 municipalities. Folz' survey on municipal recycling programs addressed public participation in recycling initiatives, whether the programs were undertaken voluntarily or were mandated by the states, the tonnage of various recyclables collected, and a few cost figures.

"Through this survey we hope to identify the trends, changes, and practices that have emerged in recycling since 1990," Folz says.

The second WMREI-funded survey, launched in June, reflects a more economic emphasis. It assesses equipment and personnel costs, types of materials collected, and the prices those materials bring when sold.

"A municipal recycling program can be thought of in much the same way as an ordinary business," Bohm says. "Its costs will depend on the amount of material collected, prices paid and received, the recycling technology used, and characteristics of the community itself. Obtaining this type of information determined the structure of the second survey."

In December, the research team will submit a report to the EPA based on the first survey, and the results will appear on the Web early next year. A report on the second survey will be submitted to the EPA near the end of the project's contract period in September 1998. From there, Peretz hopes that municipal waste managers will begin to assess and use the data to improve their communities' recycling efforts.

"Ultimately, we hope to give decision makers what they need to establish or improve their own programs," Peretz says. "We hope to show them what has worked, what hasn't, and why."

For more information, contact Jean Peretz, The University of Tennessee, WMREI, 311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-4251.

Down in the Dumps

Tennessee school children visit waste facilities and learn firsthand that many items in their trash cans deserve a second chance.

by Kris Christen

With a landfill site as their training grounds, 2nd, 4th, and 6th graders in Monroe County, Tennessee, are learning the latest in solid-waste-management techniques.

The Waste Education Station (WES), housed at a convenience center in Madisonville, Tennessee, shows kids firsthand what happens to each of the items they throw into the wastebasket every day.

The convenience center, one of four in Madisonville, takes all recyclable items and household trash. The other centers also handle yard waste, household appliances, and construction debris.

As they begin their tour, the kids don orange vests and get an apple to munch on while they pass household waste dumpsters and get a look-see at what they all hold--glass in various colors, aluminum and steel cans, paper, and plastic.

They arrive at the compost and garden area just in time to deposit their apple cores, and they're shown with a pile of leaves how worms contribute to decomposition. In the garden, they see how the resulting mulch is used.

After that, it's off to work sorting garbage into various recycling containers. While local citizens drop off garbage, kids get to see how it's managed.

This pilot program is one of the success stories beginning to roll in for the Tennessee Solid Waste Education Project (TN SWEP) says the Waste Management Research and Education Institute's (WMREI's) Rosalyn McKeown-Ice, one of the project directors.

The program has been in operation since 1995, initiated as part of a statewide goal to significantly reduce solid waste production. (See "Teaching Trash" in the Fall 1995 edition of InSites and "Nothin' But Net" in the Fall 1996 edition for more information about TN SWEP.)

"Space was donated at the Madisonville Convenience Center, and an integrated solid-waste-management program was put together for the students," McKeown-Ice says. "Since the beginning of the 1996/1997 school year, over 900 students from surrounding schools have visited the site."

TN SWEP was created as a direct result of the Tennessee Solid Waste Management Act of 1991 to which WMREI made a substantial contribution. The act was re-authorized in 1996.

TN SWEP's overarching program goal involves imparting the concepts of waste management, pollution prevention, and environmental protection to students and teachers in grades K-12, businesses, government employees, and the general public.

The education project is sponsored by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation's Division of Solid Waste Assistance, and all its services, which are provided in response to requests, are free.

Brenda Lee, TN SWEP's East Tennessee Consultant, says the whole WES project, which has been a coordinated effort between government agencies, school systems, and volunteers, has benefitted all participants.

"We've found that getting kids involved is where we can really make a difference," Lee says, "because they go back home to their parents and tell them about it."

Results are already visible.

"Before the WES program started up, the convenience center was used infrequently," Lee says. "Now, numerous vehicles are coming in to drop things off."

