001702 pm welcome to the october 28 2021 electronic meeting of the environmental commission this meeting is in accordance with executive orders from the governor to affect social distancing and mitigate the spread of the coven-19 virus we intend to conduct this meeting similarly to an in-person meeting however please be patient if there are technical issues public comment will be via telephone only to speak during any of these public comment opportunities please call or 888-788-0099 and enter meeting id 955 1333-1828 again it is our meeting id number three 955-1333 one eight two eight this information is also available on the published agenda in the public notices section of the city website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 at t channel 99 and online at www.a2gov.org watch ctn okay galen would you like
002to read the land heritage state statement sure uh land heritage statement i acknowledge that the land the city of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinaabe including the otawa ojibway and border wide me and wyandotte peoples i further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the united states on land our time obtained generally in unconscionable ways from indigenous people this take another land was formalized by the treaty of detroit in 1807. knowing where we live work study and recreate does not change the past but a thorough understanding of the ongoing consequences of this past can empower us in our work to create a future that support that supports human flourishing and justice for all individuals and that's the land heritage statement oh did we lose steve
003i don't see them approval of minutes rita you want me to do it wow yes oh wait you did the roll call right no you didn't i'm sorry please go ahead and do the roll call galen okay all right uh commissioner grant here uh commissioner needham commissioner needham uh councilmember dish i am here from michigan city indiana hi uh commissioner gibb randall you're from ann arbor uh councilmember griswold councilmember griswold commissioner callie ward here from ann arbor all right we know steve is here um commissioner mursky she's not on here anymore uh vice chairperson mitchell here from ann arbor right uh commissioner van broke abandoned broke commissioner chris vanderbilt all right a dead unmoved i'm here thank you all right uh commissioner oriol you're from ann arbor [Music] thank you galen um so for those
004who don't know i am the vice chair of the environmental commission and uh suddenly stepping in for steve brown our chair um i hope that he'll be able to join us soon uh i'm gonna go ahead and ask for approval of the agenda removed approved and the second we approve okay thank you um seconded by commissioner gibb randall um and then next item is approval of our minutes from september um anyone like to make a motion about the minutes so move move by chris graham second no second second place shannon give brandel thank you very much um so the minutes are moved and seconded and i will just suggest that we move on our next section is the um public commentary and i'm sorry i don't have the full script for this but the public
005commentary is open to the public anyone who would like to speak to us at this time we would ask you to phone in and use the number i'll say eight seven seven eight five three five two four seven and once you're in you would enter meeting id nine five five three and if you wish to speak you would um raise your hand by i need some help galen is it star nine to raise hand yes i think i believe so i always get mixed up um star nine and um then we will recognize you to speak and you would speak by um being star six so um i just got a message from steve who's there he is yay um returning steve i just called for public comment um and i think i can turn
006it over to you or ask gail and if anyone is waiting to speak for us to speak to us tonight there are no calls online okay um let's give it like 10 seconds sure okay thanks rita for taking over you're welcome um let's see how i'll be here if i drop out again um this is hap this hasn't happened for some time so i don't know what happened it's a windy night there's no cost thank you okay i'll i'll step back steve it's here okay thanks um so uh the next item on the agenda are two special presentations the first one is a zero waste uh report from sam mcmullen on our zero waste work group white paper that was distributed earlier so sam you have the floor thank you um hello everybody i'm here
007to talk about a white paper that's been in the works since about march of this year um i'm going to give a little bit of general sort of background to the to the motivations and i'll skim through the important bits of the document itself if that works all right um so this on on a very high level this document recommends that we establish a meaningful zero-waste goal as a city as some of you may already know in 2007 this body recommended a zero-waste goal um to go red to produce zero waste and without a precise definition or a timeline um it's failed to produce or make the kind of strides that we would have hoped um so this document is sort of a an attempt to remedy that um let me just get a little
008bit of uh sort of y zero waste type comments in aside from the intrinsic value of not wasting resources um reducing our waste actually is a huge part to play in our emissions calculus extracting transporting producing and disposing of our food and materials actually accounts for about 42 percent you'll read in the white people 42 percent of u.s greenhouse gas emissions um so it's a very significant portion of our of our total emissions um and so as as ann arbor has committed to zero emissions it's a really important set of tactics and strategies to put in place i also want to speak briefly about the connection between 820 and this zero waste goal we in the document actually recommend that the gold be a part of strategy five of a20 um and as h20 starts
009to incorporate this uh the scope three emissions i imagine that the the current calculation which is about point five percent of the total the plan's total um emission savings will grow significantly because of that number i just quoted above the the 42 um sort of the further out you expand the the reach the more of imported emissions or the more emissions um come into play that are embodied in the stuff and the food and the production that we rely on as a city um okay so the the recommendations and i'll read through them again but i want to um talk about them one by one um the recommendations in the document are one that the city ann arbor city council specify and adopt a definition of zero waste that aligns with strategy five um as
010it stands right now we don't have a definition of zero waste which makes it very difficult to pursue um pursue zero waste generally uh so we suggest a definition that's been adopted by many other cities it's the zero waste international alliance definition that's the definition we recommend in the white paper the second recommendation in the white paper is recognize the zero waste is indispensable to strategy five of the 820 carbon neutrality plan uh which calls for the city to expand composting and recycling and move towards a circular economy um so this is sort of pointing to what i was saying before about the about carbon neutrality and zero waste really um being interlocked in a in a very fundamental way um and then the third recommendation is direct the city administrator to instruct staff city
