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June 23rd, 2013:

Russia to create waste recycling industry by 2020

23/06/2013 ITAR-TASS

http://indrus.in/news/2013/06/23/russia_to_create_waste_recycling_industry_by_2020_26361.html

Russia will create a waste recycling industry by 2020, Minister of Natural Resources and the Environment Sergei Donskoi said.

“We have drafted amendments to the Waste Law which hold manufacturers responsible for disposal and recycling of their waste. A manufacturer whose products will be disposed of later should include the recycling fee in the cost of the products,” the minister said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum on Saturday, June 22.

He believes that the fee will be 0.4 percent of the cost of a product. “It should not fuel inflation due to big competition in the market, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, this will make it possible to accumulate money in a state fund to finance the construction of waste disposal and waste sorting plants,” Donskoi said.

“Basically, we should create an industry with a large number of waste recycling facilities within the next seven years by 2020,” the minister said.

He said the law should enter into force by the spring of 2014.

Bloomberg Plan Aims to Require Food Composting

Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

Maxie Santiago prepared to empty his food scraps into a collection bin on the sixth floor of his 600-unit building in Manhattan.

By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: June 16, 2013 969 Comments

Dozens of smaller cities, including San Francisco and Seattle, have adopted rules that mandate recycling of food waste from homes, but sanitation officials in New York had long considered the city too dense and vertically structured for such a policy to succeed.

Recent pilot programs in the city, though, have shown an unexpectedly high level of participation, officials said. As a result, the Bloomberg administration is rolling out an ambitious plan to begin collecting food scraps across the city, according to Caswell F. Holloway IV, a deputy mayor.

The administration plans to announce shortly that it is hiring a composting plant to handle 100,000 tons of food scraps a year. That amount would represent about 10 percent of the city’s residential food waste.

Anticipating sharp growth in food recycling, the administration will also seek proposals within the next 12 months for a company to build a plant in the New York region to process residents’ food waste into biogas, which would be used to generate electricity.

“This is going to be really transformative,” Mr. Holloway said. “You want to get on a trajectory where you’re not sending anything to landfills.”

The residential program will initially work on a voluntary basis, but officials predict that within a few years, it will be mandatory. New Yorkers who do not separate their food scraps could be subject to fines, just as they are currently if they do not recycle plastic, paper or metal.

Mr. Bloomberg, an independent, leaves office at the end of the year, and his successor could scale back or cancel the program. But in interviews, two leading Democratic candidates for mayor, Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, expressed strong support for the program — including the plan to eventually make it mandatory.

Sanitation officials said 150,000 single-family homes would be on board voluntarily by next year, in addition to more than 100 high-rise buildings — more than 5 percent of the households in the city. More than 600 schools will take part as well.

The program should expand to the entire city by 2015 or 2016, the sanitation officials said.

Under the program, residents collect food waste — like stale bread, chicken bones and potato peels — in containers the size of picnic baskets in their homes. The contents are then deposited in larger brown bins on the curb for pickup by sanitation trucks.

Residents of apartment buildings dump pails of food scraps at central collection points, most likely in the same places they put recyclable material.

It remains to be seen whether New Yorkers will embrace the program, given that some may cringe at keeping a container of potentially malodorous waste in a typically cramped urban kitchen, even if it is supposed to be emptied regularly.

The city has historically had a relatively mediocre record in recycling, diverting only about 15 percent of its total residential waste away from landfills.

In the latest 12-month period recorded, the Sanitation Department issued 75,216 summonses to home and building owners for failing to recycle. Officials expected that more summonses will be issued in the current fiscal year, because the department has redeployed personnel to recycling enforcement.

Still, the residential food-waste program would represent the biggest expansion of recycling efforts since the city began separating paper, metal and glass in 1989.

“It’s revolutionary for New York,” said Eric A. Goldstein, a senior lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a prominent environmental group. “If successful, pretty soon there’ll be very little trash left for homeowners to put in their old garbage cans.”

The city spent $336 million last year disposing of residential trash, exporting most of it to landfills in Ohio, Pennsylvania and South Carolina.

Food waste and other organic materials account for almost a third of all residential trash, and the city could save about $100 million a year by diverting it from landfills, said Ron Gonen, who was hired last year as deputy sanitation commissioner for recycling and sustainability, a new job at the department.

Experts have long criticized recycling as a weak spot in Mr. Bloomberg’s environmental record. But he appears to want to close out his tenure with a push to improve the program.

In his State of the City address in February, Mr. Bloomberg called food waste “New York City’s final recycling frontier.”

“We bury 1.2 million tons of food waste in landfills every year at a cost of nearly $80 per ton,” he said. “That waste can be used as fertilizer or converted to energy at a much lower price. That’s good for the environment and for taxpayers.”

