Lots of counties in Texas have a recycling center in place, call your local county and just pick up a few bins separate your waste into them and when they fill up take them to the recycle center and for paper usually a local school will have a big green bin they have out front to recycle the paper.
When I lived near College Station TX we didn’t have trash pick up and once a month we went to town drove through the recycling center and they unloaded it, we went to the dump once a year and never had more than a $6 charge for what couldn’t be recylced

I think the future in “Zero Waste” will be something like this (http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2007-03/prophet-garbage), but rather than burning the organic matter it can probably be put to different uses as described in the podcast.

Here is the article I mentioned: http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2012/10/judge_halts_dallas_flow_contro.php

I think that the concept that the interviewee presented (zero waste) is a bunch of marketing mumbo jumbo. Anyone who has worked for a large industrial company knows that the purpose is to make money and if that means selling the by products, so be it. This is nothing new. The ford model t’s engine was packed in a crate that was used as the floorboards for the truck.

Can more be done, absolutely but do we need snake oil salesman who speak in abstracts? Heck no!

Zero Waste around the world: http://www.ecocycle.org/zerowaste/aroundtheworld

Hi John,

Thank you for taking the time to talk about this topic today. It is definitely an area that I can personally greatly improve on!

I felt very lost for most of the interview, and if I could make a suggestion, echoing Adam and Cory’s concerns, in future interviews you might want to focus on drawing the listeners in within the first few minutes, then expand on the theory, talking about other people doing the same thing, and what we “should” be doing. Keep in mind that you live and breathe this one topic for countless hours, every single day. For many (most?) of us, this is the first time we have ever heard of the term.

For example, in the first ten minutes of the interview you could have said, “Zero Waste sounds like a gargon term, right? Well let me boil it down for you and the listeners; Zero Waste is a personal, corporate, or governmental goal of systematically identifying every area where processes produce garbage, and either fixing it at the front end by modifying the process to not require the waste, or at the back end using one person’s waste as another’s resource.”

Then go into a VERY specific example, so the audience has a concrete example to reference when they hear who else is doing this, and what we “should” be doing. For example, you could tell a story about how an ATV manufacturing company you helped would receive wheels from their supplier in thick plastic bags. Every month they produced 14 tons of trash, and it cost them $20,000 per month to haul that garbage away. By working with their supplier to put the wheels in cardboard boxes, the supplier saved $5,000 per month in packaging, and the ATV company was able to sell 25 tons of cardboard to a paper towel manufacturer for $2,500 per month. This turned a $60k/yr expense into a $30k revenue for the ATV manufacturer, saved cost for the supplier, provided a resource for the paper towel manufacturer, and kept 168 tons of garbage out of a landfill.

Again, I hope you take this advise as constructive. I think it takes a lot of balls to do an interview that will be heard by over 100k people in the first day. I also have no doubt that you know this subject incredibly well, and just a slight tweak in how you present it could make a massive difference in how the message is understood by the unwashed masses, like me.

I must admit that at first I wasn’t really into this episode but some point along the way I caught the spirit of the idea and my mind ran away with the idea. I envisioned companies designing their products or their waste containers with the next user in mind. Like plywood shipping boxes cut to the dimensions to be used as the bodies for kitchen cabinets. Or maybe a packaging container designed to be a secondary product to the consumer. Like maybe Tupperware shoe boxes. Like flour sacks were printed to become dresses and blankets.

The Starbucks example was good, but only touched the surface of one aspect of waste management. I always though there could be a business in many cities of collecting food waste from restaurants and grocers to sell to livestock(or mushroom farmers apparently). The example above of what the ATV maker did could be the basis of a consulting business for other firms that produce office waste. Overall, this is a very thought provoking topic.

-Ben