A new report from Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso throws support behind Intro 696, a New York City bill that would require a large expansion in composting capacity across each of the city’s five boroughs.
Reynoso called for an increase in composting capacity over codigestion in New York City at a composting conference last week, the latest salvo in a tug of war over the city’s organics. While the city has implemented a codigestion program with utility National Grid at Brooklyn’s Newtown Creek Wastewater Recovery Facility as a solution for food waste, the benefits of such systems now seem insufficient compared to composting, Reynoso said.
“The diversion in the National Grid side was something 10 years ago, 15 years ago, that we thought was the best option. It’s what we knew then,” he said. “Things have changed.”
If you like this post, you’ll love our daily environmental newsletter, EnviroPolitics.It’s packed daily with the latest news, commentary, and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond. Please do not take our word for it, try it free for a full month.
Agenda: (updated to add electronic waste presentation):
10:00 a.m. Welcome – Steve Rinaldi, Chair, New Jersey WasteWise Business Network/NJDEP, Bureau of Sustainability
10:10 a.m. Share My Meals…Fighting Food Insecurity and Food Waste – Helene Lanctuit, Chief Executive Officer, Share My Meals
10:30 a.m. The Morris and Sussex County Boat Shrink Wrap Recycling Program – Anthony Marrone, Morris County District Recycling Coordinator, Morris County Municipal Utilities Authority
10:50 a.m. Update on the New Atlantic Coast Recycling Class A Recycling Center and Recycling Markets Update – John Stanton, Director of Business Operations, Atlantic Coast Recycling
11:10 a.m. Electronic Waste Management in New Jersey – Chris Kaasmann, VP of Compliance, Greenchip E-Waste & ITAD Solutions
Note for NJ Certified Recycling Professionals– Those individuals who are NJ Certified Recycling Professionals will earn 1.5 recertification credits for attending this meeting! FYI, the webinar’s 1.5 credits will be split 50-50 between meeting and classroom credits.
Led by risk-averse corporate owners, dozens of the biggest U.S. newspapers have decided their editorials should express opinions on everything except who should be president.
I can’t remember the last time I was as shocked by a news-industry number as I was by 200,000. Specifically, the 200,000 Washington Post subscribers who NPR’s David Folkenflik reported cancelled their subscriptions in the days after the paper announced it wouldn’t be endorsing in the 2024 presidential race. (Not long after, the number grew to “more than 250,000” — a number the Post’s own reporters later confirmed.)
I have all the respect in the world for Folkenflik, but my brain refused to believe it at first. 2,000? Sure. 8,000? Okay. Even 20,000? Those seemed within the realm of possibility. But 200,000 was consumer action on a scale unseen in the modern news business — and without any organized force pulling the strings. All this at an outlet that had, only weeks earlier, been chuffed about an increase of 4,000 subs so far in 2024. Post owner Jeff Bezos, the man behind the non-endorsement call, didn’t help things with a tone-deaf op-ed packed with C-minus arguments.1
Perhaps Bezos thought he would avoid customer outrage because declining to endorse for president is a growth industry in America — and has been since Donald Trump first came down that escalator. I first wrote about this two years ago when it became clear that the country’s largest newspaper chains — all either private equity-owned or -adjacent — were growing allergic to making the call. Using a database of newspaper endorsements from The American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara, I tracked how many of the 100 highest-circulation newspapers had declined to endorse for president. The trend line is rather clear:
2004: 9 2008: 8 2012: 23 2016: 26 2020: 44
In five election cycles, endorsing for president went from a “nearly everybody” thing to a “barely half” thing. You can find all the details in that story, but the truth is that, in 2016, newspapers overwhelmingly backed Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump and faced enormous blowback from Trump supporters — in the form of cancellations and, in somecases, threats that led to papers hiring extra security for their employees. That, combined with the continued decline in the U.S. newspaper business — which led some publishers to question the value of annoying any sliver of their remaining customers — led to a widespread abandonment of endorsements in 2020. Papers that had endorsed Clinton in states that Trump won were the most likely to bail.
