Nestlé Waters North America (NWNA) is supporting an amendment to a bill in Maine (LD 102) that would set minimum post-consumer recycled (PCR) content requirements for plastic beverage containers sold in the state. The amendment NWNA is backing calls for altering targets to begin at 25% by April 2025 and increase to 30% by April 2030. Nestlé Waters North America (NWNA) is supporting an amendment to a bill in Maine (LD 102) that would set minimum post-consumer recycled (PCR) content requirements for plastic beverage containers sold in the state. The amendment NWNA is backing calls for altering targets to begin at 25% by April 2025 and increase to 30% by April 2030. Nestlé Waters North America (NWNA) is supporting an amendment to a bill in Maine (LD 102) that would set minimum post-consumer recycled (PCR) content requirements for plastic beverage containers sold in the state. The amendment NWNA is backing calls for altering targets to begin at 25% by April 2025 and increase to 30% by April 2030.
The original bill called for these containers to have 15% PCR by 2022, increasing to 25% by 2024. Other notable changes include an exemption for small manufacturers and the removal of language setting requirements for plastic caps.
Recycling equipment company Tomra has endorsed the new language, along with the National Resources Council of Maine (NRCM), Conservation Law Foundation and other environmental groups.
“Recycled content legislation supports plastic recycling markets because it creates more demand than would otherwise be created because of the relatively low-cost of virgin plastic,” said NCRM’s Sustainable Maine Director Sarah Nichols in a statement to Waste Dive.
The “Utah Roadmap” could become one of the most aggressive climate action plans in a conservative state, depending on how the legislature responds. Credit: George Frey/Getty Images
When Utah lawmakers start their legislative session next week, they’ll have a roadmap waiting for them that could become one of the nation’s most aggressive climate action plans in a Republican-led state—and potentially a path forward for other conservative states looking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
That the proposal even exists signals a major shift in thinking in a state where legislators for years have publicly questioned—and sometimes ridiculed—climate science.
Led by a University of Utah economics think tank, proponents of the seven-point strategy managed to dodge political potholes by emphasizing widely supported goals like cleaning up air pollution and stressing economic benefits, an approach some policy experts say could provide a model for bipartisan action on climate change in other conservative states.
“That’s the sort of framing that can help change the conversation in a way that does bridge partisan divides,” said Jay Turner, an environmental politics and policy researcher at Wellesley College and co-author of the book “The Republican Reversal: Conservatives and the Environment from Nixon to Trump.”
Conservatives in the State Capitol haven’t abandoned fossil fuels. They actively support lawsuits to open up West Coast shipping terminals and maintain a $53 million fund to help build export capacity for shipping Utah coal overseas. But widespread public concern about air pollution has also made them more receptive to emissions reductions.
Utah’s shift started with high school students raising their voices. In 2018, they succeeded in persuading lawmakers to pass a resolution acknowledging the risks of climate change that Republican Gov. Gary Herbert signed. Then, last year, the legislature voted to provide $200,000 for the University of Utah’s business school to report on the state’s air pollution and climate change problems and recommend solutions.
“I really think that this is a great indicator of the progress we’ve made as a state,” said Piper Christian, one of the students who lobbied the legislature and is now a University of Utah sophomore majoring in politics and environmental studies. “I want to stress that this is one more step, definitely not the end of the road. Now we need to see these actions through.”
The draft proposal, “Utah Roadmap,” was released in early January and suggests reducing carbon dioxide emissions 25 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 and 80 percent by 2050. Another of the 7 points presses state leaders to step up participation in “national discussions about how to harness the power of market forces and new technologies to reduce carbon emissions in a way that protects health, sustains economic development, and offers other benefits to Utahns.”
WindFloat Atlantic, the largest offshore floating wind turbine in the world, went online New Year’s Day and has been harvesting energy ever since. The massive structure is connected to the grid off the Portuguese coast of Viana do Castelo.
The floating turbine stretches over 98 feet high.
There is also approximately 164 feet of space between each column. While this is certainly not the largest turbine in the world, it is the largest of the floating variety, which is an engineering feat within itself, as raising a floating structure is different compared to turbines built into the ground.
The floating structure was connected to the grid by a 20 kilometer (12.4 mile) long cable.
The WindFloat Atlantic platform, on which the turbine has been erected, is anchored to the ocean floor with chains at a depth of an estimated 300 feet. This allows the turbines to be located farther out to sea than traditional offshore wind farms that are fixed to the bottom of the sea.
The consortium behind the wind farm project says that it is the world’s first “semi-submersible floating wind farm in the world,” Popular Mechanics reports.
Starbucks is joining a growing group of food service companies seeking to minimize or zero-out waste, with an emphasis on shifting to more recyclable containers. The international chain announced this week it will launch a new set of ambitious goals, bowing to shareholder concerns around climate change and pollution.
In a public note from CEO Kevin Johnson, the company said it aims to switch completely to reusable packaging, expand plant-based food options, invest in supply chain sustainability, and focus on both recycling and waste reduction.
By 2030, Starbucks is aiming for “a 50% reduction in waste sent to landfill from stores and manufacturing, driven by a broader shift toward a circular economy,” along with a 50% emissions reduction and 50% replenishment for water withdrawal. “Our aspiration is to become resource positive – storing more carbon than we emit, eliminating waste, and providing more clean freshwater than we use,” Johnson wrote.
Starbucks has been under pressure from shareholders to improve on the company’s sustainability goals. As You Sow, a nonprofit shareholder advocacy group, has been working with Trillium Asset Management to push Starbucks on the issue.
In 2019, the partner organizations filed a shareholder proposal requesting Starbucks to revive a lapsed effort to recycle its packaging in developing markets, in addition to serving at least a quarter of its beverages in reusable containers. That proposal garnered support from 44% of shares voted, per As You Sow, or the equivalent of more than $20 billion.
The organizations refiled the proposal in 2020 after Starbucks failed to respond in 2019. The company responded with the new goals laid out by Johnson this week and the shareholder proposal has been withdrawn in response.
Conrad MacKerron, senior vice president for As You Sow, told Waste Dive that with the announcement Starbucks has become “the biggest company to make a commitment of this type.” As You Sow is not currently pushing any other companies on reusables, but is encouraging fast-food companies on “more preliminary steps,” he said.
That includes Yum! Brands (which operates KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell) and Restaurant Brands International (Tim Hortons and Burger King), both of which As You Sow is pushing to “ban foam cups, stop using plastic straws, and collect packaging on site for recycling.”
One of the country’s largest foot-to-gas facilities is in Brooklyn, New York, which in 2016 began using its own Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant to process 130 tons of liquefied food waste, roughly 3 percent of the city’s daily food waste.
More and more cities are making biogas out of tons of wasted food instead of sending it to landfills.
By LJ DAWSON for Politico Magazine, 11/21/2019
Every year, America throws away more than 80 million pounds of food. More than three-quarters of it ends up in landfills, where it takes up more room than any other kind of waste and produces as much greenhouse gases as 3.4 million vehicles.
The food waste that doesn’t end up decomposing at the dump is most commonly diverted to compost facilities that turn organic material into nutrient-rich soil. But an increasing number of municipalities around the country are looking to do even more with this untapped resource by turning it into usable energy called biogas.
Driven by legislation and public demand to limit the size of their landfills and reduce carbon footprints—eight states have food-recycling laws, six have food waste bans and even more states or cities have enacted recycling legislation—at least half a dozen American cities have begun using anaerobic digestion to handle food waste. Widespread in Europe, anaerobic digestion uses bacteria to break down organic material in an oxygen-free environment—a faster process than traditional composting, which depends on oxygen to do the work. It’s the same technology cities already use in wastewater treatment.
Top: Construction for the “waste to gas” initiative at the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn. Bottom: A view of the “setting tanks” inside the plant. | Sarah Blessner for Politico Magazine
Los Angeles is expanding its food-to-biogas program, a private facility recently opened in Salt Lake City to take restaurant food waste, a fuel company in Philadelphia announced plans to build a food-to-fuel processing plant last year, and in Connecticut, one anaerobic digester is running while three others are scheduled to be built.
One of the country’s largest facilities is in Brooklyn, New York, which in 2016 began using its own Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant to process 130 tons of liquefied food waste, roughly 3 percent of the city’s daily food waste. And food waste is just a fraction of the sewage that the plant handles in its eight gleaming egg-shaped silver tanks. But officials expect that Newtown will produce approximately 190 to 275 million cubic feet of natural gas for local electricity generation by next year.
