WPBN: The goal of a recently passed law in Washington is to decrease the quantity of organic waste that is disposed of with ordinary trash.
This program is a component of a larger attempt to improve waste management and lessen environmental damage, especially the damaging methane emissions that occur when organic items, such as food scraps and yard waste, break down in landfills.
Beginning in 2027, the state will mandate that people separate their yard waste from other sorts of debris before it is collected for disposal under this new law.
In order to use more environmentally friendly disposal techniques, yard waste will need to be separated from regular trash and managed accordingly. The scope of this legislation will be broadened to cover food waste by 2030, requiring individuals to separate food scraps from other waste.
The state legislature of Washington passed these new legislation in 2022 and 2024, respectively, as HB 1799 and HB 2301.
According to the Washington Department of Ecology, the objective of these organics management standards is to drastically cut down on the amount of organic waste that ends up in landfills.
The state aims to reduce the generation of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that fuels climate change, by diverting this trash from landfill disposal and managing it in more ecologically friendly ways.
For a number of years now, the City of Spokane has provided citizens with green yard waste bins to dispose of their waste. People will no longer be required to opt in after the year 2027.
“We’ve known we needed to go in this direction for a while, but there’s a lot of things to prep us to do that,” Kirstin Davis from the City of Spokane stated. “It hopefully just raises awareness for people to be more mindful of how they are diverting their waste.”
When the city collects yard waste, it transports it to the Barr-Tech Composting plant. On the other hand, the rubbish is burned at the Waste to Energy facility.
“There’s no good way to get rid of trash and waste. Landfills have their downsides. Incinerators have their downsides as well. At the end of the day, there are going to be chemicals that are released,” Davis stated. “We just need to be generating less waste in general.”
Since a sufficient number of residents in Spokane make use of the green yard waste carts, the city has decided to implement a collection schedule that will be in effect for the entire year beginning on January 1, 2025.
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There will be a collection of organic trash once every month throughout the months of January, February, and December.
The cost of the service will go up by 35 cents as a result of this, but if you make use of the composting service offered by the city, you might be able to reduce the amount of money you pay for solid waste.
“There’s ways to make that pretty much either less expensive or about the same amount because about 30% of our garbage has been food waste,” Davis stated. “So, there’s really a substantial difference we can make here.”