If you like this post, you’ll love our daily environmental newsletter, EnviroPolitics.It’s packed daily with the latest news, commentary, and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond. Please do not take our word for it, try it free for a full month.
The U.S. EPA has yet to offer guidance on how to address forever chemicals in the organic material from wastewater treatment facilities.
Photo by SuSanA Secretariat, Flickr
By Jacob Wallace, Waste Dive
Since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, many wastewater treatment plants have operated with a simple environmental trade-off — they treat water from population centers, industrial sources, landfills and elsewhere, and the leftover solids can be sent to farms to use as fertilizer.
But that arrangement has neared a breaking point in recent years, strained by new understanding of pollutants like PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. In communities around the U.S., the chemicals are exiting the plants via its sludge, known as biosolids, and in some cases contaminating farmland.
The question of where the biosolids can go now — either for treatment or reuse — has left the waste industry and policymakers around the country mired in tough policy decisions.
Some feel left in the dark by the U.S. EPA, which recently argued in court that it’s under no obligation to regulate PFAS in biosolids at all, or even place them on its list of pollutants to watch. Instead, the agency has issued nonbinding guidance on addressing contamination which emphasizes reducing pollutants, as well as monitoring programs and collaboration with manufacturers.
If you like this post, you’ll love our daily environmental newsletter, EnviroPolitics.It’s packed daily with the latest news, commentary, and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond. Please do not take our word for it, try it free for a full month.
Former New Jersey Assembly Speaker Garabed “Chuck” Haytaian, one of the leading figures of the Republican wave that took over Trenton in the 1990s and a lawmaker for more than two decades, has died at age 86, state officials said Friday.
A cause of death is unclear, though Haytaian reportedly suffered health issues in recent months, officials said.
A lawmaker from the northwestern corner of the state, Haytaian was often blunt, loyal to his party, and combative with the press — in some ways, a precursor to some modern GOP politicians.
Haytaian — pronounce Hi-TIE-an — assumed the top post of the state Legislature’s lower house in 1992 as Republicans took control of both chambers in a voter revolt over Democratic Gov. Jim Florio’s $2.8 billion in tax increases. Republican Christie Whitman ousted Florio in the next election.
Haytaian later ran for U.S. Senate in 1994, when he unsuccessfully tried to unseat Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg, falling by 3 percentage points. Haytaian was then head of the New Jersey Republican Party from 1995 to 2001.
If you like this post, you’ll love our daily environmental newsletter, EnviroPolitics.It’s packed daily with the latest news, commentary, and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond. Please do not take our word for it, try it free for a full month.
A pump is used to help bring in water from the reservoir at Lee Brothers Cranberry Farm. Continued lack of rain could mean more pumping. photo: Tim Hawk / For The Inquirer
Generations of the Lee family gathered this fall, as they have every year since 1868, to harvest cranberries at the Lee Brothers Farm in Chatsworth, Burlington County.
Stephen V. Lee III, 78, has farmed the fruit for decades. He walked Thursday on the sand road of a bog filled with scarlet berries that bobbed at the water’s surface.
Workers, including family members, stood hip-deep in the water, raking berries toward a submerged vacuum that sucked the fruit to the top of a truck. There, a machine washed them as they bounced along a conveyor that spewed them by the thousands into a truck.
Cranberry harvesting is an annual colorful ritual in New Jersey. But this year is anything but
“I haven’t seen this in my lifetime,” Lee said of a drought that farmers trace to summer.
The hues of the turning leaves that surround the farm are subdued. The grass is brown. A reservoir that pulls from the nearby Wading River is nearly empty. Campers along the nearby Batona Trail are prohibited from lighting campfires.
As Lee climbed into his truck, the temperature was heading toward an all-time high for the day of 82 in Philadelphia, last reached in 1946.
If you like this post, you’ll love our daily environmental newsletter, EnviroPolitics.It’s packed daily with the latest news, commentary, and legislative updates from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware…and beyond. Please do not take our word for it, try it free for a full month.
