Interview with Paul Schultz, Resource Management Coordinator for the City of
Dubuque, IA
October 5, 2012, 1PM-1:40PM
Telephone
I decided to interview Paul Schultz after reading about the PAYT program in
Dubuque, IA. The program sounds effective, and does residential pickup of food
scraps, but more intriguing is Schultz’ language in the EPA document that mentions
Schultz. He calls the volume-based user fees a “sin tax,” which intrigued me: what
sort of ethics motivated the recycling and composting in Dubuque?
I called his office at 1PM on the dot, no answer, then I tried his cell phone. He picked
up. He had been in his (supervisor’s?) office next door, and told me to call him in his
office. It was pay-day, and all the collectors were coming in and picking up checks.
Brief interruptions peppered the conversation, and he apologized and explained this
again each time.
I ran through much the same questions I had asked Bill Rabbia three weeks earlier,
with some adjustments. Schultz seemed eager to answer all my questions, especially
as the interview went on and I got more excited about the program. He would
occasionally misinterpret my questions—or maybe I was asking the wrong
questions—so on some occasions I had to ask twice.
For much of the interview, I focused on the structure of the program, which is partly
explained on a PowerPoint that Schultz had sent me a week ago, but which I wanted
to hear in his words. While he coordinates a Pay-as-you-Throw program, I was most
interested in the food scraps program.
1. Could you describe how general trash and compost get picked up in the
Dubuque Food Scraps program? How do you deal with noncompliance?
When the food scraps program started, there was already PAYT, which included
unlimited recycling and other waste on a user fee basis, and a large item program
picked up on the same day. The average weight of waste was 21 lb. per household
per pickup. All in all, the town picked up six large items per day. 20% of the
landfilled material was food, 10% was paper.
The food scrap program is still in its pilot stage (after six years!) and has only 250
households enrolled, and 100 people on the waiting list. Schultz has quit advertising
or even talking about the program in Dubuque because too many people want in on
it. Limiting its expansion is a DPW cap on the composting facility of 2 tons of food
waste per week.
A new facility is opening up in the next month or two that can take 40 tons of food
waste per week, which would allow for expansion of the program. Schultz is
planning to expand into the institutional sector in the near future with 12 schools
and colleges. There is no push into the commercial sector yet because the
commercial sector is not served by municipal trash pickup.
Customers of the food waste program are given (wait are they? Or do they purchase
them…) 13-gallon containers for scraps. Schultz does not remember any problems
with people on the food scraps program, probably because they volunteered to be
on it. The food waste program costs 60 cents per month, except in winter when it is
the cost of a yard waste sticker (find out how much this is).
2. Are the food and yard waste mixed together? Are there ever problems with
that/does that influence your treatment of the compost?
Food scraps and yard waste are composted together in the same facility, and
transported in the same trucks. While it is conceivable that some residents put food
waste in their yard waste bags, Schultz is unable to recommend that, because of the
need to stay below two tons of food scraps per week.
3. Could you describe how the fee schedules work? Is the system entirely PAYT?
How were people selected for it, what does one have to do to get on it?
Dubuque runs on a hybrid PAYT program (the term was unfamiliar to Schultz, I had
to explain as I asked it. Most PAYT programs are hybrid.) in which waste is charged
and yard waste is also charged but under a different system? I was unclear on this.
The new composting facility will have a 40 ton per day (or was it week?) food scrap
limit, which is “half the food in the landfill.” Schultz seems excited about this. The
facility will be indoors, under a roof, taking a model from Minnesota. While still
unclear on design specifics, Schultz was able to guess that it will use statically
aerated windrows. A soft opening is set for the next 2-3 weeks.
The plan with the new system is to get rid of the 13-gallon containers and allow
residents to put food waste in with their yard waste. Approval for this plan won’t
come til the end of the month.
4. When was PAYT initiated in Dubuque? Who designed the system and who
decided to implement it? How were fees decided?
The food scraps program is six years old; PAYT has been in place for ten years. The
push for PAYS was from the Dubuque government. Because landfills are managed
entirely by the government in Dubuque, there’s much more willingness to support
recycling in order to reduce stress on landfills.
Schultz had been an organic farmer before he started working for resource
management (more on this later). Because he had been composting food scraps and
farm waste together for years, he knew that it’d be easy to implement a food scraps
program at not much extra cost. The 60 cent fee was calculated to be able to offset
the purchase of containers, and a progressive staff member of the DNR allowed 2
tons of waste per week as a stepping stone for a more comprehensive plan.
They’ve seen more resistance since implementation, whenever they try to grow the
program. The program is currently stagnating. Lots of other cities are working on
composting, but the DNR is resisting this kind of growth.
