Connecticut is No. 1 in managing its garbage

If you are like me, you get tired of hearing that Connecticut seems to have fallen behind, or perhaps lost some measure of status among the 50 states. Conventional wisdom seems to have concluded that Connecticut is no longer a leader, that it has lost a step or two, whether in population growth, job creation, tax burden, indebtedness, outmigration — you name it. It’s disheartening to read national news stories ranking the states and see Connecticut near the bottom in so many categories.

But we residents know those rankings don’t tell the whole story. Connecticut is a beautiful, vibrant and rewarding place to live. We rank quite well, thank you very much, in many important categories. One ranking, admittedly an obscure one, is of particular importance to me as a person who has spent decades of my career working to protect the environment.

In a 2014 study, Columbia University Earth Institute ranked Connecticut No. 1, best in the nation — in fact, best in the western hemisphere — in a metric called Sustainable Solid Waste Management. This metric illustrates how we manage solid waste, i.e., our garbage. You can think of it as a measure of how much of our waste is wasted.

No state comes close to Connecticut in its commitment to sustainable waste management. Maine and Massachusetts are a distant second and third. The deep green states of California and Oregon are 9th and 11th respectively.

Our success is rooted in a commitment made decades ago, when Connecticut closed every town dump and undertook implementation of a sound and ambitious new policy that would protect our environment and our public health, including our groundwater, generate clean renewable energy and insure our self-sufficiency: We would manage our waste responsibly and not have to rely on other states.

Connecticut’s approach can be abbreviated as the 4 Rs: reduce (the amount of waste generated); reuse (items multiple times before discarding); recycle (what can be recycled); and recover (the energy from what cannot be recycled). Connecticut partnered with private sector companies to build and operate five state-of-the-art waste-to-energy facilities to generate clean renewable energy from the waste we were unable to recycle. No longer were we “wasting” that material by burying it. And although it was not a concern at the time, our waste-to-energy facilities actually reduce Connecticut greenhouse gas production by elimination of the methane gasses formed by waste degrading in landfills.

Our pursuit of sustainable waste management, initiated decades ago by the development of waste-to-energy facilities, is a testament to progressive “green” engineering, public private partnerships, and a state committed to sound environmental policy.

This is not to say we can’t do even better. There’s plenty of room for improvement. Enhanced recycling, organics composting, packaging reduction, increased recycled content, pay-to-throw programs and better education about waste and recycling practices are all opportunities we can and should embrace.

But Connecticut remains the leader — at least for now. The cornerstone of Connecticut’s success, the Hartford waste-to-energy facility that manages one third of Connecticut’s post-recycling waste, is old, tired, and in desperate need of capital investment. And the investment needs to be made soon, or we will find ourselves taking a giant step backwards — burying our waste in landfills in other states that are literally hundreds of miles away because we in Connecticut decided years ago we could do better than solid waste landfills.

Connecticut certainly has its challenges, but we have our successes as well. Let’s hope we can find the requisite determination to not waste the hard work and effort of our previous generation’s commitment to build the most sustainable waste management system in the nation. It would be a self-imposed tragedy for us to return to the practice of burying the resource better known as our unrecycled garbage.

Thomas D. Kirk is president and CEO of the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority.