Florida SWANA will host its Winter Conference February 19-21 at teh new Drury Plaza Hotel Orlando in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.
The call for Abstracts is open through November 14. Suggested Topics include
Stay tuned for more conference details as they emerge. Plenty of SCS Engineers professionals will be there – we hope you will too!
Join SCS Engineers professionals at the SWANA Florida chapter’s Summer Conference and Hinkley Center Research Forum, July 23-25 in Daytona Beach, FL.
Don’t miss this opportunity to network with some of the best minds in the solid waste industry at this important solid waste conference and tradeshow in the southeast, while earning continuing education hours and enjoying beautiful and exciting Daytona Beach.
The program committee is developing an interesting and educational agenda about the latest developments in the solid waste industry. The conference will explore important topics, such as solid waste management, rate analyses, recycling, zero waste, landfill design & operations, waste-to-energy conversion technologies, disaster debris management, and more!
Several SCS Engineers professionals are presenting at the conference, including
Click for more conference details and registration information.
We hope to see you there!
Today’s blog highlights successful K-12 recycling education programs in Wisconsin’s green schools that walk the walk in teaching kids and their parents important lessons about sustainability and the environment. Wisconsin’s Green Schools Webinar entitled “Re-imagine, Re-design & Re-cycle: School Waste Collection Systems That Work!” is taking advantage of the Carton Council funding to further zero waste in schools. The webinar is free to attend and open to everyone, with content designed specifically for K12 champions leading recycling programs for their school or district.
As schools set their sights on zero waste goals and seek to shift as much material from the trash to recycling and composting streams, they need an efficient material management system that is easy to use for students and staff alike and is sustainable to operate. Attendees of this webinar will hear directly from three different school districts about their recent innovations in bin design, construction, and placement.
The event includes students building receptacles and hallway recycling programs that are helping to maintain one district’s classroom eating program. The programs are re-imagining unique systems for collecting valuable items such as milk carton material.
Panelists include Brittney Albin, Sustainability Coordinator for Lincoln Public Schools; Chris Jimieson of SCS Engineers and a parent recycling advocate; and Madison Metropolitan School District’s Jeremy Drake, a Principal at Strategy Zero Waste Solutions.
Mar 22, 2023, 04:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)
The Carton Council will award $2,000 each to 25 communities that improve their resident education, with special attention paid to food and beverage cartons. Additionally, there will be first, second, and third-place prizes to recognize winners who provide outstanding communications and marketing efforts. 1st place will receive an additional $3,000, 2nd place an additional $2,000, and 3rd place an additional $1,000. More information about how communities can participate is here.
Recycling Tips and Resources for schools, parents, and municipalities:
Visit professionals from SCS Engineers and SCS Field Services at BOOTH 28 at SWANA’s 3-day Northwest Regional Symposium, April 18-20, at the Tulalip Resort Hotel in Marysville, WA. SCS Engineers and SCS Field Services are Bronze sponsors of the conference, and SCS Engineers is also a meal sponsor.
The symposium, themed “The Next Normal: The Future of Solid Waste Management,” will bring together solid waste industry professionals and students from a wide variety of specialized fields to exchange information and learn from technical experts. Hear presentations by SCS professionals, including:
The symposium program will include sessions on Organics Management Planning; Aging Transfer Facilities Planning; Waste Systems’ Financial Impacts (zero waste and funding opportunities); Emerging Landfill Industry Trends (PFAS, liner, leachate, and landfill gas); Sustainability, Recycling, and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). It will also include tours of several compelling sites, plenty of networking opportunities, educational credits, exhibits, and much more!
Each spring the Evergreen (WA and MT), Beaver (OR and ID), and Pacific (BC and Yukon) chapters of the Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA) hold this joint Northwest Symposium.
For full program details and registration information, click here
SCS Engineers is a Silver Sponsor of the Wisconsin Integrated Resource Management Conference (WIRMC), February 22-24 at the Hyatt Regency in Green Bay.
The conference will feature numerous networking opportunities, exhibitors, field trips, and several tracks exploring the latest solid waste management trends and practices.
The following SCS professionals are presenting at the conference:
Abstract: Solid waste organizations are looking to hire, and the waste business doesn’t have the glamor some other companies can offer. With a tight talent pool available, organizations with good onboarding programs can help attract good talent by highlighting the organization’s culture, reduce the time for a new employee to become a productive employee, boost employee engagement and help build a stronger company culture. We don’t often talk about topics like this, but building and maintaining a strong work force in our field is important. So let’s start talking about it!