011staff to design and undertake key feasibility studies to inform deadlines action steps and action steps for achieving zero waste we had a recommendation to include unnecessary resources the next action step is is also about resources number four recommendation in this document direct the city administrator and city staff to allocate a share of whatever funding is allocated to or raised by millage or other means for the climate action strategy five because the enterprise funds are not sufficient to fund zero waste and circular economy goals so those are the explicit recommendations in this document and a couple areas that we've debated a lot and and we will certainly take um the important discussion points are the distinction between circular economy and zero waste and that was a it's a the city currently uses circular economy language and
012the this goal very specifically um advocates for a zero waste um a definition of zero waste and for zero waste to be in the in 820 the carbon neutrality plan um so there was a lot of there's a lot of sort of confusion about whether those are distinct things were those two sides of the same coin um why aren't we just talking about uh circular economy why do we need to talk about zero waste at all really important discussion section um we talked about it in the in the white paper a little bit but that's just something to keep your eye out the other important thing to pay attention to is the timeline um there are sort of two ways to go about this assigning a timeline one would be for the environmental commission or
013city council to pass a timeline to the city administration and say this is what we want to do tell us what you need to get there the other option would be to say we're trying to get to say to the city administration we're trying to get to zero waste what's a reasonable timeline what do you need to get there so those are points that are left unresolved in the white paper and hopefully we can get some some resolution around them i'm going to share my screen briefly and while i'm doing that i'll take any clarifying questions at the moment before i get into the important bits of the doc oh here we go okay all right thanks sam i think i'll make a comment at this point and that is that um these are you
014know a concept such as zero waste goals or circular economy is just an overarching general concept i think what's going to really define on the city's goals are our goals you know with us the cities to have a sustainability dashboard i think if we can um if we can reinstitute that practice and if we can cut goals um and with intermediate goals or smart goals i think that i think it doesn't matter whether we call it circular economy or uh zero waste but i want to emphasize the fact that the the user the the actual waste generators they can see what zero waste is because uh you know they they when they dispose of anything they see uh their landfill they see their trash cart they have their you know compost cart and they have
015their recycling cart and um beyond that um it's an act of faith um but um in order for all the residents to to you know to to monitor their own practices so their own behaviors i think i think it's important to um to make that apparent um at the point of use of the whole system you know where people put things into their into their carts as well as businesses so i just want to say that up front so um go ahead sam if i might just two things on that the the in my everyday life i i run a little non-profit called live zero waste that deals with exactly what you're talking about steve um trying to get people to live a zero-waste lifestyle um and you're absolutely right it's a it's a particularly
016sticky concept for for the general population it's something you end up thinking about a lot and it's very obvious it's very tangible and especially coupled with that statistic that i brought up of 42 percent of our emissions being in the materials economy it's it's a very important thing to get um get across that a lot of our carbon footprint actually happens from the stuff we buy and the and the way that we deal with materials the other thing that i want to mention because mike isn't here and i'm sure he would want me to and it's a really important point um this is not in any way meant to be something that a problem that we're passing off to consumers i don't think anyone here would argue that that we don't have a massive problem
017with the amount of resources we extract and consume but a lot of the responsibility in fact much of the responsibility falls to producers and large organizations like the city of ann arbor so this is something that the zero-waste goal should should be seen as a systems level goal rather than a goal for individuals i'm not saying that you were suggesting that steve i just want to be crystal clear on that bit um okay so this is the document can everyone see my screen are we good to go nice um so i'm just going to read this first paragraph and then and then bounce through the rest of it um on july 7th 2007 the ann arbor city council adopted the city's first zero waste goal thank you environmental commission um the goal to produce zero
018waste did not specify a definition for zero waste or set a timeline for achieving it on june 2nd 2020 when the ann arbor city council approved a20 it approved strategy 5 which commits the city to various other actions to further our community's progress towards carbon neutrality by quote changing the way we use reuse and dispose of materials end quote this broad strategy envelops the existing zero waste goal reference from 2007 and emphasizes the importance of changing consumption patterns as well as disposal practices the strategy also entails analysis of scope 3 emissions for those on clear scope one is what the emissions you produce by your activities in the city scope 2 includes the emissions from electricity are used scope 3 would be an analysis analysis of all your sort of the the broadest level of
019emissions that you could take which would include emissions created in producing imported products for instance so that's scope 3 emissions strategy entails analysis of scope 3 emissions for which the office of sustainability has begun to develop metrics while direct emission savings from this strategy are by nature hard to pin down we know that the materials economy making food and stuff has been shown to contribute more to u.s emissions than any other activity that's the 42 statistic as 820 begins to estimate scope 3 emissions and bring scope 3 reduction under its purview it becomes more urgent to develop strategy 5 by articulating an operational definition of zero waste and engaging partnership organizations in developing the circular economy um there we already see the zero waste and circular economy sort of tag teaming this issue um as
020the city develops policy and funding priorities to decarbonize adopting an operational definition of zero waste may provide a policy bridge between the city's solid waste working area and its office of sustainability and innovation that's a very important point and between its swrmp solid waste resource management plan and a20 plans demonstrate to council members and the public at large the role that solid waste and the production and consumption that creates that waste plays in cities emissions calculus established for council members and the public the importance of making a transition from a linear to a circular economy if the city is to achieve its eight to zero goals um we propose that the city adopt a definition of zero waste that aligns with strategy five we also recommend strategies and action steps to advance that goal consistent
