Ron Gonen, the co-founder and managing director of Closed Loop Partners, New York, recently talked with Alec Baldwin about the state of the recycling industry in the city on Baldwin’s “Here’s the Thing” podcast. Gonen formerly served as the deputy commissioner of Sanitation, Recycling and Sustainability for New York City under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
According to Gonen, New York City taxpayers spend $400 million per year exporting waste to out-of-state landfills. His goal as the city’s first “Recycling Czar” was to make recycling easy for both citizens and businesses in order to divert more of this waste.
The city started by placing recycling containers on the street and allowing rigid plastics to be included in the recycling stream to cut down on confusion as to what could and couldn’t be recycled. They also instituted a curbside organics program to harness energy from food waste through anaerobic digestion (AD).
Gonen says that utilizing AD in the future will allow the city to save hundreds of millions of dollars not having to export this waste out of state. Instead, the refuse will be converted to gas to power vehicles and homes throughout the city.
The challenge going forward for the city, Gonen notes, is to get residents to understand the importance of properly sorting their waste.
“Eighty percent of what’s in the New York City waste stream can be recycled. For anybody who says recycling doesn’t work, or we shouldn’t be recycling, they’re living in an alternate universe,” Gonen says.
He points to the widespread adoption of recycling in countries like Germany and Scandinavia as evidence that people can learn to be more dutiful in how they sort their waste. However, there are other factors in play in terms of diverting waste from landfills in the long run, he notes.
“There is a lot more money that needs to be spent, there is a lot more innovation that needs to take place, but the messaging also needs to change and people’s expectation needs to change,” Gonen says.