Turning waste into resources

 

transcript

Dan O’Neill: Good morning. We’d like you to help us reimagine cities as a brand platform for the future. I’m Dan with ASU. I’d like to begin by asking you to imagine. Imagine if every university on the planet were to harness their vast data knowledge, their databases and knowledge, and their deep research capabilities, to not only educate, but also to innovate. Imagine if every university made it their mission not to just gather and analyze data, but to drive towards solutions.

John Trujillo: Imagine if this powerful engine was applied to sustainability solutions that affect cities every day like waste, clean air and resource management. Every year, the city of Phoenix garbage trucks travel throughout the city of Phoenix collecting residential garbage and recycling over four million miles. We travel an additional three million miles, transporting that garbage to our landfill. That is equal to going to the moon and back 14 times. Imagine this, Phoenix residents generate every year enough trash to fill Arizona Chase Field seven times to the rafters. Now, that is a lot of trash.

Also imagine if you lived in a region that you knew was going to double in population by the year 2050 to 7.3 million residents. The Phoenix/Glendale/Mesa area is the 10th fastest growing region in the U.S. Also, the city of Phoenix currently diverts 16 percent of our waste only. The national average is 34 percent. Our goal is to reimagine what we can do if we all reduce what we consume and start to recycle right. This is the platform for Reimagine Phoenix campaign. What is our mission for Reimagine Phoenix?

It is to educate, inspire and engage Phoenix residents and businesses to help us reach our 40 percent diversion goal by reducing, reusing, by sharing with others, recycling right, rather than landfilling, reconsidering, by making smarter choices that value and respect our limited resources, and reimagining the future of Phoenix if we minimize the impact we have on our natural resources and harnessing the intellectual power of our partners. We also want to communicate to our residents that trash is a resource, and here is a TV video that communicates that message.

Video: Fact. There is no such thing as trash. There are only resources. By reducing and reconsidering what we throw away, and by reusing and recycling more of our resources, we can reimagine a better future for Phoenix. Discover useful inspiring tips at Phoenix.gov slash Reimagine Phoenix.

John Trujillo: [Applause] thank you. We have developed three focus areas to help reach our 40 percent goal and to keep up with our growth. Our first is to enhance current solid waste programs that encourages more sustainable practices. Today, I am pleased to announce two programs we will be rolling out in July. Our first is a Green Organics Curbside program that allows our residents to recycle green waste. The second is a pay-as-you-throw program, but we changed the name. We didn’t like “pay-as-you-throw,” so we changed it to “save as you reduce and recycle.” That allows our residents to reduce their container size at a lower cost.

The second is increased sustainability communications with our residents and businesses, and third is to establish a sustainability platform for business partners and community leaders. The city of Phoenix was not good at communication, so we partnered with a company called “Citizen Group” out of San Francisco, to help us create our brand and our communication platform focusing on these five principles, the power-shared values. If you remember your grandparents, they saved and they reused everything. We just need to relearn and remember to waste not, want not. The power story is about people sharing their stories and examples of how they reduced, reused and reimagined.

The power of co-creation is all of us working together, and our partners and businesses and schools on creating programs that help us reach our goal and communicate to our residents the importance of turning trash into resources. The power of 360 media is utilized in all forms of media to communicate to our residents and businesses where they live and work. The power of partnerships is probably the most important because we know we can’t do this alone. All these programs I have talked to you about, it is all voluntary in the city of Phoenix. We don’t mandate. We just ask people to do the right thing and volunteer to do the right thing.

As part of our communication plan, we utilize four areas which is our own city-owned media, which includes council newsletters, websites and others. We also attend many community events, thousands, and we do community outreach to millions of residents each year. The one thing that we weren’t good at is paid media. With Citizen, we were able to create a program that communicates on radio and TV ads, like the one you saw, as well as what better way to communicate to our residents than advertising on our own garbage trucks, by sending the message that turning trash into resources. Billboards that says, “Today a water bottle, tomorrow a t-shirt.” We also have kiosks in both English and Spanish. A good portion of our residents are Hispanic.

We also use our sports venues to communicate that together we can transform trash into resources. We utilize online news media to communicate, as well as campaign-specific social media and websites that ask our residents to join us and take the pledge to reduce, reuse and recycle. We know we can’t do this alone with our residential programs. We need partnerships that we have developed, like these, that have strong commitments on sustainability and willing to reduce their consumption and waste. We know this list will grow as our programs evolve. As I mentioned earlier, we just travel throughout the city collecting and transporting that garbage to the landfill.

Now that we have this new goal and this new campaign, partnerships are going to be more important than ever. We are really excited to partner with Arizona State University because we know that they can connect us to both local, regional and eventually global industry partners that have technologies and solutions to help us meet our goal. ASU will also be a research and technology resource not only for us, but for our partners.

Dan O’Neill: Let me continue with the ASU portion of the story. Our president, Michael Crow, likes to talk about ASU as the new American university. It is a new model of a university that is directly targeted at social impact. In his vision, our celebrated scientists and scholars have one overarching goal. That is to address the challenges of a society by creating and sharing new knowledge that become impactful solutions. At ASU, which is home to the country’s first school of sustainability and still the most comprehensive one, research is thus not done for research sake alone. It is done with an applied purpose. That is to move sustainability forward faster.