021timeline of the 820 plan so the recommendations i read already to you background this just covers what's currently on the books you can read through that if you're interested in in sort of the history of of where we've been and why we actually need a zero waste goal and a definition of zero waste right now um this just elaborates a little bit on the the idea that zero waste really is a lens that takes into account upstream and waste reduction and is not just an end of the pipe strategy um strategy five zero waste and the circular economy this is uh in large part of justification of putting the zero waste goal into strategy five um which is again changed the way we use reuse and dispose of materials i think zero waste fits naturally
022there um but this this covers in a little bit more depth this is a nice little graphic about the linear economy recycling um and a truly circular economy producing as you can see zero waste or very little waste that's the that's the goal i think steve said very very well in his email you're approaching zero asm totally meaning that you you're never gonna get all the way there but the importance of having uh having a direction to go and a zero-waste goal can't be overstated um [Music] okay these action steps are are suggestions based on previous actions and and things that the the subcommittee finds particularly important in achieving a zero-waste goal or or moving the needle on zero waste [Music] and then assessment strategies and actions are further um for the sort of recommendations
023or suggestions made by the zero waste working group which is this subcommittee they include getting grants helping the city with purchasing um sort of changing the way that the city purchases things um and and helping to develop policy with the the great amount of expertise that we actually have on the zero waste working group so that's the and then we have future considerations and some edits at the bottom so i think now um i've i've unloaded a lot on you i'm ready to accept questions or we can start discussion um unless there's something you'd like me to dive into a little bit more detail on steve i know um first of all i'd like to thank the zero waste working group it's a working group composed of many members that have spent quite quite a
024lot of time for doing some research and carefully considering this document so i'd like to thank the zero waste working group for getting this done um the floor is open for questions um just raise your hand um or uh you know either you know through the reactions feature at the bottom of the zoom window or um oh rita mitchell you have a floor thanks steve um i have um spent some amount of time reading the 820 plan and looking at the carbon savings and i would i was interested in your description that the um scope 3 emissions are 0.5 but that would grow over time so i'd like to understand the concept there thank you yeah let me clarify um the a20 currently has emissions estimates for each of the each of the actions um
025and i believe that it's composting maybe commercial composting commercials or expanded composting commercial recycling and the estimates for those two currently within a 2-0 amount to about 0.5 of emissions reductions the where i get the the stance that that will grow as we start to incorporate scope 3 emissions is exactly based on this this study about emissions embodied in products that we are importing into the city or or consumption based emissions um oh see so scope because these were not included exactly so we're looking at scope 2 with the plan as it stands and as you look at scope 3 suddenly this little section that's that's changed the way we use reuse and dispose of materials that looks like a small portion of the plan starts to blossom into a very significant and important strategy
026for getting to uh zero emissions thank you yeah of course yeah for me the central the central idea i think is that our scope three emissions or somebody else's scope one or scope two yeah exactly right but if we're going to be doing a proper accounting you need to include this right yeah i think an equivalent or an easy to grasp equivalent is would be blaming china for manufacturing for the emissions based on things they manufactured for the us economy really things that we have created the demand for and we should be responsible for the emissions okay and um i know there's a couple of ways of calculating these things and i'm sure there's a growing consensus because many uh you know many governmental bodies internationally have uh been working on developing a more accurate
027precise accounting greenhouse gas emissions so um i fully expect these numbers to change in the future um and the city is currently working on incorporating scope 3 into zero okay um kayla lisa dish has her hand up and then chris graham you have the floor lisa yeah i just wanted to say quickly on that last point that um whereas i think it's important that the city figure out how to measure scope 3 emissions and account for them in the plan we know what we need to do to reduce them and so i don't think we need to wait i mean it's always nice to have a baseline so you can show that you've made progress but i don't think that we should let um the difficulties with accounting for those emissions keep us from doing
028the things that we've known for 20 years now because it appears in plan after plan or not quite 20 but 14 of what we need to do to get uh to move towards zero waste and so um that's i think the spirit of this document is let's just get moving on some of the stuff that we've said over and over we need to do but we haven't been able to fund and so this is what we need to do is get creative about funding and also develop the kinds of goals that have been developed for the other emissions reductions for production and consumption reduction chris you're on the floor so um the recycling armor review center closed on south industrial on a key bus route more than a year ago and their talking about opening
029a site way out on jackson road sometime in the future um [Music] if we're serious about reuse and i certainly took tons of stuff there i have no idea what happened to it all but i presume it went back out the door at some for a recycled ann arbor and certainly some gain for the people who are able to get materials at relatively or very low cost can't we do more to nudge recycling and are we get going on their replacement facility and how are we going to get people of low income out to 5 000 jackson road and back [Music] secondly of course the whole key of all this is the circular economy and trying to um make products that we buy more reusable and i don't see how we and ann arbor do
030that very well maybe sam you have some insight in what how we might use our leverage a bit better than we are um i think at the sort of i can speak from the personal from personal experience or or doing this with individuals the this document is basically the first step it's the saying we want this you know which is for uh for an individual saying i'm gonna try to not create waste so for instance my sister and i have been doing a zero waste pledge for six years now and i still have trash you know i this is my trash from this year um you don't you don't eliminate it but there's that intention is so important because without it you don't you don't make the effort there's no there are no you know