5. Where you involved with the Dubuque waste management at that time? Were
you involved in the implementation of PAYT?
Schultz has been in this position since 1995, and saw the department through the
implementation of PAYT. He’s been interested in zero waste for a while.
Dubuque is one of the most sustainable cities in Iowa, according to Schultz. It has a
culture of sustainability and resiliency, which makes composting easier to
implement.
The food scraps program has earned Dubuque lot of points and awards at
competitions. It looks good for the city, and gets them support at the top. It makes
policymakers think that Dubuque must really know what they’re doing.
Iowa city has been working with the university to design and implement a system,
but most of them just do a permit with MSW. It’s harder to do this with controls on
leachates, and difficult to invest in such programs in an unclear regulatory
environment.
6. What difficulties have you run into with the implementation and expansion of
the system? What advice do you have for a similarly-sized town looking to
implement a similar system? What would you do if you could start all over
again?
There have been no neighborhood complaints about the food waste program; the
facility is far from houses and farmers are used to composting anyway. The Solid
Waste Agency had a bad experience when they started the yard waste program,
because the bio-bags didn’t break down properly. They got stuck in the windrow
turning equipment, and looked unpleasant in the compost. The program has since
seen resistance to bags of any kind, despite biodegradable material improvements.
The lack of an intermediate containment method limited expansion. Then they had
to make sure those non-degrading bags weren’t being sold.
Schultz complained that the Solid Waste Authority hasn’t been as professional with
food composting, just mandating the yard debris. They aren’t seeing the big picture!
7. Who has tended to opt in to composting pickup?
Some households will share a compost container. Residents are excited about it and
want to get involved. People are interested in sharing collections, or even doing
their own personal composting. Schultz doesn’t seem to have any info about who
the people involved with the food scraps program are, but says that he cannot
promote it, because of the high demand.
8. What has community response been like? Have there been community efforts
against composting, or efforts to expand it?
The Department of Natural Resources hasn’t been willing to change the permit on
the facility; the new facility was placed in Dubuqe purely by chance. He calls his
“non-strategic intelligence”. There was no search for public money, it was all
privately financed. There was no reaction from the zoning community, no NIMBY
reaction (his phrasing). The facility is out in the country, in an agricultural area, far
from everything.
9. One of the things I liked most about the Dubuque section of this EPA-SERA
report is the phrase “sin tax”. There’s a real moral element to the system, and
I like that. Can you talk a little about your own ethics of waste?
At this point Schultz abandoned what little was left of the bureaucrat was in him.
While some of these phrases I’ve seen before in his presentation or in the EPA/SERA
document, I think they are genuine. “Waste is abuse!” he explained. “This is assets.
There’s no such thing as waste. Waste is a verb, not a noun.”
The food scraps program is “making a strategic point. If I can use it as an asset, how
it it a waste.” He views his job as “managing assets” and views the landfill model as a
“paradigm we need to get away from.” Landfills are a “desecration of God’s earth.” At
this he notices he slipped a notch further. Before he became an organic farmer he
was in seminary, three months from becoming a catholic priest.
“The natural world doesn’t produce waste! We should follow different scientific
frameworks! Each and everything in its place!” He views composting as “care of
creation,” which is “the rent you pay for the privilege of living on earth.” Most
people, he admits, are “eco-illiterate,” so PAYT allows him to design a program
where people pick up on incentives and save money by recycling. They were forced
into that because the city wasn’t able to achieve 20% diversion before PAYT, and
they fell into non-compliance. Trying to persuade people to recycle is difficult. When
putting PAYT in place, they dropped the tonnage of their trash by 20%. People got
used to it.
To close out, I asked him for some advice to a city that was looking into a PAYT
system. He offered a number of points in support of it:
-It sets you up to be more resilient.
-“It’s ridiculous to be living in a culture of waste—of anything!”
-We can’t prepare for the future with the current resources that are availale.
-PAYT reduced their cost of operation.
-People from outside the city brought trash in, someone needed to enforce it. We
issue a couple tags a day, but private operators don’t/can’t do that. They don’t want
to go back and pick stuff up.
Dubuque also has a new pilot program in smarter resource management. They’re
weighing 250-400 households’ trash, and developing dashboards where consumers
can see the breakdown of what they’re throwing away, and compare their trash to
other people’s trash. Hopefully, this will create incentives for removing things from
the waste stream. This is a year long pilot project. You can just see the read out on a
computer screen and they’re even developing an app for that.
The project has attracted IBM’s smarter cities task force for smarter discard
management.
Schultz wants to move away from the term “waste.” Trash is landfill, recycleables
are…recyclables, and organics are compost. Call it where it goes.