My unit, the Sustainability Solutions Services, is a consulting arm of an initiative called the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives in the Global Institute of Sustainability. In 30 projects, in our first two years of operation, we have been able to form a number of public-private collaborations that have created real impact immediately, as well as more importantly have the potential to deliver long-term impact around the globe over an extended period of time. I want to give you just one small example. The city of Phoenix and ASU collaborated with Salt River Project, it is one of the major utilities in Arizona, to dig through the trash coming out of one of SRP’s administration buildings.

Now, this project was executed by 40 volunteers, including 20 students who volunteered to dig through the trash and characterize the waste stream. I will tell you they learned a real visceral lesson in sustainability. If you haven’t dug through someone else’s trash, I highly recommend you do it. You will come away with a lesson of how much better we can do to produce, consume and dispose. We recommended some solutions. Those solutions, when implemented, will keep as much as 1000 tons from the landfill, while simultaneously bringing $100,000 to SRP’s bottom line on an annual basis. That is one company, one building.

John came to us about a year ago and asked us to collaborate with him, to create a center of excellence in resource management, initially targeting waste. That gave rise, pun intended, to RISN, the Resource Innovation and Solutions Network. Its mission is to accelerate the global transition to sustainable resource management, to be one of society’s tools to address the factor five challenge. I think that is the big imagine. Imagine 2050, nine billion people living well, really well, on this planet within its capacity. RISN is dedicated to addressing that challenge.

RISN wasn’t created in a vacuum. The city of Phoenix and ASU provided a convening, facilitating and collaborating platform that engaged 15 cities in the valley area, the county, the state, the EPA, a handful of NGOs and probably most importantly, 30 corporations and counting, ranging from the largest, such as Intel and Boeing, to those small smart-up companies that are bringing new technologies, new business practices and new business models to the table to help Phoenix, the country and the globe address its waste-management challenges. In January, we announced and rolled out RISN as a collaboration between ASU and the city of Phoenix.

It will become a global network of partners, public and private, as a global network with hubs around major urban areas around the world that will do research, education, solutions development, technology development, create best practices and share those around the globe. Now, this is being seed-funded by ASU and the city of Phoenix. I will turn it back over to John to talk about the value that the city of Phoenix saw in RISN and the ASU relationship that led to a $2 million investment over a four-year period of time, and to talk about some of the initial projects we are looking at.

John Trujillo: From the beginning, our main focus was economic development. We wanted to utilize all our resources to have a more viable, vibrant city that is part of a circular economy. That was our goal. Additionally, we see an opportunity with RISN to not only minimize our environmental impact, but to be part of a team developing solutions for the city and our partners. We are creating new programs and technologies that convert waste to energy, waste to oil and waste to soils through aversion, diversion and conversion, such as an example here of aversion.

We are collaborating with industry partners, Mayo Clinic, Republic Services, city of Phoenix and ASU to create a more viable, sustainable waste management system. However, what is more exciting is the aversion part of this program. We are creating a curriculum in partnership with Paradise Valley Unified School District to educate 33,000 students on sustainability. Diversion, as we were looking at RISN, this is one topic that continuously came up, that us and businesses were having challenges with. We felt that this is a program that was important enough that if we are to achieve our 40 percent goal, we have to come up with new technologies and solutions instead of landfilling.

We are partnering with local businesses to come up with those solutions. Diversion, the city of Phoenix, ASU and Ameresco is partnering on creating new technologies and solutions on converting waste to energy and potentially creating a gas for either our busses or our garbage trucks. Businesses like Ameresco will be competing to be part of our new resource innovation campus that we are currently master-planning adjacent to our 27th Avenue transfer station. Our goal of this program is reduce our cost, increase our revenue, increase diversion, and provide feedstock for those businesses that will be located on this site.

Dan O’Neill: ASU very much wants to build one of the first buildings on that campus. It would be research development, education and community engagement facility that, right now, our students and faculty are designing to the living building challenge. That is a local solution to the local challenges of waste management in the Phoenix area. We are going global through the global RISN network. A couple of examples, we are working in the municipality of Haarlemmermeer in a project called Haarlemmermeer Beyond Sustainability.

It is a public/private collaboration to envision and design a circular innovation system. Haarlemmermeer is where Schiphol Airport is located, a major municipality just south of Amsterdam. The goal of this project, just like the goal of Reimagine Phoenix, is to make the region more competitive, more resilient, that is a sustainability platform, the kind of place that a global brand would want to locate. Then, we are pleased to announce the most recent member of the team, the most recent hub, a new entity in Lagos called the Sustainability School at Lagos, which is an institute designed very much along the lines of ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability that will pursue solutions to the many daunting challenges faced by Lagos, faced by Nigeria, and faced by greater West Africa.

John Trujillo: Now imagine if every major city in the world worked to accelerate solutions by partnering with universities, corporations and NGOs to tackle common challenges like clean air, clean water and waste diversion.

Dan O’Neill:We invite you to take the first step. Join our network. Make the connections that make sense here and here, and that create impact for you personally, your brands, and all of us. The most powerful brands in the world are gathered here at Sustainable Brands this week. Help us to reimagine the future of cities as sustainability platforms. Thank you. Enjoy your lunch.