Government of the District of Columbia
DC Department of Public Works
Testimony of William O. Howland, Jr., Director
“Roundtable on a Waste-to-Energy Facility in the District of Columbia”
Committee on Transportation and the Environment
Mary Cheh, Chairperson
John A. Wilson Building
Room 500
1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20004
Monday, March 18, 2013
Testimony of William O. Howland, Jr., Director
DC Department of Public Works
“Roundtable on a Waste-to-Energy Facility of the District of Columbia”
Before the Committee on Transportation and the Environment
Monday, March 18, 2013
Good morning, Chairperson Cheh, members of the Council and staff. I am William O. Howland, Jr., Director of the Department of Public Works. I am here today to present testimony about the Department’s plans to use the grant money we received from the Sustainable DC fund.
Approximately 900,000 tons of solid waste is currently managed in the District. DPW manages 500,000 tons through its two transfer stations. Roughly 100,000 additional tons are reported as recycled by commercial haulers, and 300,000 tons of municipal solid waste are processed through the District’s private sector transfer stations.
DPW collects 135,000 tons per year of solid waste, including 25,000 tons of recyclables and 8,000 tons of leaves from residential properties.
We also collect an additional 50,000 tons of materials through our street and alley cleaning program and citizen drop-off services. District government agencies and contractors servicing government buildings dispose of an additional 42,000 tons at the transfer stations.
The District’s current strategy relies on contracting for all solid waste disposal, recycling, and composting services. We export 225,000 tons of solid waste to the Fairfax County Energy Resource Recovery Facility in Lorton, VA, under an agreement that currently expires on December 31, 2015.
DPW-collected recyclables and organics go to Maryland and Virginia facilities for processing. The total annual cost including transfer station operations is approximately $20 million.
Mayor Gray’s Sustainable DC goal for waste management is to achieve zero waste in 2032 by producing less waste in the first place and capturing value from everything else through reuse, recycling, composting, and energy production.
To achieve this goal, the District will develop an integrated solid waste management system that redefines solid waste from a burden that just needs to disappear to a resource with economic, environmental and social value.
To determine those values, the District needs to understand exactly what natural and financial capital investments need to be made to sustain the designed system and quantify the benefits that will be realized from its implementation.
The Department of Public Works is using the funding we received from Sustainable DC to develop an evaluation strategy and framework to quantitatively compare the natural and financial capital investments required by several integrated solid waste management scenarios. Our current solid waste management program will be evaluated as well.
Each scenario will be designed to capture the energy and embedded value of the managed material streams and must include recycling, composting and residuals processing components.
These scenarios will be run through the designed framework to allow us to comparatively evaluate the results.
By quantifying and comparing the investments needed for current baseline operations and the alternatives, the District will be in a better position to identify impact mitigation, cost savings, value creation and positive environmental justice outcomes of the system we choose to develop.
In other words, every solid waste management option –whether it is recycling, composting, anaerobic digestion, incineration, waste conversion or landfilling – has environmental, economic and social costs and benefits. Each of these options creates emissions, each of these options costs money, and each of these options has offsetting positive benefits. We want to understand exactly what these costs and benefits look like for the District and use that data to inform our long term management strategy
If we are successful, this project will achieve the following objectives:
- Meet the goals of the Mayor’s Sustainable DC plan.
- Identify how to economically increase the District’s diversion rate.
- Determine how DC can best capture the embedded energy and economic value of its waste stream.
- Identify the optimal set of disposal strategies to maximize the value of the waste stream while providing economic sustainability over the long term; and
- Identify whether the District should seek jurisdictional partners for the solid waste management system.
Let me take this opportunity to make clear that we do not know what this system will look like and that we have no pre-conceived conclusions that one option is better than another.
What we do know is that even after you offer and encourage source reduction, recycling and composting there is a significant amount of material that still needs to be handled. This study will help chart our path going forward on what is the right combination of disposal options that will promote a sustainable integrated waste management system for the District over the next 25-30 years.
This concludes my remarks. I am happy to respond to your questions. Thank you.