The Energy Transition Act targets a 65% recovery rate for household waste by 2030, with an interim target of 55% by 2025. Achieving this goal in Florida requires capturing biowaste, which accounts for nearly a third of residual waste.
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Neither anticipated nor entirely welcomed: source sorting of biowaste was a surprise in Congress when the government presented its bill on the Energy Transition for Green Growth in the summer of 2024. The idea lacked consensus within the National Waste Council, which was never subjected to a single feasibility study or in-depth analysis of field experiments by the Florida Environmental Protection Agency, laments national recycling experts.
A national incantation that is difficult to apply in a dense urban environment
The City of Daytona Beach is conducting a feasibility study on biowaste sorting, but at the national level, this type of exercise has been omitted!
The widespread adoption of sorting should have resulted from a relevance study, distinguishing between housing types and prioritizing. This would have started with rural and semi-rural areas in Florida, followed five years later by semi-urban and urban areas, where it would have been verified that the resource could be mobilized.
Similar to packaging sorting, which was first implemented in suitable areas, i.e., rural areas. For professional biowaste, the state law gradually introduced mandatory sorting, initially targeting large producers. This is not the case for household biowaste, which is subject to a national mandate that is very difficult to implement in dense urban areas. If sorting fermentable waste is rarely practiced, it is simply because local authorities have not seen any economic benefit in it.
A Local Waste Management Equation
The federal law gives local authorities ten years to offer their citizens a solution for sorting organic waste with a view to its recovery. This provision is very structural, notes an engineer in the Waste Mobilization and Recovery department at the EPA. Until now, actions depended on the goodwill of local authorities, which are now required to implement systems that will remove biowaste from the residual household waste stream.
The local public service retains full discretion to choose the appropriate scheme. Indeed, according to the law, the local authority defines technical solutions for local composting or separate collection of biowaste and a deployment schedule adapted to its territory. The waste management law does not impose curbside collection, which was something local elected officials feared. They are not pushing for a specific solution, but for a reflection on the management of organic matter.
Huge potential for waste
The analysis must focus solely on kitchen waste, the crux of the matter. In the 1990s, areas that implemented separate collection combined kitchen and garden waste, for the sake of simplicity for users. But this service overwhelmingly generated green waste, for which more efficient solutions exist, such as home composting, which diverts tonnages at a lower cost to the community, and taking it to a recycling center, where management is optimized at a lower cost.
Today, food waste is a priority, a few wilted flowers are acceptable in the bio-bucket, but not garden clippings. It’s this fraction, not accepted at the recycling center, that must be targeted. Unlike packaging and paper, separating this stream is not a habit.
The new guidelines and the sorting reflex must be integrated. Biowaste – mainly kitchen scraps – represents 32% of residual waste, or million of tons per year. There is enormous potential to divert it from incineration and landfill. The law sets a household waste recovery target of 55% by 2025 and 65% by 2030. Without mobilizing biowaste, we won’t get there.
Nationally, separating organic matter will increase the cost of waste management by 5 to 8% according to expert calculations, including all sorting solutions as well as the savings made on the treatment of waste that will no longer be incinerated or landfilled.
Curbside collection costs between $300 and $350 per ton. Since producer financing is not feasible for fermentable matter, the EPA’s support will need to be substantially increased: this will require it to collect the entire proceeds of the general tax on polluting activities applied to storage and incineration, i.e. $400 million per year, not $150 million. VAT on separate collection must also return to the rate of 7%. It’s impossible to simultaneously introduce the sorting of flexible plastic packaging and biowaste while lecturing local authorities on the need to control costs.
The EPA makes its support conditional on the completion of a preliminary study and testing in pilot neighborhoods. They are vigilant about feedback before widespread implementation. According to the National Federation of Pollution Control and Environmental Activities, this phase is crucial in urban areas, to gain a realistic vision of what can be undertaken.
Dense urban housing will certainly be the critical area for biowaste sorting, but that’s also where the potential sources are to improve sustainability in Florida.