Stopwaste.org Strategic Planning Meeting
Staff received an invitation to and attended the Stakeholder Workshop provided by Stopwaste.org on Thursday, November 12, 2009. The meeting was focused on reviewing the proposed Ten-year Strategic Plan for the organization. The overall aim of the Strategic Plan is to emphasize the organization’s focus on broader sustainability issues and not solely on discard management. The presentation focused on the lifecycle of materials with targets/policies for each of the production, consumption, discard, and recycling phases.
In the production phase, Stopwaste is proposing to increase efforts in green purchasing policies, producer responsibility legislation (where the cost of disposal/recycling is paid by the producer), partnering with the East Bay Economic Development Alliance to provide recycling loans to businesses, and development of a taskforce to study product fees for hazardous, non-recyclable, and litter prone products. The consumption based activities proposed are focused on increasing and developing polices for green building and bay-friendly landscaping.
The proposed discard activities were to create a media campaign to reward high performing residents (media exposure and financial) for recycling excellence, creating a franchise review taskforce to produce best practices for inclusion in a jurisdiction’s franchise agreement, enforcement of the plant debris landfill ban, and look at mandatory recycling and organics ordinances. Finally, recycling activities were focused on aligning franchise agreements as part of the taskforce, evaluating existing materials recovery facility (MRF) capacity, supporting facility expansion, looking at indoor composting and anaerobic digestion of compostable materials (creates methane), furthering the evaluation of product fees, and supporting the management of biosolids.
Stopwaste is also proposing some new goals for the next ten-year period: 90% of accounts have less than 10% recyclable & compostable materials in their garbage by 2020 and 90% of purchases (landscapes, buildings, paints & sealants) will pass sustainability filters by 2020.
