ZERO WASTE AND LITTER ACTION PLAN

What’s the Plan?

At the end of 2016 the Kenney administration issued a plan to cut the city’s waste stream down to zero by 2035. The goals went beyond simply picking trash up on time, getting litter off the streets and stopping illegal dumping. Getting to zero waste also meant increasing recycling and composting and coming up with creative solutions to cut back on everything we throw away. The strategy spelled out in the plan focused on waste reduction and diversion in buildings and events, engaging the public in reducing and diverting waste, and developing citywide programs to cut waste, say by establishing an organics collection program for composting.

At the heart of the plan was the creation of the Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet, a multidepartmental team chaired by a staff position (filled by Nic Esposito, until recently Grid’s director of operations) that could set targets for waste reduction and coordinate to solve problems that cut across the city government.

One thorny waste conundrum was how to tackle illegal dumping, a problem whose solutions necessarily involve multiple departments including the Streets Department (which functions as the City’s sanitation department), the police department, the district attorney’s office, and Parks & Recreation, whose parks are where a lot of trash gets dumped. The cabinet studied the problem and worked out how to fight it, for example by having the police department dedicate detectives to environmental crimes and ensuring that the DA’s office devoted attention to prosecuting the cases once the police had finished their investigations.

How’s It Going?

Up until 2019, it was going pretty well. Successes included developing plans for a city composting pilot, working with City Council to pass legislation to better regulate the tire waste stream (tires are often dumped illegally), and working with City building managers to identify barriers to recycling for City staff and for the public at their facilities. Then the pandemic hit, and the Kenney admin- istration, citing budget constraints, cut the staff position coordinating the cabinet and the plan, thereby effectively dissolving the Zero Waste Cabinet. Reporting on progress toward the zero waste and litter goals ceased, making it hard to evaluate progress, and it appears that the cabinet’s initiatives have largely fallen by the wayside. Recycling in the city has declined to 2007 rates, and although the Streets Department has touted a recent civil prosecution of an illegal dumper, consequences for dumping remain rare.

Climate Action Playbook

What’s the Plan?

The Climate Action Playbook collects action items from other City plans that have something to do with climate change, making it a compendium of plans rather than a plan on its own.

Climate change is the biggest environmental challenge facing Philadelphia and its residents, and it’s hitting the city from all sides. As a warming climate drives more moisture and energy into the atmosphere, storms are growing more intense, bringing extra rain in heavy doses to a landscape with flooding and stormwater drainage problems. Sea level rise will increase flooding along Philly rivers: the Delaware is tidal along its entire course in Philadelphia, as is the Schuylkill up to the Fairmount Dam. Rising water levels will exacerbate storm surges pushed upriver by hurricanes.

No natural disaster kills more Philadelphians than heat. As the city warms, heat waves could claim more lives, particularly in neighborhoods with less tree canopy, disproportionately inhabited by Black and Brown Philadelphians.

As a compendium of plans, the playbook contains many wide-ranging action items that it divides into three categories: reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing the use of nature to soak up carbon and adapting to the changing climate.

How’s It Going?

The City has some small successes to point to in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, though many of these consist of further planning, benchmark setting and strategizing. For example, one success is the release of a clean fleet plan that aims to shift the City’s fleet of 6,400 motor vehicles to electric, but it remains to be seen how quickly the City will actually shift to an electric fleet. In the meantime, the City lacks a plan to encourage private electric vehicle ownership. The city government has seen more success in reducing emissions from its built environment. The 2022 Municipal Energy Master Plan update reported that electricity and heat consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are dropping in government buildings.

In the meantime, other City initiatives march forward that increase greenhouse gas emissions with apparently little thought of climate impact. For example, the Cityowned Philadelphia Gas Works continues to work to expand the use of fossil gas in the city, and the airport is expanding its cargo facilities, thus promoting the most carbon-intensive way to ship.

When it comes to using nature to soak up carbon, the City strives to increase the tree canopy, but it fails to protect existing canopy, even in its own parks (see the March 23 Tree Plan release article at gridphilly.com).

When it comes to resilience, the City places businesses and residents in the path of future disasters, most glaringly in the rapidly developing Navy Yard and on Venice Island. Meanwhile environmental justice neighborhoods like Eastwick have found themselves further exposed to future flooding as tree canopy upstream in the Darby-Cobbs watershed is cleared for City golf course renovation. In recreation sites, heat-absorbing grass fields are increasingly replaced by artificial turf that instead reflects heat right back out, turning playing fields from oases into ovens.

The City’s 2017 All Hazard Mitigation Plan, which aims to reduce the impact of disasters, included an objective to “integrate hazard and risk information into land use planning mechanisms” that was basically repeated in the 2022 update: “integrate hazard and risk information into land use planning decisions.” Nonetheless it is hard to find a development project that has been halted by climate resilience concerns, calling into question the will of City leaders to sincerely follow through on any plans in the playbook. (In a rare example, in 2012 Eastwick residents successfully fought off development plans in their flood-prone neighborhood.)