031it's a guiding principle so i think if the one of the things that the city could do to your question um to sort of point the the attention in the right direction would be to say this is what zero waste is and we're trying to get there by this state um and once you have those those guide posts in place you can start thinking all right so what does that actually mean how do we approach you know the fact exactly like you said that most of the things we buy aren't designed to be reused or to be used in some other system um and in some ways like there are products out there that are designed that way and that with a little bit of attention brought to the issue might become more adopted um
032by the residents of ann arbor and and there's a lot that the city can do um to help the residents to get the residents pointed in that direction but also i think critically the city has a huge amount of spending power and has you know if if the city can sort of take up this this mantle as or take up the zero waste ethic as a as a guiding principle for its own purchases um that would be extraordinarily impactful i don't know if that got to the heart of it yeah um my chris i haven't broke your hand up here before thank you um it might be helpful to point out that the subgroup did a lot of work on trying to figure out should we put a smart goal in this document for a
033number of steps and make them crisp and clear to everybody or should we simply treat this document as a first step and say we want the overarching goal of going to zero waste and i just would go on record as saying i'm a proponent of sand we need some kind of an overarching goal that says well we want to get to zero waste by some date otherwise um in my business experience stuff doesn't get done uh but i just want to offer that up that that's been a debate amongst the the subgroup and and maybe lisa you have some things to add to that but um without going into a lot of detail and trying to force procedures on the city council or staff uh i would support a simple goal that says we want
034to get to zero waste by 2050 or some date just so we can put some teeth into this whole thing thanks and the question that was debated on the sort of sub group on the working group um was who should be the one to set that date um it's it's clear that a goal without a date is pretty useless um because we've had a goal since 2007 and not much has budged in terms of diversion rate or many of these issues that we've been coming up against but um whether that whether city council is the one or the environmental commission is the one to provide a date or whether it's the city staff who would go and look at the look at what it would actually take and then come back with a date is
035is sort of the main point of contention on that particular aspect and it's on it's undecided in the in the white paper as it is correct okay i'm john callaway you're on the floor yeah just picking up on that sam and thanks for bringing this forward um so i understood what you just said is like that's not defined but as i read this it seems to be kind of putting it on the city staff and like with many things that we discussed and relates to city staff i'm wondering and i've only been partially involved with the work of the subgroup but what's been the engagement and what's been the discussion with city staff about charging them with this responsibility i mean i agree since 2007 we don't have one and i'm all for smart metrics
036but that's why i've spent kind of more of my time on the circular economy metrics initiative to kind of identify something and be able to kind of move forward with something specific but i guess the the main question i'm trying to bring forward here is what has been the discussion with city staff about this recommendation you're absolutely right sorry i should have said as it stands in the document right now it is on city staff you're totally right lisa i think you're you're ready to feel that question though john um do you have any follow-up questions john so if we want to you know move to that feedback i think that's that's a critical part of this in terms of my read of what we can do and where we can go yeah um all
037right lisa you have your hand up you have the floor yeah i wanted to speak to john's question i'm sorry i'm having um the internet's not great so i hope you can hear me um you guys for breaking up for me okay great so um we've been working uh jenny patoski's been working closely with us on this document and um we will not be able to do we will not be able to have a thorough staff discussion until the new resource recovery manager comes on board and gets her feet on the ground and she's coming in on monday i think is her first day of work and i have um spoken with dr steltz about this and her she is very very much open to um the idea that we that a a definition of
038zero waste would be a useful uh well let me put it she's extremely open to the idea of elaborating strategy five she thinks a definition of zero waste would be a great part of that and of course um john the work that you and i and jenny are doing with the metrics for the circular economy plus the whole plan of incubating the circular economy are all part of building out strategy five and so um i think that uh the you know i think we should take i i think we i think because all the staff who would be relevant to this decision aren't yet on board we don't have a clear answer as to whether they would um take kindly to our saying well let's just throw 2050 at you and see what you make
039of it or um or if we could give them a list of strategies that we cull from various documents or from the strongest of the many documents because there hasn't been linear progress towards um smart thinking about zero waste to kind of it's it's in some and then it's it's backgrounded in others so um sam dug up a really great document the waste not report that i think is probably the strongest in terms of thinking about strategies so we could give them the list and say you know prioritize these and do whatever you need to do commission or conduct feasibility studies to see what it would take money-wise and time-wise to make these a reality and what order we should develop them and set the overall date after thinking through some of the steps because
040much of this is no surprise incredibly logistically complicated it has to do with trucks and alleys and containers and drivers and routes and some containers are one thing and other containers are other things and it's massive so that's i think where we are now is that a conversation like that will happen sometime in november and we'll have a clearer signal from staff of what would be useful but i do think that a resolution coming from us and city council about a definition of zero waste and some approach to strategies may be a date maybe not a date but just a clear thing of this is a priority for funding as funding is coming in um i think is a very useful thing right now all right thanks lisa um any other questions or comments um
041rita you have your hand up you have this now um i just want to just understand this this concept so in a way if we if this is really really successful would the um reuse so the reuse center i could see being in place but what about the merch you know if it was like ultimately super super successful doesn't it mean that we wouldn't need as much of a material resource facility is that where we're going that would be an incredible problem to have yeah i i agree i'm just but it's just i'm just wondering about the you know what happens in the long run where we see it yeah well we're taking other communities waste in at the murph too and so i don't know that they will be as quick as we are
