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What are you still throwing away?

Pat yourself on the back, Portland. Our city is doing a pretty good job with an estimated 48 percent of our trash diverted from going to a landfill and instead being recycled or reused.

However, the official Waste Composition Charts from Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality tell a more humbling story. Hundreds of thousands of tons of usable materials are still going to the landfill or burned in an incinerator. As an example, the Portland metro area still dumps over 40,000 tons of clean lumber, 40,000 tons of metals, and 120,000 tons of plastics annually (based on the most recent 2009 data).

The challenge is getting those materials from the people that have them into the hands of the people that need them.

An eclectic group of organizations banded together by a program called ResourceFULL Use seeks to do just that. The group meets quarterly at the Portland Airport Business Center to describe their under-utilized wastes or by-products and to challenge themselves to collectively identify productive uses.

Participating companies ask: “What's still in my waste stream?” The answers get creative.

For example, the Portland International Airport throws away thousands of feet of old escalator rubber railing each year. When ResourceFULL Use wrapped its brain cells around the challenge of finding potential second uses, they came up with ideas for horse trailer or dock bumpers, structural parts for retail displays or landscaping barrier material.

Other exchanges are simpler, like the nursery that obtained discarded planting pots from a nearby waste transfer station. Even after installing a steam-cleaning process, the nursery saved over $10,000 in plant pot costs.

In another case, disposal costs for two containers of specialized refrigerant to a hazardous waste facility would have cost $3,000 in disposal fees. But when the material was used by another ResourceFULL Use member instead, the disposal fee was avoided and the company that used the refrigerant saved $400 by not purchasing new material. In the ideal exchange everybody wins; with financial and environmental benefits.

A typical ResourceFULL Use meeting includes a high-energy speed dating-type exchange about what materials participants have or need, with each meeting yielding interesting new use ideas. Each new participant contributes to the list of available materials and potential uses.

An example of this collaboration is the fiberglass company and chicken farmer discovering that waste feathers could be used in a new product called featherglass. The fiberglass company found a cheap, local material, a new product idea and profit center. The chicken farmer found a market for a material that's costly to dispose of.

A similar program on a much larger scale is the National Industrial Symbiosis Programme in the United Kingdom. NISP is government funded and an independent audit shows it to be the most effective program in the U.K. for greenhouse gas reductions (35 million tons to date). The program has diverted 39 million tons of industrial waste from landfills into productive use. Economic results include creating $1.4 billion dollars in new sales for members, boosting the U.K. economy by as much as $3.9 billion dollars and created or retained 8,770 jobs.

While on a much smaller scale, RecourceFULL Use has seen similar results. For example, the exchange of

250 gallons of yellow traffic paint saved from landfill yielded:

• $2,500 in savings for the member who used the paint.
• $750 in avoided hazardous waste fees.
• 2,500 pounds of waste prevented
• Greenhouse gas emission reductions estimated at 6,300 pounds of carbon dioxide for the avoided paint manufacturing and 42 pounds of CO2 for the transportation fuel saved.

Ask yourself, “What am I still throwing away? What is still in our dumpster or on our hazardous waste manifest?” Then stop by the Airport Business Center August 18 at 9:30 a.m. for the next ResourceFULL Use workshop.

Debra Taevs is the deputy director of the Pacific Northwest Pollution Prevention Resource Center in Portland. ResourceFULL Use is the brain child of the ZeroWaste Alliance, Columbia Corridor Association and the Pacific Northwest Pollution Prevention Resource Center, with a grant from the Boeing Company.