“It really is an exciting sort of sustainability circle,” said Pam Elardo, the city’s deputy commissioner of the Bureau of Wastewater Treatment.
But despite the proven technology, Newtown is still among a minority of the nation’s wastewater facilities handling food waste. Indeed, none of New York’s remaining 13 wastewater treatment plants processes food waste.
“We are at one-seventh, maybe even one-tenth of the potential of this industry,” said Patrick Serfass, the executive Director of the American Biogas Council. According the organization, there are over 2,000 anaerobic digesters in the country built to produce biogas, but most that process food waste are on farms not in cities.
Top left and right: From the top of the “digester eggs,” visitors are able to look into a glass screen to see waste being processed below them. Bottom: Inside the plant, screening chambers pull out physical objects trapped in the wastewater. The most common object they must pluck out? Wet wipes. | Sarah Blessner for Politico Magazine
Cities have been slow to divert food waste to anaerobic digestion because it is more expensive to start than composting and requires new sites built by private investors or costly updates to existing public infrastructure. Digesters are more expensive to build and maintain than composting facilities like the one in San Francisco, but they have the benefit of producing two valuable byproducts: a rich soil additive prized by agriculture operations and biogas, which can be sold and reused as fuel.
Serfass stresses that composting and anaerobic digestion complement each other; San Francisco uses both. Often anaerobic digesters, especially ones that process sewage and food waste like Newtown, struggle to process yard waste, such as leaves and sticks. Compost can handle it better. Digesters also work best in densely populated or high-use agriculture areas because they need a consistent and large supply of food waste.
Current federal regulations provide a disincentive to make food waste into biogas by reducing the value of renewable gas that a wastewater treatment plant produces if it includes food waste as part of its intake. Nevertheless, wastewater plants can offset their own energy costs by using the biogas they produce. Earlier this year, San Luis Obispo, California, a coastal city of 47,500, chose not to use the city’s wastewater treatment facility and instead began sending food waste to a private facility that solely processes food waste from multiple sources on the California coast.
The Newtown plant, with the Manhattan skyline on the horizon. | Sarah Blessner for Politico Magazine
“We were able to divert all of the organic material to a facility that could capture all of the methane coming off of it and turn it into something productive,” said Jordan Lane, the city’s solid waste and recycling coordinator.
The facility, owned by Kompogas, takes in about 100,000 pounds of waste a day. The facility produces enough energy to fuel itself and 600 homes a year. The city mitigated odor issues from food waste and complied with California’s food waste diversion requirements when it switched to the anaerobic digester.
“We chose to use the digester out of convenience, sure, but also because it was arguably our best and most local option for organics treatment and disposal,” Lane wrote in an email.
Expansion is on the minds of New York officials. By 2021, Elardo hopes Newtown can ramp up from the 130 tons processed each day to 250 tons—nearly doubling its capacity, but still a long way from handling all the city’s food waste.
“It takes an investment on our side, and it takes public support to be able to drive those investments for that specific need outside of our regular business,” she said. “We could take a hundred percent of the city’s food waste. I mean, it’s not a crazy idea. What the problem is, it’s a logistics problem.”
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A drinking water sample taken from a Bergen County, NJ town had one of the highest concentrations of an increasingly common group of toxic chemicals found across the nation in a survey of water systems, according to a report issued Wednesday.
The sample taken in Bergenfield in August detected 12 compounds of PFAS, a group of man-made chemicals used in everyday products for almost a century and which have been linked in recent years to cancer and other ailments.
The levels of PFAS, or polyfluoroalkyl substances, did not exceed a federal health standard for drinking water. Tests by the Suez water company, which supplies Bergenfield and dozens of other Bergen and Hudson County towns, also show PFAS levels below that standard.
But the results still ranked Bergen County number four in the nationwide survey conducted by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.
“It’s a snapshot of what’s happening locally, but it also shows the ubiquity of PFAS in our water nationally,” said Sydney Evans, an analyst for the advocacy group and an author of the report.
The chemicals are found in non-stick pans, polishes, waxes, paints, cleaning products and firefighting foams. Brand names that contain the chemicals include Stainmaster, Scotchgard, Teflon and Gore-Tex.
PFAS compounds like PFOA, PFOS and GenX, have been found in drinking water from such upscale towns as Ridgewood in Bergen County to shore towns like Toms River to sparsely populated communities at the southwestern tip of New Jersey.
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