042to innovate and that would also be a terrible problem to have i think i think that's exactly the the mindset that and so i'll just interject for a second sorry uh that's exactly the mindset that this kind of goal puts you in oh what if this or what if it worked you know and i think that's that that's already a huge step and something that we need to we need to push for because without it we're not going to have a we're not going to be able to make the strides that we need to i'm really glad you asked that we shouldn't let concepts get in the way of pragmatic results i mean i think i think we have examples here i mean sam just showed us his waste for the entire year and um
043and there are youtube videos we can see about how residents have gone to zero waste personally and so i think um disseminating that message to residents would be a good step and there's a number of players here there's the um and there's the city itself what can the city do to become a zero waste organization and then is what can they what can we do to help residents become zero waste and then what can we do to help various commercial entities to get dessert waste and i'll just interject that i i'm a i think um a spirit of continuous improvement is important in this regard and i also i'm a big fan of pilot projects so i would i would like to see a small pilot project and just try out different things and see
044what happens you know i think that has a lot of benefit and then whatever the learnings are from that pilot project they can gradually expand that you know throughout the city so um chris you have your hand up so um isn't it really the stuff that goes in the trash bin rather than a recycle bin that we want to deal with or for heaven's sakes the construction waste bins i don't foresee recycling ever ending there will be many materials and probably more that are recyclable if we do this right that's my thought yeah that's correct yeah i think so okay um if there are no more comments at this point um chris so shannon you have your hand up just thinking i i really like your idea of the pilot project and like i'm i
045guess i'm still trying to wrap my head around what this actually looks like like in practice um and we've had um a couple of well i'm thinking of the viridian development and i'm thinking of another one i'm working on something coming up um where part of the whole point of the project is that sustainability is a huge component of it and it seems that you might find a group of people that might be willing to really try this in a way that might be more difficult across a sort of general whatever you know um neighborhood or what you know whatever that means and it just might be interesting to try to engage um groups that that might want to take it on in a real way as especially as they're building things as they're building
046uh you know projects making things and and settling people in into rhythms of how they how they live and so it might be an interesting thing to connect with some of these developments as they come online to think about i know that because i was one of the site designers for the iranian project there's a there was a lot that we went through with the city with how to collect waste and how to think about all of that and um i just think you have a ripe group to be able to try some of these things with and and i think small-scale projects like what stephen is bringing up really make a lot of sense because i think there's just a ton of learning that happens in those um and uh i think it would
047be interesting to kind of partner you know with with something uh with the with a group like that to try something so that's i guess my two cents about how to maybe connect environmental commission and planning commission in that way you know about what's coming online and how we might connect the dots to be able to make something happen like that um where i think both the developers and very potentially residents because it's something that is being pitched as one of the reasons for living in a place like that to just see what's see what's possible so a great point um chris he still have your hand up oh okay so yeah so um i think also um you know having clubs like a more like an informal club or a formal club of uh
048citizens no matter where they are in the city to get together and meet monthly and share ideas and uh you know do contests things like that contest can be a good thing as well um in this regard so i think we could learn a lot over the next six months for example um if we had some kind of a club form clubs um organizations and uh shannon was saying there are different intentional communities can we call them that you know where there are buildings and apartments where people uh people with similar values have gotten together and these would be good these would be good uh testing testing grounds i think yeah shannon i'm really glad you brought that up i think it it speaks to like the more people that from different perspectives are are
049thinking about okay what does it mean from where i sit for us to be zero waste like architects or design whatever is like i think it's a really important thing to get a different perspective and just while we're talking about pilot projects um the residential stuff is important and easy sort of first thing to latch on to the commercial recycling is much it's a much lower rate so residential recycling is about 50 commercial recycling is around 10 so there are some if we can get some other perspectives involved i think that there are huge gains to be made in in commercial recycling and commercial composting as well that sort of areas that sort of haven't even been touched and are a little bit more hidden and obviously cnd i mean steve knows you're on that
050train yeah okay um yeah last call for comments all right well thank you very much sam and the zero waste working here and we'll look forward to um future progress in this area and um or my people the city has been invited to come and talk about their perspective on december 2nd at our next meeting so um thank you all right thank you so um the next item on the agenda is uh um al hodge is going to present on the special challenges of classic so al you have the floor okay great thank you i need to have the screen sharing turned on please okay uh hopefully you can all see that uh [Music] i'm al hodge i've been with the in the plastics industry for 47 years across just about all aspects of it
051from corporate management to engineering design and machinery processing as well as design of final plastic products refuse plastics is simply the name of this presentation my business is the hodge plastics group and i'm based here in the ann arbor area just to run you through some numbers the plastics industry is the third largest industry in the united states it contributes about 451 billion dollars annually to the u.s economy and it's been doubling in size every 15 years since the 1950s employs quite a few people is about 16 000 plastic facilities across the united states uh in 2020 plastics generated about 42.7 million metric tons of product in the united states which is about 286 pounds per person yet we only recycle overall about 9 of the plastics just for your educational purposes there are two
