Sustainable Tennessee

Day two of the Summit for a Sustainable Tennessee started out in the morning with breakout sessions on Air, Land, Water, Energy and Solid Waste. Participants focused on developing some action items for the coming year for each breakout group.

The solid waste and recycling breakout session which I attended, was an informative look at some of the issues facing the state of Tennessee when it comes to landfill safety, nuclear waste disposal, recycling and solid waste disposal.

Some facts were discussed:

Over 71% of the waste stream in TN has the potential to be raw material for business and compost.
12% is food waste
13% is yard waste
36% is paper/cardboard
15% is construction and demolition waste.

Tennessee spends 250 million dollars to dispose of solid waste though landfills.

The TN Bottle Bill would put a 5 cent deposit on glass, plastic and aluminum beverage containers.
4.5 billion containers are disposed of in the state of TN. 90 percent of these containers are tossed in the landfill.

25% of the cost of landfill disposal would be eliminated with the passage of the bottle bill.
Independent redemption centers would be funded to accept these recyclable materials.
18 sponsors for the Bottle Bill during the last legislative session for 2008.
Keep Tennessee Beautiful opposes this bottle bill.
Funding for KTB is from the beverage industry. Keep America Beautiful was started by Coca Cola back in the 1950’s.
5 million in litter grants comes from the beverage industry.
Many state municipalities rely on KTB to pay for local recycling funds.

Keeping that 71% of raw material out of TN landfills would lower the cost of waste disposal immensely.