The 3 r's--reduce, reuse, recycle-- are a constant reminder to all who enter the premises. In fact, in addition to the dumpsters and composting area, the center houses numerous displays, which not only show kids how a landfill is designed but teach them to be smart consumers.

An environmental shopping area teaches the concept of source reduction, for instance, by showing them how to choose products with less packaging or packaging made from post-consumer recycled material. Here, they also learn to buy juice concentrate that comes in a small container to be mixed rather than numerous individual fruit drink cartons that come packaged in unrecyclable waxed cardboard.

Other displays feature decomposition time lines explaining how long it takes for such things as plastic bottles, cigarettes, and newspapers to degrade.

A garbage pizza depicts in pie-chart fashion how much trash we typically throw away, as well as its makeup--roughly 35 percent paper, 20 percent yard wastes, 10 percent plastics, 8 percent metals, 8 percent food waste, 7 percent glass, 7 percent wood, and 5 percent other.

Instructors constantly reinforce the idea that if we recycle everything else, only the "other" category ends up in the landfill.

Considering that every American throws away more than four pounds of trash a day and averages 0.75 tons of garbage a year, recycling is an important concept for kids to learn early on.

All in all, the WES program has been such a success that Blount County, just north of Monroe County, is seeking funding for a similar learning center and has put Lee on its steering committee.

"The importance of all this is we have found that by collaborating we can use resources from several agencies to create programs that any one agency couldn't do alone," McKeown-Ice says. "Such collaboration leads to wise use of resources, which is one of the fundamental themes of environmental education."

For more information, contact Rosalyn McKeown-Ice, The University of Tennessee, WMREI, 311 Confer- ence Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-4251.

Nature Goes to School

by Kris Christen

Instead of barren ground or worn turf with a few trees scattered here and there, schoolyards at some of Knoxville, Tennessee's, inner-city schools may soon boast lush mini-ecosystems, if a University of Tennessee (UT) professor has his way.

After seeing similar projects in other parts of the country, particularly in Florida, Sam Rogers, a landscape architect and associate professor in UT's Department of Ornamental Horticulture and Landscape Design, began outlining a plan.

Once executed, the plan will provide his landscape design students with some valuable experience and afford inner-city elementary school students an opportunity for environmental education.

Project LAND (Landscape And Nature Development for School- yards) is the result, and the timing couldn't have been more perfect. Rogers had been receiving calls from Knoxville-area teachers requesting help in turning beleaguered schoolyards into outdoor classrooms.

"The idea is if we can provide leadership or a vision for some of the area schools to improve their grounds, we'll raise environmental awareness for the kids and their school communities," Rogers says.

"Not only do our students get a chance to apply what they've learned in landscape design classes, but area elementary teachers will be able to teach environmental studies to kids based on what's happening right outside their classroom windows."

Last year, Rogers' students completed LAND designs for three of Knoxville's inner-city schools, and this year they began work on a design to transform the schoolyard of another.

To facilitate the landscape design process, the campuses are divided up into study areas. Where one group of UT students might shape designs for an environmental restoration area, others might look at potential outdoor classroom areas, children's garden areas, school entrances, and playground spaces.

After meeting with principals and teachers, the UT students determine the schools' needs and try to match those needs to the site, coming up with creative ideas on how the land might be used.

"Just like an architect plans the building, our students plan the outdoor environment," Rogers says. "Too many times school budgets don't allow for funding of outdoor improvements, so we're trying to pick up where they left off."

The plans include greenhouses and cultivation plots where kids can plant vegetables or flowers and watch them grow, complete with composting piles for recycling any organic wastes.

Old tree trunks are strategically placed so that kids can examine the decomposition processes that take place under a rotting log, and bird stations equipped with bird feeders and birdhouses offer them a chance to view birds' habits up close.

Native trees and plants such as tulip poplars, dogwoods, redbuds, sassafras, sumacs, wildflowers, and trumpet creepers abound, weaving through each of the learning stations according to habitat type.

"Our goal is to promote the idea that each schoolyard can be transformed into a functioning ecosystem, allowing kids to really experience nature," Rogers says. "This is something they don't always get in the inner city."

Rogers is now working to formalize a partnership with Ijams Nature Center, Knox County schools, AmeriCorps, and the Water Re- sources Research Center, which is a subunit of UT's Energy, Envi- ronment, and Resources Center.

"The problem is that we haven't been able to move beyond the design phase to actual implementation yet," Rogers says. "We generate ideas, the semester ends, and the class leaves, so it's going to take several partners to help us follow through with this project."

For more information, contact Sam Rogers, ASLA, The University of Tennessee, Department of Ornamental Horticulture and Landscape Design, P.O. Box 1071, Knoxville, TN 37901, or call 865-974-7324.

Rhapsody in Green

Using nature's tools, UT researchers create greenways to restore Knoxville's damaged riversides and blighted urban areas.

by Kris Christen

These days it's often easier to find abandoned inner-city lots littered with tires, gas tanks, and other trash than it is to find trees and flowers growing there, but momentum is building in urban areas to buck this trend and regain some of what's been lost to urban blight.

In particular, communities nationwide--including Knoxville, Tennessee--are responding by creating greenways along rivers, stream valleys, ridges, abandoned railroad tracks, utility rights-of-way, canals, or scenic roads.

Knoxville's greenway system was initiated in the 1970s by the Knox Greenways Coalition, a grassroots organization committed to the establishment of greenways. The city's green corridors are now also overseen by the Knoxville Greenway Commission.

To date, Knoxville has completed 10.8 miles of greenways, up from 2.9 miles just two and a half years ago, according to Donna Young, Knoxville's greenways coordinator. About 5.5 more miles are currently on the drawing board.

Greenways in urban areas link neighborhoods with parks and work places and provide ideal recreational opportunities for bicyclists, walkers, and joggers. When located along urban streams and rivers, they also serve to improve water quality by providing filtering strips to reduce surface runoff and vegetation that anchors the soil and reduces erosion.

As it stands now, most of Knoxville's streams are in poor ecological health and stand to greatly benefit from adjacent greenways.

However, a pathway flanked by trees and shrubs, a common design for greenways, might not be enough to remedy Knoxville's ailing streams because in some areas the stream edges are so highly eroded they need to be restored.

This is where The University of Tennessee's (UT's) Water Resources Research Center (WRRC), which is housed within the Energy, Environment, and Resources Center, comes in.

WRRC staffers, working to restore the highly degraded streams that flow throughout Knoxville, are coordinating their efforts with Knoxville's greenway projects. By combining the benefits of greenways with those of stream restoration, the water quality in these streams stands to improve dramatically.

The WRRC's restoration work was recently bolstered by a $300,000 grant from the Tennessee Department of Agriculture's Non-Point Source Program.

The purpose of this funding is to improve Knoxville's urban watershed by setting up stream restoration demonstration projects on various streams in the community, says Tim Gangaware, WRRC's associate director.

"We've received state support to put these projects in place and then bring people in from across the state to learn why and how they were conducted and whether or not they worked," Gangaware says.

Known as the Urban Watershed Restoration Project, its main goal will be to develop workshops and guide Tennessee communities in assessing and restoring damaged waterways, creating "pocket parks" for urban residents at the same time.

As the restoration sites are developed, Gangaware's team will be documenting the entire process on a step-by-step basis in a technical manual, featuring a series of chapters, diagrams, pictures, and even a video to polish it off.

"We hope that the end product will be a how-to "cookbook" that can walk a community through an entire restoration project, all the way from identifying a site, assessing it, collecting data, and submitting permit applications, to showing what a successful site looks like once it's completed," Gangaware says.

The three-year grant will cover 60 percent of the total project cost, with the remaining portion coming from various city departments and other organizations. The Knoxville Utilities Board will provide services, UT classes and AmeriCorps volunteers will provide the labor, and the Tennessee Valley Authority will provide technical expertise.

"Our work will involve riparian zone and bank stabilization techniques and in-stream habitat restoration projects," Gangaware says. "But in each case, we're building elements into the project design that will allow these areas to become part of the city's greenway system at some point."

One of the sites being surveyed for the project is an old construction area near the grounds of the 1982 World Fair and extending along Second Creek in downtown Knoxville. Plans are on the books to transform it into a parking area, and Gangaware is determined to make it a "green" parking lot.

"We're hoping to incorporate a grass filter strip planted with native trees and shrubs between the parking lot and the creek itself to keep any runoff from going into the stream," Gangaware says.

Eventually, this filter strip will become part of the greenway that runs up from the Tennessee River, through the UT campus, meandering through the World's Fair Park past the planned parking lot area, and extending 2.5 to 3 miles beyond.

Another site begging for attention is an area in South Knoxville along Goose Creek.

"There's absolutely no riparian vegetation to speak of there, and during a heavy rain, you can just see the stream bank cave in," Gangaware says.

The Urban Watershed Restoration Project grew in response to the Clean Water Act re-authorization of 1990 requiring states to address non-point source pollution, which is now the number-one water-quality problem in Tennessee.

Non-point source pollutants collect in streams every time it rains when tons of oil, gas, and toxic metals are flushed off streets and parking lots; sediments are scoured from exposed soils at construction sites; lawn fertilizers, garden sprays, and pet droppings are washed from residential lots; pesticides and eroded soil are drained from farms; and spilled raw materials and products are washed off industrial sites.

In restoring damaged creek banks, the WRRC is using a bioengineering approach, which involves taking traditional engineering design and combining it with natural materials.

For example, a typical engineering approach to shoring up stream banks is to riprap, piling rocks along the banks and in the water.

Generally speaking, riprap does the job, but it creates a sterile environment, not providing much in the way of shade, protection for terrestrial wildlife, or a suitable aquatic habitat.

To remedy this, Gangaware and his team replace riprap with "willow waddles" or "willow fascines," which are bundles of live willow cuttings lain into stream embankments to stabilize them. Willow is used because of its extraordinary ability to sprout roots from cuttings.

These live cuttings then sprout and root into the ground, covering the bank with a massive layer of willow bushes and trees whose roots trap sediment and water as it flows down the bank. They can grow as much as three to four feet in one year.

In addition, the restoration team plants native species of trees and shrubs whose root systems will eventually preserve a stream bank.

Over the long term, Gangaware and his crew hope to improve the ecological quality of Knoxville's streams by working with the Knoxville greenway projects to provide stable stream banks and wide vegetated streamside corridors.

"We know we'll never make them back into trout streams because it's literally taken decades for the streams to get this degraded," Gangaware says. "But if we can get them more clogged with fish rather than the rusted shopping carts and old tires you find there now, we'll feel that we've accomplished something."

For more information, contact Tim Gangaware, The University of Ten- nessee, WRRC, 311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-2151.

Banking and Borrowing in Clean Air

Tennessee researchers devise convenient payment terms for nations hedging on commitments to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

by Kris Christen

Remember the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that took place in Rio de Janeiro?

Remember, too, the wave of optimism that swept across the world in its wake as 150 nations signed the first international treaty pledging to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000?

Greenhouse gases result chiefly from the combustion of fossil fuels; the release of coolants that contain chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs); and methane, which comes from bio- mass decomposition, cow pies, landfill wastes, and natural wetlands.

Such emissions increase the amount of heat-absorbing gas in the atmosphere, which wraps the Earth like a blanket, trapping heat from the sun near the planet's surface and contributing to the "greenhouse effect" and global warming.