052forms of plastics one is a thermoset which is not recyclable that would be your plastic handle on your frying pans its high temperature items your pex pipe which is your water piping that you're seeing now that is a cross-linked high-density polyethylene which turns it into a thermoset these are not recyclable products but thermoplastics which are your most common form of plastics are recyclable with an asterisk and we'll talk about that as we get into the uh presentation there are actually 45 different families of thermoplastics uh with polyethylene and the polyethylene therapeutic which is the pet or the water bottles being the most common plastics derives itself either from a gas or oil it's actually fairly economical material to produce and it's actually within reason an environmentally friendly material to produce compared to other materials such
053as co such as mining or even pulp paper uh products uh [Music] about half of all plastic produced is for single use containers which would be take out food containers or single use containers that you find in every grocery store takeout facility uh grocery stores 7-elevens restaurants and so forth just in the united states there were 180 billion single-use takeout containers used in 2020 and about 14 of those were collected for recycling so a tremendous amount ends up going into the landfill the universal sign for recycling was created back in 1970 and of course the plastics industry picked up on that and embedded their material codes into it with the delusion that people are going to think that this is being recycled but it's really not a recycling code it's simply a material code there
054are seven codes here in the united states if you were to go to china there's 144 codes in their process here we only recognize seven one being the p e t two is high density polyethylene three is vinyl four is low density polyethylene five is polypropylene six is polystyrene and seven is at great catch-all other uh these were developed by the society of plastics industry which today is the plastics industry association but they're all monitored and controlled by the astm just to run things mr hodge your slides are not advancing and i think that that is something you want they're not advancing yes that's correct yay you see these yes all right well this is do you want to put it in presentation mode it is well i was not for us there you go
055now no we're seeing not presentation mode or screen sharing do you have two screens you see this we see it but we see all of them we see a left left side of your what is your full deck how about that you hit the right button but can you switch to slideshow is that is that a an option for you it should be the button that he's hitting down there that guy right there that normally works okay well i tell you what why don't we just have to look at it as is that's fine yeah at least we can see what you're talking about now that's better okay so these are the seven codes that i was talking about and these were created uh by the society of plastics industries to give the illusion that
056plastic is being recycled when in fact it's really not it was a pr campaign it's been recognized as one of the most successful pr campaigns ever in american history let's start with the most common plastic there is and that's polyethylene therapy which is the number one plastic this of course is used in your water bottles juice containers take out containers this little slide up here above this water bottle is what's called a this is how all water bottles start out they start out as an injection molded part goes into a machine called the stretch blow mold and then through heat and pressure it gets blown into a bottle one of the biggest companies providing this machine is a company called seidel they actually have the technology to make 60 to 90 000 bottles per hour
057on these machines so if you take a plant you put 30 or 40 machines in you can see the amount of volume of bottles that can get created in a very short period of time second most volume used plastic is high density polyethylene that's your milk containers ice tea containers a lot of fabric softener containers or laundry detergent containers as well the next volume is polypropylene which is actually a very reversible plastic it's a lot of bottle caps of polypropylene but it's also made into a lot of containers especially you'll see it in your freezer compartments with heat up materials that could be microwaved like bob evans mashed potatoes or even ice cream for freezers uh unfortunately this material though it's very common especially in yogurt containers probably 80 of our yogurt containers are polypropylene
058it's very seldom recycled the reason for that is it's hard to separate this plastic at the municipal recycle facilities and also there's limited market uh limited people recycling this product because the volume is in pet and high density about one percent of all polycopies being recycled right now uh the second tragic materials i like to call this number six which is polystyrene uh you see uh uh this is the polystyrene foam container the ubiquitous drink cup heated bowl cups a lot of takeout containers still use polystyrene foam less than a half a percent of all polystyrene foam right now is being recycled it's simply going into the landfill it's one of those materials that could be and i have a little bit of news on that coming up in the presentation but it's one of
059those ones you really want to avoid so essentially uh 3 4 6 and 7 have no markets for recycle technically you could recycle all plastics but you have to have a market for them so they could be reused in some form and there's just basically no market form about 94 percent of americans favor recycling yet we're still stuck at about 90 of all plastics being recycled uh i had a meeting last week with a group called dart container they're out of mason michigan they're about three billion dollar organization they're one of the largest producers of polystyrene both solid and foam phased polystyrene containers they also do some other things like polypropylene pet and paleo pla they will offer service where they'll come around and pick up polystyrene containers and they take them over to their
060indiana facility and recycle them now they do pick up at the merf facility or that little recycle facility we have here in ann arbor on the styrene foam even though they don't make that particular type of foam the reason why i contacted them and sit down with them is that i was at the oktoberfest in celine several weeks ago and they were using number six polystyrene containers for their drink glasses for the beer i was actually a volunteer there helping with the main street people all these containers were thrown in with the trash which then just simply got taken to the landfill absolutely nothing was recycled at that facility so i made a presentation to the city i sat with the saline environmental commission and have also had a presentation with the washington environmental commission
061why are there no guidelines at large events for recycling plastics especially when there are sources that will come and take this plastic and recycle it and i mean the the the answers back were very disillusionable uh you know main street just simply said look we didn't have time we ran out of time we couldn't prepare wash and i had said that gee we're busy doing other things and it's kind of a that's part of the tragic story when you talk about recycling in uh zero waste we just haven't put the time and effort in to put a plan in place to recapture these products so those all those containers from the oktoberfest uh in celine are sitting somewhere in a landfill somewhere and they had record attendance at this thing this just shows you a