The city does not handle commercial waste — businesses must hire private carters. But the administration intends to propose legislation that would require restaurants and food businesses to recycle their food waste.

A central question for the next mayor and City Council will be when to make residential recycling of food waste mandatory, with violators subject to fines. Garbage disposals remain relatively rare in the city.

Mr. de Blasio called diverting trash from landfills “crucially important to the environment and the city’s fiscal health” and said he would like to have a mandatory program within five years.

Ms. Quinn said the City Council would take up a bill this summer to require pilot programs across the city to ensure that voluntary recycling of food waste continues, regardless of who is mayor.

She said a mandatory program should be in place by 2016.

“We’re going to lock it in,” she said. “When New York makes composting part of everyday life, every other city will follow through. This is going to create an urban trend.”

Sanitation officials said they had been heartened by recent pilot programs.

At the Helena, a 600-unit building on West 57th Street in Manhattan, bins are kept in the trash rooms on each floor and emptied daily by workers.

The building’s owner, the Durst Organization, said the weight of the compostable material had been steadily rising, to a total of 125 pounds daily.

In the Westerleigh section of Staten Island, the city offered 3,500 single-family homes brown bins, kitchen containers and compost bags last April. Residents were told to separate out all foods, and even soiled paper like napkins and plates. Already 43 percent are placing their bins out on the curb for weekly pickups, said Mr. Gonen, the senior sanitation official.

Ellen and Thomas Felci, neighborhood residents, said they were eager to take part in the program — “for the good of the city,” Mrs. Felci said.

Everything now goes into the brown bin: things like corn husks and broccoli stems, but not meat (because Mr. Felci, 65, said he feared raccoons).

Mrs. Felci, 62, said that a week into the tryout she noticed a bad smell coming from the container, which she had placed next to the sink in the kitchen.

She solved the problem by dumping the contents into the bin outside more regularly and putting baking soda in the bottom.

But across the street, Joe Lagambina, 58, shunned the program. He said that recycling plastic and metal was already a burden, and that he would not separate food unless it was required by the city. He said his three daughters often mixed trash with recyclables.

“I’m the one who has to separate everything,” he said. “I go outside and there’ll be regular garbage in the blue can. It’s a pain.”

“I have enough work,” he said.

Response shows US delegation’s value

I suppose the trip adds to Edward Yau’s frequent flyer points. During his 60 months at ENB he went overseas 59 times hence the state of our air and lack of constructive action against polluting ocean shipping, failure to ban hi sulfur bunker fuel , no Emissions Control Area mandated and other pollution sources left rampant. Failure to legislate source separation of waste etc and Yau still has a highly paid office manager job instead of being charged with Misconduct in Public Office.

Since the CE met Mayor Bloomberg hopefully he learned something, such as the fact that New York City has specifically excluded incineration from its proposed waste treatment plans and New York City has the highest tobacco tax in America. Obviously Mayor Bloomberg cares about New Yorkers’ health, a constructive hint that needs to pass to CY Leung.

South China Morning Post

Published on South China Morning Post (http://www.scmp.com)

Home > Response shows US delegation’s value



Response shows US delegation’s value

Sunday, 23 June, 2013, 12:00am

CommentLetters

· 197f7e4a8b9a82902129d05bb8ffbad2.jpg

Leung at the New York Stock Exchange. Photo: Gary Cheung

Philip Bowring’s article (“Limits of Chinese parochialism”, June 16) questioned the value of the chief executive’s trip to New York last week.

We do not agree that the chief executive “carries no weight and saw no one of significance” and that “time and effort would have been far better spent building Hong Kong’s relations with its neighbours”.

Hong Kong has strong economic ties with the US, which is our second-largest trading partner, after the mainland.

Last year, the total value of our bilateral trade reached almost HK$543 billion. The US is also our second-largest export market and fifth-largest source of imports.

It was therefore important for the chief executive to embark on this trip to promote trade and maintain a strong economic partnership with the US business community. Hong Kong businesses recognised the importance of this visit. Hence, over 200 leading businessmen joined the delegation, including around 40 from Guangdong.

Contrary to Bowring’s suggestion, during this trip the chief executive met different political leaders, financial heavyweights and top-level international business leaders, including the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg; the co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and former secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin; the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William Dudley; the chief executive officer of the New York Stock Exchange, Duncan Niederauer; Rupert Murdoch from the media sector; Jerry Speyer from the real estate sector; and the top management of some global investment banks.

The chief executive was also the guest of honour at the Hong Kong Trade Development Council’s trade promotion events, which more than 1,000 people attended. Such huge attendance demonstrates that the US business community attaches great importance to Hong Kong.

Nick Au Yeung, assistant director (media), Chief Executive’s Office

Topics:

Leung Chun-ying



Links:
[1] http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1261617/limits-chinese-parochialism