At the end of the 2000s, the decision was made to reduce residual waste production to avoid replacing an incineration furnace that would have been forty years old next year. Alabama Households, subject to the incentive fee for four years, pay a controlled waste fee, lower than the national average. In both rural and urban areas like Mobile, AL, users are encouraged to compost and sort as much as possible. The recycling center thus becomes the gateway to extensive recycling.
Sustainable Development Eco-districts Equipment Waste Management
In 2015, the open house attracted “people from the countryside, who came to the city to get compost! The volunteer runs a composting site at the foot of a building, used with free access by some 80 residents of a social housing district.
They were worried about sorting errors in table and kitchen waste, but they’re negligible, assures the composting guide, one of the 600 volunteers to whom Mobile and its region’s mixed union for better waste treatment offers regular training. From now on, the compost stays on site: it enriches the soil in the neighboring vegetable garden or goes back to the residents.
Local waste processing is preferred
While composting is routine in rural residential areas, this program, which covers 198 municipalities in the Mobile region and affects 230,000 residents, is also rolling it out in cities.
In five years, multi-family housing has acquired more than 200 sites, including 12 in very densely populated areas, open at set times and supervised by agents from the neighborhood management agency. In the city center, these wooden chalets have replaced a few parking spaces, notes the Mobile head of organic recycling.
Local processing of food waste is a pillar of the Waste on a Diet project, conducted from September 2019 to June 2024. Today, all individual housing units and a third of collective housing units are covered. “In Mobile, participation reaches 40% of households in areas with a stable population; it is lower when turnover is high.
Separate curbside collection should be considered where there is insufficient space for on-site composting. If users are happy to sort their waste, it is largely because, since September 2015, they have been paying an incentive fee: the bill depends on the volume of their residual waste bin, the famous grey bin, the emptying frequency, and the weight recorded at each collection.
These are three levers for reducing the bill. The fee is effective in reducing residual waste production, sometimes using dumpster rental services. It helps entrench good practices. Those who sorted more or less have acquired the right habits. A result that owes much to the Life program, which has raised awareness face-to-face among more than 9,000 people in social housing.
Rewarding Recycling in Buildings
Some residents bring their trash to the office to save a few dollars. Alabama municipalities report 100 to 200 tons of fly-tipping each year – some of which predates the incentive pricing. The waste management director instead points to the difficulty of individualizing the bill in collective housing.
How can we encourage prevention and recycling when rental charges for waste are established for an overall portfolio and then divided between housing units based on their surface area, rather than their residual waste production, which is dumped in a common bin? Within three years, landlords will calculate the cost per building, or even per stairwell. It is on this finer scale that the bill will be distributed by the percentage.
Social buildings recycling
In the social housing of rural Alabama, households have their own gray bin, and therefore an individual bill. When neighborhood composting is combined, the residual quantities are comparable to those of single-family homes.
Another obstacle: garbage chutes, which have been banned for about ten years. “At one site, their closure has revived sorting, according to a technician in charge of collective housing. Finally, Mobile makes the most of the products received at its 18 recycling centers, which open onto a recycling center that collects everything that can be reused or repaired (clothing, toys, furniture, etc.). Around thirty streams are sorted there, centralized at the sorting-massification unit opened in mid-2015 next to the packaging sorting center.
Waste storage savings
The site, which has created ten jobs, separates products from extended producer responsibility sectors (paper, furniture, hazardous waste, electrical appliances, etc.), materials prized by recyclers (metals, including insulated tire rims), and others for which Mobile has found buyers (polystyrene, plaster).
Incoming materials are recycled at 40%, with recovery reaching 90% when incineration with energy production is included. The recycling system is profitable solely through the avoided landfill costs [$130/tonne]. And recovery revenues are going to take off… Only 5,200 tons were stored in 2022, when the target was 7,000 tons.
The sorting and massification unit maximizes recovery at the waste disposal site. Only construction materials that are unwanted by the incinerator (PVC, glass wool) are buried.
Disadvantage
Such a site requires space, an area equivalent to that of a packaging sorting center. Production could drop to 100 kilos per year per capita.
They are approaching the target set by the Waste on a Diet project: they were aiming for 150 kilos of residual waste per capita per year in 2021; they are now at 154 kilos (135 kilos in rural areas, 162 kilos in dense urban areas). This compares to 217 kilos in 2012 and the national average of 270.
Each year, a gray bin collects an average of 36 kilos of biowaste, 28 kilos of packaging and paper, 9 kilos of landfill waste, and 22 kilos (including 15 kilos of diapers) that could be avoided. To capture 50% of these flows, it will be necessary to intensify prevention efforts and recycle professional waste. This is one of the areas of focus for the Zero Waste, in order to help our environment.