Michigan reconsiders garbage laws

These proposals are meant to to amend Part 115 of Michigan’s Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act, which details the state’s public and private garbage disposal operations, the article says.

 

“What we’ve come to is a consensus about broad ideas on changes that need to be made, but there’s still a lot of work to be done on details,” Sean Hammond, deputy policy director for the Michigan Environmental Council, told MLive.

A DEQ study conducted in 2016 found that 42 percent of material thrown away in Michigan has market value, including recyclables and food waste that could be converted to energy through composting and anaerobic digestion. The study estimated that $368 million worth of recyclables have been buried in the state’s landfills.

 

“Solid waste is really a type of infrastructure,” Hammond said. “People want to put their discarded materials at the curb and have it disappear.” 

 

According to the article, county solid waste boards have been forced to dissolve as funding has diminished over the past 15 years. As a result, the state has not enforced municipal requirements to update solid waste plans on a regular five-year cycle.

 

“At the county level, we’ve lost some of our expertise because the solid waste planning process hadn’t been updated in so long and everything has just been out there tooling along, for better or worse,” Darwin Baas, representative for the Michigan Association of Counties to SWSAP, told MLive.

 

Baas added that the state lacks the processing capacity needed to divert enough recyclables from the landfill to significantly increase Michigan’s recycling rate.

 

The public meeting will be held Wednesy, July 20, 2016, from noon to 3 p.m. at the Lansing Community College. The DEQ is accepting public comment until Aug. 1. The panel will formally present its recommendations to the DEQ this fall, MLive reports.