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Climate Action Plan > Chapter 5: Waste Reduction & Recycling

Chapter 5: Waste Reduction & Recycling

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Efforts to achieve Zero Waste are an essential piece of reducing the emissions that cause global warming. Zero Waste means that all of the community’s discarded material will be recycled or reused, and none will be sent to landfills. Recycling and reducing consumption in homes, businesses and public institutions serve to decrease upstream, energy intensive production processes and the associated GHG emissions and to keep waste out of landfills where it releases methane (CH4), a powerful greenhouse gas.

In March 2005, the Berkeley City Council adopted the goal of achieving Zero Waste by 2020. The resolution also reaffirms the City’s commitment to the Alameda County-wide goal of achieving a 75 percent waste diversion rate by 2010.

Achieving these goals requires sustained collaboration across sectors to:

  • Eliminate solid waste at its source, i.e., the point of production
  • Maximize recycling through expanding residential and commercial collection programs, recycling and composting facilities, and public education and outreach

As is explained in Chapter 2 of this report, despite the connection between solid waste management and climate protection, the Berkeley greenhouse gas emissions inventory does not currently include the emissions that result from solid waste sent to the landfill. This is a barrier to counting increases or decreases in solid waste-related emissions against the community GHG emissions reduction target. This barrier notwithstanding, Berkeley should not let constraints in our ability to quantify waste-related GHG emissions limit community waste diversion efforts. The Climate Action Plan affirms the important connection between climate change and solid waste by proposing potential solid waste diversion actions.

ICLEI, the organization that provides cities like Berkeley with an emissions inventory protocol, is currently working to update its community-level inventory methodology to include solid waste emissions. Once the update is complete Berkeley will be able to measure and report these emissions in subsequent GHG emissions inventories.

Read entire Chapter 5: Waste Reduction and Recycling

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disposable take-out items

Post #13 by Kris Muller on March 4, 2008 10:34AM

In addition to efforts to reduce use of disposables, please work to replace plastic with compostable take-out items where they are unavoidable. Please develop regulations collaboratively with businesses that now use disposable take-out containers and utensils, to take into account their experience of circumstances where customers will need take-out. I try to avoid plastic bags and reuse those I get, but for some purposes (eg, barbecued chicken, raw meat and fish, yogurt and other dairy products) we need other containers that are compostable. City regulations with a deadline for disposables would push development of bio-sustainable alternatives.