CPW Blog: "Team Rubbish"

Trafton B.

January 23, 2011 - 11:43 PM

It's been three weeks - a long three weeks at that - and I can't believe I'm just now telling you all know about my CPW project team. Like I said in the Winter Term Course Preview, the Community Planning Workshop will likely be the most important learning experience I have in my college career, and I'm really excited about the prospects of the next sixth months so far.

For our project, the City of Eugene has contracted UO's CPW to research topics surrounding construction and demolition (C&D) waste materials - current practices in the Eugene-Springfield Metro Area, potential markets and uses, barriers to recycling - in order to recommend strategies for diverting such materials from the local waste stream.

The rationale behind our project is that the United States annually produces an exorbitant amount of construction and demolition (C&D) waste materials - e.g., carpet, concrete, asphalt shingles, gypsum drywall, plastic packaging, etc - that are often thrown away in landfills rather than being recycled or reused. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, recycling of C&D waste materials conserves landfill space, reduces environmental impacts associated with manufacturing new materials, creates jobs, and reduces building project expenses by avoiding purchase and disposal cost.

In 2007, the Lane County ‘wasteshed' (that's includes us in Eugene) recorded a recovery rate of 53.5%, which is above Oregon's state legislated goal of 50% of all waste material diverted from landfill by 2009, however, it's just below our county goal of recovering 54% by 2009, so there's still work to do. That's where we come in.

My team and I, "Team Rubbish," will work with Ethan Nelson, director of the City of Eugene's Waste Prevention and Green Building program, to develop strategies that will add local value to selected C&D materials in order to divert them from the waste stream. The Team will focus on four materials: asphalt shingles, concrete, carpet, and gypsum drywall. Plus there's a possibility we'll add food waste to the scope of the our final reports, but that remains to be seen. Our end product will be in the form of a detailed report with of case studies, market analyses, stakeholder interviews, and new market development recommendations for each of these waste materials that we hope can be incorporated into the City of Eugene Solid Waste Management Plan.

I've very excited to get to my hands dirty with this project, which I lament to say I haven't quite been able to do because I've been wicked busy working on this Salem SCY Report. Friday we met with our client, Ethan, and I think we managed to make a good enough impression on him. We gave him a quick spiel of our preliminary research, I was charged with finding case studies of waste management programs in districts outside of Lane County.

Without skipping a beat, we have our first team presentation on Wednesday, and now that I think about it, we're pretty much going to repeat everything I just wrote. I imagine we'll have a PowerPoint presentation in the background, but the script is taken care of at least...cool. Did I just multi-task without even realizing it? Man, I'm good!