Building a Zero Waste World, One Community at a Time (Episode 35)

He is author of The Zero Waste Solution: Untrashing the Planet One Community at a Time, produced the video pieces of Zero, and is featured in the film Trashed by Jeremy Irons. Connett takes no fees for his work, and ILSR and Doctor Connett have been working partners for the past 25 years.

Paul has enthused us with his singing, his insistence that we all have fun while we are on the campaign trails all over the world. I must tell this one anecdote, which always sticks in my mind, and that is we, the institute was working for the Philadelphia City Council in the mid ’80s. Council and we wanted to stop an incinerator from being built in South Philadelphia.

ILSR coordinated the testimony to the City Council, and right after we had a pro-incineration expert tell the City Council that lead and other particles coming out of incinerators go up and they don’t come down. Well, with his scientific background and his wonderful way of presenting facts, Paul corrected that misconception that things go up and don’t come down. 

I think the councilors in South Philadelphia smelled a rat when they were told that, from the risk assessment people, that the incinerator posed no more threat than smoking two cigarettes in a lifetime.

Because we were the biggest milk producing county in the whole of New York state, and the biggest source of exposure to dioxin is through the food chains and through cow’s milk. But this emerged actually from our research, particularly from Tom Webster. I got fascinated with dioxin and as soon as I started to fight incinerators in New York state, immediately we had invitations to speak in adjacent states in Vermont, in Massachusetts, in New Hampshire, and then in New Jersey, and then all over the place. It took me to 49 states in the United States. I still haven’t been to Alaska. And as of the latest count, 66 other countries.

But, as you point out, you can’t just say no to something. It wasn’t enough to say no to incineration, because the officials read that as, “If we don’t want incineration, we’re going to have chaos.” We had to have alternatives. We had to say yes to something and Neil, in particular, with the Institute of Local Self-Reliance, was saying yes. He was saying, “Yes, we can use waste. We can reuse the resources, in what other people call waste, for local development, urban development, especially in the cities.”

That message really reverberated with me, so we pushed for intensive recycling, for composting, for reuse and repair. By the late 1990s, this whole conglomeration of alternatives morphed into the zero waste strategy. Other people would call it zero waste, 100% recycling. We call it zero waste, or darn close.

That folded back on an interest I’d had ever since I read The Limits to Growth in the 1970s. It was pretty obviously that you can’t have unlimited growth on a finite planet. Now people talk about the circular economy. If you want a circular economy, then you have to have zero waste. But the positive message is there are jobs, and small business opportunities, and local self reliance, and sustainability in this message of zero waste. 

It’s pretty cynical, but they’re in it to make money, as much money as they can. To hell with the planet, to hell with communities. That’s all they’re interested in, and that’s pretty sad. 

Then introduce into that operation a zero waste research center to study our non-recyclables, which in my view is bad industrial design. The community has to say to industry, especially when they’re getting over 80% or even 90%, which some communities are doing, of diversion to landfill. They have to say to industry, “If we can’t reuse it, if we can’t recycle it and compost it, you guys, industry, shouldn’t be making it.” We need better industrial design for the 21st century.

In other words, we’re introducing fourth R. Now, most people heard of the three Rs, reduce, reuse, recycle. That last R of recycling includes composting, which in my view is more important than recycling, so we shouldn’t lose it. So, the three Rs and C, and then we add the fourth R of redesign. In other words, we need a combination of community responsibility and industrial responsibility.

I think before zero waste, the big mistake that we all made was to assume the community could do everything. But with zero waste, we are introducing the absolutely vital concept that industry has a critical part to play in this effort. We need to marry community efforts and industrial efforts.

Once you’ve separated the resources, we got to make it convenient for pick up, and that’s why we need door-to-door pick up, door-to-door collection of the separated materials. One of the reasons that that is so critical, you cannot get clean organics clean enough to compost and to use in agriculture unless you have door-to-door collection. If you try to do it other ways, you get dirty compost, and that’s no good to us.

Then you get the familiar concept of recycling, and then after recycling, reuse and repair. And I’ll stop there because reuse and repair is critically important for community development. It is a model of the circular economy when we pass on secondhand goods to somebody else. What’s important about that for local self-reliance is this is where the jobs are. This is business opportunities.

Our reusables are low volume, but high value. Whereas recyclables are high volume and low value. After that, we have many steps involving reducing waste as much as possible. Reducing the residual fraction with pay as you throw systems with other waste reduction initiatives.

I’ve mentioned step eight, which is the separation facility in front of the landfill, which then takes us to industrial responsibility. And finally, the backup landfill, which is only going to take the non-recyclables and the stabilized organic fraction.

