After a request by Councilmember Joe Deets in early July, the Bainbridge Island City Council heard a presentation from city management analyst Adam Nebenzahl at the July 15 council meeting reviewing the city’s waste management practices, including which ones council may want to amend following changes to the recycling process at the state level.

Waste reduction is a major tenet of the city’s Climate Action Plan, a suite of commitments ranging from mitigating greenhouse gas emissions to improving community resilience to rising sea levels. Part of the city’s effort has focused on reducing waste; both diverting recyclables and organic waste from going to the landfill, and minimizing the amount of waste produced by residences, industrial and commercial operations.

But as it stands, the city does not have very much influence over how its waste is processed once it’s collected, Nebenzahl explained; however, the city can control what goes into the trash, recycling and compost, and when those services are available.

“We’re limited to what the county can do and the facilities in the region,” Nebenzahl said.

After garbage day, trash from Bainbridge is shipped to a landfill in north-central Oregon; clean recycling is sorted at a transfer station in Bremerton and shipped overseas; and organics are taken to a compost facility in Belfair.

The city’s efforts to divert recycling and organic waste from the landfill has seen some progress — the level of contaminated organic waste from residential customers on BI is less than 5% — but because most of the waste-management process is not under city purview, some elements are still hard to measure.

“We don’t know what our contamination rate is for the things that are being picked up from our recycling; therefore, we’re unsure what level of our recycling is actually being diverted and not ending up in the landfill, at this point,” said Nebenzahl.

For each type of waste, the city may have to take a different action, but Nebenzahl proposed a few moves to start with: for regular trash, the city could finalize an agreement with a solid waste hauler; for recycling, it could add more items that can be recycled; for compost, it could add multi-family housing to its organic waste collection.

“We shouldn’t treat garbage like garbage,” said Deets. “I was taken aback by the info that so much of what we think, as a community, is being recycled, is actually going to the landfill.”