Today, five years after the Rio summit, most nations, including the United States, are realizing that their initial commitments to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions were far too ambitious. In reality, U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions have actually increased by about 3 percent since the 1992 summit.

While some might suggest that we surrender to the facts and discard the hard-won promises made at the summit, researchers Jonathan Rubin and Paul Leiby are exploring ways to create a worldwide framework that would allow nations that fail to achieve target emissions reductions today to borrow against their future emissions rights, while still protecting the global environment and promoting fairness to other countries.

Rubin is an assistant research professor with the Energy, Environment, and Resources Center at The University of Tennessee, and Leiby is a researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

According to the emissions-trading plan, each participating country would be allocated a certain number of permits allowing it to emit a specific amount of greenhouse gases each year. The country would also be allowed to buy and sell permits with other countries based on its present emissions levels.

Furthermore, if a country stays under its available permit levels, it could bank excess permits for future use or resale to countries that exceed their limits.

Initially, surplus credits will probably be found in the developing world, where economies are in the process of transitioning from low-tech, "dirty" industries to higher-tech and less-polluting systems.

As a consequence, costs to achieve significant reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions would be lower in these developing nations than in highly industrialized countries like the United States, which have already widely adopted cleaner production technologies.

These developing nations are reluctant to commit to any kind of trading framework, however, let alone one that permits banking and borrowing, because developed nations are historically responsible for the majority of greenhouse-gas emissions. In fact, developed nations currently produce as much as 50 percent of total emissions of these gases while boasting only 16 percent of the world's population.

A key component of Rubin and Leiby's framework would allow the United States and other nations to "borrow" from themselves and pay for current excesses by achieving additional reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions in the future. The question is, how much more should they have to pay for such a privilege?

For instance, if a country falls short of its 2000 pledge by 1 million tons, at the end of the next assessment period, probably 10 years later, it would not only have to meet its pledged reduction for that period--it would also have to achieve an additional 1-million-ton reduction to offset its shortfall from the previous period, plus pay "interest" on the amount it borrowed.

The interest that's factored into the formula is not unlike interest attached to a loan from a bank.

In the case of emissions, the need for the interest rate--which Rubin and Leiby calculate at over 20 percent per decade--arises from one of the more troubling realities of greenhouse gases themselves. Unlike other gases that may dissipate quickly after being released into the atmosphere, greenhouse gases accumulate over time.

In other words, Rubin says, a ton of greenhouse gases released today will pose less risk to the environment than the same amount released 10 or 20 years from now, after the atmosphere has accumulated decades worth of these harmful emissions.

Nearly everyone involved regards the researchers' plan as a good idea, but will it work in practice?

"The skeptics will say this is just a system to defer prompt payment or another opportunity for the nations that have money to avoid doing what they should be doing," Leiby says.

And the incentive is high for nations to borrow now because most countries are currently exceeding their emissions limits, and nobody knows for sure if and when this system will be implemented.

Indeed, if the system isn't implemented, and there are no penalties--now or in the future--imposed on countries that fail to meet their obligations, few would be motivated to adopt the strict policies necessary to force polluters within their borders to reduce emissions.

In effect, they'd be borrowing from a bank that imposes no terms for repayment or interest.

On the other hand, Rubin says, "if the greenhouse gas problem is as bad as some say, then dramatic reductions will have to be made later, and this type of framework is exactly what's needed to force nations to achieve those reductions."

Though they don't insist their framework is flawless or represents the only way to contend with the global issue of greenhouse-gas emissions, they don't see many other practical alternatives lurking on the horizon, hazy though it may be.

"In one sense, you could just prohibit banking and borrowing of emissions and force nations to meet their commitments right now; then you get around this whole problem," Rubin says. "But you can't do that now because most nations can't meet their commitments, and you might incline them to abandon the treaty and with it their commitment to cleaning up the atmosphere."

For more information, contact Jonathan Rubin, The University of Tennessee, EERC, 311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-4134, or call 865-974-4251.