062little bit of the growth of plastics uh if you go back to 1980 you can see the expansion upward very quickly in plastic that's when plastic really started to replace glass and other containers in your grocery stores and same thing here you can see about 1980 you start to see the decline of plastic which today by far if you go into any grocery store and walk through the owls the vast vast majority of everything is some sort of a plastic based product uh some of the stats here just to talk about united states we use about 1500 bottles plastic bottles per second uh plastic bottles are about 29 are recycled right now but it still means about 22 billion gets sent to the landfills and p-e-t bottles no one's for sure but it's estimated it
063takes 500 to 1000 years to reach to decompose properly so if you guys go back and think about that if the pilgrims had water bottles when they landed up at plymouth rock they'd still be laying on the beach up there at plymouth rock uh polystyrene usa throws about 25 billion polystyrene cups away every annual every year you know the plastic bags that are used only about one in every 200 bags get recycled pet that does get recycled here there are some that can go back into bottle production if it's kept very pure some of it can be used back in food containers but most of it ends up going into non-bottle non-food contact applications particularly like carpet fiber or other kind of clothing and things of that nature when pet goes into clothing they call
064it polyester but it's the same material it's polyethylene therapeutic again the real recycle process is not simple uh it takes a lot to separate the material with the murph you have to have a facility that can take it in then wash it repellentize it clean it repellentize it and have a market to sell to uh and unfortunately right now in the united states it's cheaper just to take it to the landfill than it is to recycle it and that's why a lot of plastic ends up in the in the uh landfills and in the recycling stages you have to figure out how to sort it how to identify it wash it get it ready into some sort of a form that you can extrude it and filter it out i put this picture in here
065because that's probably one of the nicest sorting facilities you're ever going to see most of these are actually fairly rough environments to work in uh they're typically not environmentally controlled so they're hot in the summer cold in the winter uh they're very dangerous work there's a lot of moving parts and it's very strenuous monotonous work sitting there pulling out plastic and trying to separate it on a line uh this starts us now talk a little bit more about how we get it plastic back into a peliform this one little item here in the bottom left is what's called an extruder this is where plastics gets fed in and push down this barrel through heat and pressure and out comes pellets at the other end if it's set up right and this is where i spent
066most of my career at working in the extrusion part of the plastics looking at what's going on uh outside of the landfills we know that there are a lot of plastic in the oceans right now uh about eight million tons of plastics are flowing in the ocean every year it's it's a situation that's almost to the point of being overwhelming how much is going into the ocean and we typically categorize all plastic pollution just not the ocean but by micro mesa and macro and it's also a category now called nano if you're wondering about the plastics in the ocean these countries china indonesia philippines thailand and vietnam are the leading contributors to the uh ocean contamination the united states i think he ranks about number seven so we're up in that area as well where
067we put about 750 000 pounds annually into the ocean one way or another so we know that plastics are doubling every 10 years which is a tragic outcome for us plastic food packaging is the most is the second most common trash item collected on a beach and oddly enough cigarette filters are actually which is a plastic by the way that is a fibrous plastic is actually the number one item found on beaches in uh there were a number of tests run here in the united states and in canada it's found that about 94 of all tap water in the united states contains some sort of a micro to nanoplastics the study in canada found about two-thirds of all water bottles the water and cells contains nanoplastics here we have a status saying about 93 and
068what that really means is that inside of each of us right now there's probably about a credit card size worth of plastics floating around on your body uh from drinking out of these containers we don't know yet the long-term effect of that but no one's really got any belief that it's beneficial this picture of this guy right here is down in houston it's along the canal there is if you ever get to houston you should go down along what's called the houston canal it's the petrochemical capital of the united states it's where all the chemical reactors are from dupont the dow to monsanto basf that's for all bodies making their plastic product this is the plastic that they found in the waterway right outside these plants although they they designate themselves as being you know
069environmentally safe organizat organism organizations but yet they dump maybe not directly but one way or another put a lot of plastics into the water the urine river of the 28 deteriorate tributaries to the great lakes the stream contributors euron river has the highest level of microplastics of any of them and about 70 of those microplastics come from synthetic closing the polyesters nylons and acrylics as well so we know we produce a lot of plastics again when we look at possibilities for recycling and where it's coming from plastics continues to grow the production produce of about three to four percent annual growth rate here in united states the largest plastic polluters are the pepsico and coca-cola uh and worldwide coca-cola is number one due to their use of p-e-t bottles and the amount that they actually
070produce which are staggering amounts for it we know there's a market for pet or recycling for pet and high density if we can just get it to go but part of the problem here is that uh virgin for instance high density polyethylene natural right now sells about 60 cents a pound uh the recycle content adds about another 20 cents a pound so if you were trying to reincorporate high density back into your product you'd be paying about 80 cents a pound to use that material and now you know you put yourself at an economical disadvantage in trying to re incorporate regrind back into your product the only way you're going to probably get that is if you do it through legislation there are some alternatives to the regular recycling efforts and there is a technology
071called pyrolysis which is a low burn it's a very low carbon footprint and it turns the plastic back into a usable diesel fuel there are a number of these plants in use right now in europe there's only a handful here in the united states but still even if you were to start building these you need about 600 of them to handle just about 6.5 million tons of plastic waste per year which is a far short of what's really needed uh in to recycling plastics pla which is probably lactic acid gets a lot of play right now because it's the corn starch material which is being called as compostable it is not biodegradable it is designated as compostable it's actually a number seven code this material does have a tremendous large carbon footprint is corn based
