Monday 4th November 2024
It's day 36 and the final day of my Churchill fellowship tour round the U.S.
(I reccommend going back to the beginning and reading from there if you've just found this blog. Probably more interesting, and makes more sense, to read the journey in order rather than backwards!)
While I was researching this trip, Austin was on my list of places to come because of thir work on developing Community Wealth Building strategies in the city. I had read about their recent grant award to to expand reuse but couldn't connect with anyone to arrange the trip. In March 2024, the city was successful in receiving $4M of funding through the Strategic Infrastructure Fund (SWIFR) to create a new reuse warehouse and I was keen to understand what was already being done and how this grant was expand activity.
I had heard that connections snowball once you start your travels, and that certainly hapenned to me. Timonie from the EPA hapenned to mention this grant at our meeting in San Fransisco and introduced me to Maddie in the Circular Economy Dept leading the bid.
Just before meetign Maddie, Megan from her team arranged a tour of their existign reuse facility (spoiler alert, not furniture, homewares or textiles!)
Their Recycle and Reuse Drop-off Center, is an HWRC type facility, open by appointment only to drop off a "range of hard-to-recycle items and household hazardous waste to be recycled, reused or safely discarded". Any reusable items such as household cleaners and paint are available for pick up free of charge. The facility is free for Austin and Travis County residents but those outside this area can drop off for a fee.
It is still legal to burn at home and to put everything in the bin, there are no landfill bans, so the fact that in 2024 (Jan- Oct) they had already taken in 791 tonnes of material from 34000 people is pretty impressive.
This site accepts paint, batteries, flammables, pesticides, liquid fuels, fire extinguishers, bulbs and tyres. Onsite, they make household chemicals such as cleaners and gardne sprays available for reuse (in the small shed above), melt polystyrene to make blocks to be sent for chipping and create a new reused paint product.
Paint recycling
Their paint recycling is much the same as other operations that I’ve seen, except that this one gets to be outside year-round! Paint is dropped off and checked for the possibility of instant reuse, if that's not possible then it's decanted into segregated barrels to create 5 or 6 different colours. Five gallon tubs are made available for free but limited to 2 tubs per resident to make it equitable. When there is a surplus paint is often given away to places like the prison and 35,000 gallons of paint have been given away this year so far.
Austin has a population similar to Glasgow (900k), and a city divided by a river. This site is in the Southeast but plans are afoot to create a second one of these sites in the NW of the city. The site costs approximately $4M per year to operate with that being covered by the residents waste billing and some income from the materials.
More pictures and videos in this Flikr album
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City of Austin Circular Economy team
I then met with Madelyn and Megan from the Circular Economy team who are working towards the Austin city goal of zero waste by 2040.
The programruns similar initatives as Zero Waste Scotland on CE, and they talked abotu three of them:
1 - Work with existing businesses to make ‘superconnections’, identify trends, offer small grants, and run an accelerator programme to pitch for prize money to kickstart ideas.
2 – Work with residents to support these new and emerging circular economy businesses. They have a reuse and repair focus and been working since 2018 with 20 libraries to host monthly fix it clinics and looking to expand this to parks and recreation wo also have good hosting facilitates.
3 – Support Move out ATX, a furniture rehoming programme in association with the university and local reuse organisations.
MoveOutATX originated in fall 2017 as a pilot, when the City of Austin led an 8-month community-wide collaborative planning process to identify ways to capture reusable items when apartment leases end July 31 in West Campus.
The result was a partnership between community members, the City of Austin, Keep Austin Beautiful, the State of Texas Alliance for Recycling, and the UT Office of Sustainability for the 2018 pilot program called [Re]Move & [Re]Use. Three temporary drop-off stations were available in West Campus for students to bring gently used items to donate, and partner reuse organizations collected the material.
The programme rehomed 641 pieces of furniture in 2024. What wasn’t rehomed in the 5 day period over move out, was donated to local reuse partners. The success of this programme is what inspired the application to SWIFR. The $4M will be used to create a permanent reuse hub in the city to build on the university move outs and allow furniture rehoming to happen year-round.
“The reuse warehouse will connect valuable items, like furniture, to Austinites who can use them. It will also keep these items out of the landfill as we continue to work toward zero waste.”
Richard McHale, director of Austin Resource Recovery, a city department
Reuse hub impact
Data has been captured since the programme started in 2017 which all helped to inform the case for investment. Volume data was tied in with the ‘equity piece’ of being able to provide furniture to those that need it.
The resulting reuse warehouse is aiming to be operational in March 2027 and will allow non-profits in Austin to bring in clients to pick furniture for their homes as well as creating workforce development opportunities to fix and upcycle items. They aim to create replicable processes for repair and develop teaching programmes. As with all the other programmes I spoke to about this, this is more than just a short-term opportunity, it offers the ability to demonstrate commitment to training and employment and creates an important step in a person’s journey that doesn’t exist elsewhere.
IMPACTS TO DATE (2017-2024)
ENVIRONMENTAL
253 tons of material diverted from local landfills
That’s like the weight of 281 Texas Longhorns or 42 African elephants!
4,76.77 cubic yards of material given a second life
That’s like filling up 30 semi-trucks (18-wheelers)!
SOCIAL & ECONOMIC
$592,711 estimated value of recovered material
$57,500 in property manager savings (2018-2019)
Thousands of under-served Austinites directly benefited by material donated
1,718 pieces of furniture given to community members (2022-2024)
In 2018, profits from sold material enough to employ 2 entry-level employees at a reuse organization and provide 23 hours of employee training
The infographic above, demonstrates the carbon AND socio-economic benefits of reuse. As the final stop on this amazing tour, it was great to see that this wasn't just recognised by the reuse organisations themselves, but also by cities and those working towards zero waste. Reuseing makes sense, but doing it through the existing reuse sector, working with others to create jobs and training and putting economic benefit directly back in to communities is a no brainer.
Note on the SWIFR programme and the policy background:
"The Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling grant program is a new grant program authorized by the Save Our Seas 2.0 Act and funded through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also referred to as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, provides $275 million for Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling grants to support Building a Better America. ($568 billion in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding has been announced and is headed to states, Tribes, territories and local governments. This is represented in over 66,000 projects that have been awarded funding. These projects range from repaving roads and water system upgrades funded through formula grants to states to competitive funding for massive bridge and transit projects.)
This is allocated as $55 million per year from Fiscal Years 2022 to 2026 to remain available until expended. EPA was provided an additional $2.5 million in FY 2022, an additional $6.5 million in FY 2023, and an additional $5 million in FY 2024 to implement the program.
The Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling program provides grants to implement the National Recycling Strategy to improve post-consumer materials management and infrastructure; support improvements to local post-consumer materials management and recycling programs; and assist local waste management authorities in making improvements to local waste management systems.
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