With the 50th anniversary of the Solid Waste Association of North America taking place this year, Waste & Recycling News took the opportunity to talk to four officials from the organization for a wide-ranging discussion.

The roundtable of the SWANA leaders recently gathered, via a conference call, to discuss some important topics facing the industry and where they see the organization in the next 50 years.

Included in the discussion were SWANA Executive Director John H. Skinner, President Anne M. Germain, Past President James D. Warner, and Past President Sara Bixby. Warner handed the president’s gavel to Germain this year at the group’s Wastecon show near Washington, D.C.

Aside from serving as a leader for SWANA, Warner is CEO of the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority in Pennsylvania, Germain is chief of engineering and technology for the Delaware Solid Waste Authority and Bixby is director of the South Central Iowa Solid Waste Agency. Responses were edited for length.

Q: Producer responsibility. What does it mean to you and how does SWANA fit in?

Germain: Producer responsibility has become more popular. I think it’s good to get producers involved in thinking long-term about the total cycle of what happens to their materials in the long run. That would make them manufacture in a more responsible manner. I think it’s important to have them participate in the solid waste field. SWANA, I think, continues to work toward looking at various products. One of SWANA’s purposes in something like this is to be able to work with constituents, share the experience of other communities and show how to successfully work with the manufacturers and develop producer responsibility programs and deal with food collection or the management of the materials. I think ultimately we’re going to end up managing the materials on behalf of the producers because I don’t think it’s sustainable what some of the producers are doing, which is “mail us back our product.” That just seems to be too much of an effort.

Warner: I think producers are really slow to this. It’s something they’ve ignored for most of their time as manufacturers or producers. They’ve always felt there was another industry to manage the end-life of what’s made, and that’s us. There are some examples now where they have to develop programs to do it, but I think it’s going to remain rather limited, especially in the United States. I don’t think we will see the model (here). It’s worked a little bit with batteries, tires. At least they had surcharges that could fund things. I think it’s going to be very slow to develop in the U.S, and our industry will be able to adjust rather effectively as it does slowly evolve.

Skinner: I’ve heard some folks concerned about producer responsibility and that it would compete with existing recycling programs if producers set up their own networks to get these products back and recycle them. I think that’s the wrong perspective to take. I think the opportunity is that the waste management sector can provide those services for the producers. They can set up collection programs and MRFs and separation programs and feed these materials into the producers rather than have the producers do it themselves. This is the model that’s basically taking place in Europe. The smart waste management companies and municipalities were the ones that offered these services to the producers, and they’re going very well.

Warner: Let me add I think where it does happen, like I said, we can adjust well. In Pennsylvania, we’re one of the 25 states that have electronic take-back. We did go to the producer association and said, “Look, we already take this stuff in a drive-through household hazardous waste facility 50 hours per week, and we’ll contract to do it for you.” We went from paying to get rid of that stuff to now getting paid for it.

Bixby: Where I am, which is in a much more rural area, I don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about producer responsibility individually. I look more at the Walmarts and the major retailers to generate some of that interest and to drive it a little more back to the producers. They have a much stronger voice in creating that system than do I as an individual or even as a solid waste agency. But SWANA also as a group has a much stronger voice and can play a role in moving us toward producer responsibility and in helping provide some of the technical expertise and share the experiences of our members. We have a role as an organization in sharing that.

Q: Let’s just continue on the difficult-to-manage material streams here to talk about electronic waste. What do you see as the public sector’s role in tackling this issue?

Bixby: A lot of the Goodwills in our area stopped taking televisions in the last couple of weeks because the TVs they were getting weren’t something they could resell. Our agency continues to accept electronics including TVs because it’s a program that we put in place several years ago. And so our role as solid waste managers – especially public solid waste managers – is I think to be the backstop. We’re the ones that put programs in place and find a way to keep providing them even when the economic situation may dictate that some of the other folks that really have to be very profit-oriented would step away from them.

Germain: Well, here in Delaware we experience some of the same stuff. Our problem with electronic waste has been there have been people that when we leave it fairly open like our other recyclable areas, people will go in at night and cherry-pick through and take material they think they can resell and then of course we don’t think the remainder is being managed properly. We end up having to restrict access to during daylight hours or when people are available to oversee the management of it. It’s unfortunate we’ve had to restrict that, but I think it’s going to continue to be a waste stream that grows.