For the community then, something to look for is to make sure you have reuse and repair centers in town. Make sure they’re used for job training, for community education, for community activities, community fun. If we’re going to win this thing, if we’re going to really get to a sustainable planet, then people have to enjoy doing it, to have fun when they do it. If we’re grim, no one will help us. 

And there are many other excellent groups that prove that reuse is a major job creator. It also pays very good wages, and it also helped stop recidivism for returning citizens, because these jobs are interesting, they pay well, they have health insurance, and you could take care of a family. It literally can change people’s lives. 

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Paul, I really appreciate you running through some of the steps that communities can take to change this reality and to move farther towards zero waste. I’m wondering if you can maybe detail some of the biggest challenges that you see that communities face, and also that individuals face in kind of turning to the zero waste and try to turn themselves to a zero circular economy. I think that would be really helpful for our listeners to kind of figure out what you’ve identified as the challenges and how we can kind of overcome them.

In America, we enjoy going, working for six days a week and then going to the shopping malls on the seventh day and spending all our money on the stuff that’s advertised on television, following the American myth, the more you consume, the happier you become. It’s a myth. The reality is the more you consume, the fatter you become, and the more waste you produce.

But the simple fact is that we enjoy it, and so the difficult thing is going to be following the moral imperative for reducing material consumption, but without becoming miserable. Somehow you have to reduce material consumption, whilst the community is getting happy, or as the individual is getting happier. That is going to require a transformation on a fixation with standard of living to quality of life.

We’re going to have … Our young people at universities are going to have to explore all the methods that we can possibly think of in which people get happier, without consuming enormous quantities of material and energy. That is the huge, huge challenge.

Another way of putting this is that we worship, we see progress as technological progress. But the real progress for the future is going to be social progress. Social progress, which dramatically cuts down on material consumption, but without taking us back to the Stone Age and misery.

A lot easier is going to be industrial design. And here, you can see places where the community has helped. Capannori in Italy, which was the first community to declare zero waste strategy in 2006. Capannori is near Lucca. They set up a zero waste research center. One of the things they kept finding in the residual fraction were these plastic capsules from one serving coffee machines. And they wrote to the company, they wrote to Lavazza, and said, “Look, we’re a zero waste community. We’re up to 83% diversion from landfill, but we keep finding your plastic capsules. What can we do about it?”

And they wrote back, also they phoned back, and said, “Look, let our experts talk with your experts.” Well now, they have produced a compostable coffee capsule. But others have produced recyclable and reusable coffee capsules. So even a relatively small community can have an impact on a major corporation if their public image is threatened.

I say, “No.” We don’t want sustainable experts, experts on sustainability. We need all experts. We need all professors at university, all disciplines, to become experts on sustainability. In other words, how does your subject, how can you get your subject, your discipline, to relate to sustainability.

We need philosophers, you just mentioned one, we need philosophers. We need economists. We need engineers. We need artists. We need musicians. We need poets. We need chemists. We need physicists. We need everybody in this massive challenge to move a linear society to a circular society, a non sustainable, a throwaway society, to a sustainable society. We need everybody involved. Zero waste, getting people involved in the zero waste, is the first step. 

He said, “Go back to your communities and improve them.” And that put 140 grassroots activists into Parliament, including the mayor … well, not just Parliament, but local government … including the mayor of Parma, the mayor of Turin, and now the mayor of Rome. And Rome has just, I was there just a few days go in the city of Rome meeting the mayor, meeting the vice mayor, meeting the head of the waste management, [inaudible 00:24:37]. Rome is taking concrete steps to move towards zero waste, and if Rome can do it, any capital in Europe can do it.

Yes, this is it. It’s work at the grassroots level. It’s following Neil’s model from 30 years ago, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. The planet is not going to be solved by the people at the top. It’s going to be solved by the people at the bottom who are prepared to roll up their sleeves and do something. It’s not talking, it’s doing. It’s not saying no to everything, it’s saying yes to something.

If all you say is no to something, however dreadful it is, and we have to say no, you’ve got to also have the opportunity and reserve some energy to say yes to something, otherwise you would deconstruct yourself. You will end up in misery. You’ve got to have positive reinforcement for what you do. Part of that reinforcement comes from working with others in your community. 

Thank you so much, Paul. This has been a great interview.

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Building Local Power podcast from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can links to what we discussed today by going to our website, ILSR.org, and clicking on the show page for this episode. That’s ILSR.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our many newsletters and connect with us on Facebook and Twitter.

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