Landfill ban is good change

The Iowa City Council voted this week to approve a cardboard ban. Starting in January, corrugated cardboard will be banned from the Iowa City Landfill.

While the council voted unanimously, the initial reaction was somewhat skeptical, even from environmental advocates. How can the ban be enforced? And maybe just as importantly in student-dense Iowa City - what about cheese-soaked pizza boxes?

'How are you actually going to verify who's putting cardboard in there and what will the penalties be?” City Council member Rockne Cole said at Tuesday night's meeting.

Officials say they don't plan to deploy cardboard police to patrol curbside. The more immediate impact will be felt by private dumpers - like waste-removal companies that serve businesses and apartments - who will face fees at the landfill if they fail to remove cardboard. Initially, residential customers will get warning.

'At the curb, we'll be doing spot checks for City of Iowa City customers the same way we deal with recycling now - if they put glass in a curbside recycling container, they get a bright orange ticket saying we don't accept glass. … In the beginning, it's definitely more educational than punitive,” city recycling coordinator Jennifer Jordan told me.

My fellow conservatives and libertarians love to hate these kinds of bans, which they call overstepping government regulations. But I can't get worked up about this one - I don't think we have a natural right for government employees to pick up whatever we want from in front of our houses.

This is different from the proposed plastic bag ban considered last year, which would have imposed fees on all private plastic bag transactions, like in grocery stores. Such ordinances have since been outlawed by the state legislature.

In contrast, Iowa City's cardboard ban doesn't restrict the purchase or use of cardboard. It only says the material can't be disposed of in the city landfill.

Corrugated cardboard joins televisions, oil filters, and yard waste as forbidden materials in the landfill - all stuff officials say are potentially hazardous to land, water, or air.

An estimated 12 percent of all material entering the landfill annually is cardboard, according to a memo prepared by Jordan, and it emits methane gas as it decomposes. City staff members estimate their cardboard ban could divert up to 14,000 tons of waste from entering the landfill each year, which they say has a greenhouse gas reduction equivalent to the annual energy needs of about 6,300 homes.

The cardboard ban is complementary to other new waste-reduction policies. Single-stream recycling is expected to begin this fall, allowing residents to 'co-mingle” their paper, cardboard, metal, and plastic waste. The city also will soon require multifamily apartment buildings to offer on-site recycling.

'It's hard to enforce and hard to expect people to recycle 100 percent if they don't have access where they live,” Jordan said.

Oh, and the cheesy pizza boxes? Officials advise they should be composted, not recycled.

'If there's grease or cheese on it, it should not go in with the recycling,” Jordan said.

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