Abstract: Ramsey and Washington Counties recognize that there is often value to the items that people put in the trash. R&E sees the waste stream as a resource stream. This resulted in the 2016 purchase of the Recycling & Energy Center (R&E Center), located in Newport, Minnesota. All trash generated by individuals and businesses in the two counties is delivered to the R&E Center, where R&E works to recover value. The R&E Center is permitted to process 500,000 tons of trash per year. Trash is processed to recover recyclable metals and make fuel for producing electricity. In 2019, nearly 90% of the waste from the two counties was diverted from landfill because of the processing that occurs at the R&E Center. After researching and evaluating options to recover recyclables in the trash, R&E has targeted residential food scraps and remaining recyclables in trash as the next resources to recover from the mixed waste stream. The R&E Center is adding equipment to recover residential organics placed in durable compostable bags that are comingled with trash. Additional equipment upgrades will recover high-value recyclables such as metals, plastics and cardboard. Research is also under way to partner with private industry to utilize anaerobic digestion to recover value from the organics recovered at the R&E Center. We’ll discuss the research and reconnaissance as well as the design and installation of these systems and touch on the technologies that are being considered for recovering additional value from the byproducts.
The Wisconsin Integrated Resource Management Conference is the #1 place to market your business to Wisconsin solid waste and recycling professionals at the Exhibit Hall.
The Wisconsin Integrated Resource Management Conference is jointly hosted by the Associated Recyclers of Wisconsin (AROW), the Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA) – Badger Chapter, the Wisconsin Counties Solid Waste Managers Association (WCSWMA) since 2000, and Recycling Connections, allowing professionals from all aspects of the solid waste & recycling industry to collaborate and learn from one another.
Click for more conference details and registration information
Do you really need to use a drinking straw? With most beverages, probably not! Make this one change and help America reduce the amount of plastic going into our landfills.
Click to learn more about Sustainable Materials Management.
Many schools and school districts are prioritizing a shift toward zero waste and sustainability. However, learning to manage material resources on-site in a more sustainable manner presents operational and monetary challenges. Learn the benefits and steps to plan a financially sustainable program from Tracie Bills of SCS Engineers.
Tracie creates realistic approaches which allow for flexibility while maneuvering the unique challenges that occur. She takes you step-by-step through building a successful program and refers to established efforts such as in the City of San Jose that already have established zero waste programs in their schools.
Read the article by clicking here.
Setting up a school zero waste program takes time, patience, excellent collaboration and communication, and a team that wants to achieve the same goal of zero waste. Tracie Bills recommends a realistic approach in her article. She provides examples and describes how a consulting firms, such as SCS Engineers, assist schools without materials management programs to launch zero waste programs.
Building a successful program does not happen overnight, but you can do it!
Tracie Onstad Bills is SCS Engineers Northern California Director of Sustainable Materials Management. She has over 20 years of materials management experience, including working for a hauler, a county government, and a nonprofit, and over 12 years of experience with materials management consulting firms. She has provided commercial sector materials flow assessments; organics processing research and analysis; waste characterization studies; and recycling, organics, and waste management technical assistance to government agencies, schools, multi-family dwellings, and businesses. Ms. Bills has an environmental science degree from San Jose State and is an instructor for the SWANA Zero Waste certification program.
Hundreds of closed landfills in Wisconsin are required to perform groundwater monitoring and reporting. Typically, the frequency of monitoring, size of the monitoring well arrays, and the list of required parameters, was established many years ago as part of the landfill operating permit or closure plan approval. There is a potential to reduce, or terminate landfill monitoring when groundwater quality improvements are documented. WDNR guidance entitled “Reducing or Terminating Groundwater Monitoring at Solid Waste Landfills,” (PUB-WA 1013) provides instructions for requesting reductions to monitoring requirements.
Learn about new revisions to the WDNR guidance, developed with input from the WDNR’s Waste and Materials Management Study Group, which are intended to improve both the range of options for monitoring reductions and the process for requesting reductions. In addition to providing procedures for reduction in monitoring frequency, new revisions to the guidance include procedures for requesting reductions to the required number of monitoring wells and parameters. The revised guidance also provides instructions for communicating monitoring reduction requests to the WDNR review hydrogeologists.
Marc Rogoff sees unprecedented factors in play as “The Perfect Storm”—the banning of solid waste materials and imposing an almost unreachable contamination standard on bales entering China.
Read his recent article to get started on a solution relevant in your region and return again to follow our series of articles on what you can do to continue supporting or changing your program.
The article covers association actions, regional impacts, funding, and more.