Warner: We slowly got into it. First computers, then TVs, and we take it all for free. Pennsylvania now has a landfill ban going in the first of the year on those, and we’re well equipped and it’s now going from a liability to an asset because we now get positive revenue from selling them. We’ve made it convenient. I think the industry itself – the processing industry – has grown up real quick. It became more efficient with high-speed shredders and separators so they could lower the processing costs and eventually offer value. I can remember when this started, without quoting cents per pound, it used to be expensive and now we’re getting paid because the private sector has done a great job of extracting the value and lowering the processing cost.

Skinner: The only thing I want to add to that is one of the concerns that waste managers have in this area is to make sure that when those wastes are collected and transported off that they in fact are recycled and are recycled in legitimate facilities. The landscape out there is very confusing. There are different certification programs, and they argue with each other as to which one is better. There’s always the concern that these materials will go to a broker and get shipped to a country where they don’t have the processing capability and they don’t have the environmental standards. Clarifying that whole landscape is very important.

Q: Privatization is a big issue on both sides of the fence. What’s your future view of privatization trends and the impact on your membership members?

Bixby: I think SWANA is a little uneasy between whether we’re a public sector organization or an organization which is really supposed to represent both the public and the private sectors. We’re making strides in finding a more equitable middle ground there, but we may keep seeing more privatization in the industry which means we’re going to keep seeing more private sector members in our organization; at least I hope we will. I hope that we always have something to offer those folks. But at the same time, we have to go back to SWANA’s core, which is there’s always going to be a role for the public sector. There’s always a need to protect public health, public safety, the environment, and that’s our responsibility. It’s not something we can give up to anybody, and so we have to be an organization that understands the role of both public and private in the industry and gives a platform and forum for both to meet somewhere in the middle.

Germain: Obviously privatization is increasing, and our membership has dipped down a little bit with the economy, but it’s starting to come back up. Part of the growth has been with some private sector members, so we are seeing a higher percentage of our membership be private sector members. I think privatization is going to happen. It’s almost impossible now to be a municipality or any sort of public sector member and not deal with the private sector. They’re our customers and they’re the people that we ultimately end up sending product to. I don’t think there’s necessarily a conflict. There’s some synergy between the way we interact with them as a public sector member. We deal with them in both directions, and I think the interaction has been good.

Warner: I think it’s inevitable privatization continues to gradually take up a bigger wedge within the pie. I think as our new members are coming in, there is a greater percentage that are private versus the overall percentage of private, and the private sector is here to stay. They do most of the collections, they own most of the capacity, and you don’t have very many public sectors going in and replacing private sector, do you? The public sector that is still in the business needs to be good at it. Usually when they get out of it, it’s because they weren’t set up to succeed. They moved too slowly. I have many calls from public sector people that say ‘Hey, could you give us advice on how to set up an authority?’ because an authority is still public sector, but it gives much more independence and speed to react to business situations which helps the public succeed. I think if the public sector is going to remain in it, they need to organize themselves from the bottom up more efficiently to succeed.

Skinner: Privatization can succeed if the private sector respects the role of the public sector. I think the perspective that you can turn all your responsibilities over to the private sector and walk away and things will be better and cheaper for you is a very faulty perspective. The bottom line is the public sector is responsible to the community for the services, But within that framework, there are many options of the public sector and private sector working together.

Q: SWANA has made it for 50 years. What’s in store for the organization for the next 50? What are the keys to focus on in both the near term and the long term?

Bixby: Keeping members engaged for us as an organization is absolutely the most critical thing. To keep members engaged, we have to stay not only current but slightly ahead of the curve in introducing topics of discussion, coming up with answers to questions and in posing the next set of questions. That’s how SWANA stays viable and keeps people involved in it, and that’s a huge challenge for 50 years.

Germain: I think this is a matter of having the topics and the areas to focus on. We have to provide education programs so that as they get new people involved in their organizations, they can quickly be brought up to speed. Solid waste and materials management isn’t a topic that’s taught in school, so most of us in the industry are kind of self-taught, or we learned through our interactions with our colleagues and from what we’ve learned from SWANA. I think that’s the part which is invaluable: the education component that we continue to provide for our younger members as well to our more established members.

Warner: I think we’re going to keep focusing on these issues similar to what you’ve asked questions on. Sustainability is becoming a big word. Corporations are hiring their sustainability officers. I saw some news recently that Ohio State is now offering a major in sustainability. Recycling as well. One issue is that recycling has plateaued and people may be getting a little complacent with it. We have to continue to keep that in the forefront because if recycling slacks off too much, then we need much greater capacity within our facilities, and that’s always hard and expensive to do.

Skinner: We need to focus on what our purpose is, and it’s the same purpose as when the organization was started and that is education, communication between our members and working together on problems. While the subject matter might change, as long as we continue to do that – and the way we’re going to do that is going to change – I think we’ll be on the right track.