072it takes a lot of carbon uh to process the corn it is nitrites go into the waters from the uh fertilization of it it takes a lot of high heat to the process of this material it's hydroscopic so you have to dry it uh it dryers that run about 170 and 190 degrees f for six to eight hours uh which are either electrically fired or gas-fired then it's very difficult to compost it takes about 140 degrees f with a moist water base to get this to decompose actually the ann arbor compost facility actually does a pretty decent job with it but it's a difficult material to separate uh it's a very difficult material especially if it gets contaminated with other polymer actual true polymers it can contaminate those polymers in its hope i personally i
073think to me it's a rouge uh it's a material that should be just simply not used a lot of people like to come back and say well look we're using compostable materials we're doing the right thing it really has no value to it once it decomposes you're not getting any nutrients out of it at all so you can't throw it on your tomatoes expect to have great tomatoes later on uh it's a material that's again gets its play because of the fact that compostable water at these day and age sounds great but it's not an answer to the prospect it's more of a problem there are some alliances out there that are joined by these very large corporations they're all non-profits they're kind of shells to show people that they're trying to do some recycling
074uh boy i'll tell ya it's it's very iffy if any good is really coming out of these uh pepsico has made a pledge to put a 25 uh recycle content in all the containers by 2025 or at least a volume of their containers and they also pledge to do some recycling compostable materials so we have some single companies out there that are trying i don't want to make it sound like everybody's not trying uh but it's it's just a very uh minor effort to what really has to be done steve asked me if there's any legislation out there worth noting to try to control plastic there's a lot of legislation floating all around this country you see some pretty aggressive stuff out in california where they're demanding 25 uh a 20 recycled content and there's
075also some bottle deposit laws now coming into effect on water bottles here in michigan though there is this uh solid waste law bill part 115 that's gone through the house and it's being considered by the state and it's essentially trying to promote more recycling and reducing landfill waste um uh we'll see where it goes and how it comes out to me my only comment is that's fine but where are the recycle facilities going to come from you know it takes you know just to put a simple recycling reprocessing facility and you're probably looking at about 10 million investment and where's that 10 million going to come from and how many of these are we going to need uh the rule of thumb is we need 10 more of everything than what we have right now
076just to keep pace with with the plastic recon uh recycling content we have and also one of the interesting things about plastic right now is that you should also understand it's not doesn't recycle into infinity aluminum can aluminum you can recycle over and over again without any deterioration of its properties plastics every time you recycle it you lose part of its processing capabilities it actually starts to deteriorate and it's say its impact capabilities its clarity so now you have to add other chemicals into the process clarifiers impact modifiers colorants things of that type of nature just to try to get the plastic back into some sort of usable form at the federal level right now with this large spending bill that's going through there is some legislation running through about taxing putting a 20 cent
077per pound on all resin uh with the idea that it would cut plastic resin down the reason why i put this slide up is that i'm still a member of this plastic industry association and i'm getting a lot emails are pressed about saying we've got to fight this legislation so if the plastic industry's got it on their radar that means they're concerned about it of being real legislation and if it goes through it could have a major impact on plastic usage it certainly could uh start to limit the amount of plastic going into the marketplace which is one of the things that has to be done but unfortunately where the ultimate person where who's going to pay for this is going to be you and i because it's going to just lead to higher uh
078prices for plastic products but it's apparently has a reasonable chance of getting uh through so what to do individually well you know again we throw a lot of plastics away don't be fooled that paper is the answer i've been through a lot of paper pulp meals uh in my career and there are environmental catastrophes up front uh yeah you can perhaps get paper to be recycled a little bit easier and you can certainly get it to degrade uh but the best thing when you go to a grocery store just use the reusable bags don't use plastic it's just not the grocery store it's all stores cvs ace hardware wherever you go you know try to limit the amount of plastics that you use uh most grocery stores do have the ability to take in this
079is a stand at myers where you can drop your plastic bags in and there are facilities that will pick these up um washtenaw county right now is investigating a couple grocery stores uh because they were tipped off that the grocery stores are simply dumping them into the trash and it's just all getting all to the landfill and of course that's one of the problems but there are some facilities there's one down in the southeast indiana or excuse me petoskey plastics which is from petoskey michigan has a facility in indiana for reprocessing plastic bags and hylux poly which is also in indiana uh not spelled right but it's down in uh southeast indiana that we're watching take in and reprocess plastic bags as well again cut down as much as you can on the pet water
080bottles get a reusable bottle uh use it for all applications stay away from the dreadful polystyrene foam containers and again look at plastic as a big picture i like to call it it's a progressive disease uh plastics i mean if you don't do something to cure this issue it's just going to keep on growing and right now it is basically on a non-stop path growth the plastic industry association is pretty much on a path that they will fight any legislation that will limit or stop uh the growth of plastics and they've got some very large dollars behind them and as you know here in michigan we have can't ban plastic bags at a local level because there's a a law in place at the state level that you can't weigh in plastic bags plastics industry
081association was one of the lobbyists behind that whole deal uh look for things that have a recyclable content if you can again look at supporting anything that will limit and if not outright banned plastic and paper bags and uh keep current on what's going on in the recycling area and simply do your best to try to limit plastics so that's my presentation and hopefully you learned something out of it all right thank you al yeah that was very informative um are there any questions ralph i see chris vanderbilt do you have your hand up questions i have a lot of questions but um so for example there's only seven numbers in our system so let's say i got a cup made out of abs which is another is that a different family and and what
082number would you stamp on that a seven i mean are all plastics supposed to fit within these seven numbers yes that's the rouge that's what i said if you go to china they have under 44. abs in china is its own product okay and you theoretically could recycle that you could grind it up if you had a bunch of it but you can't you had somebody wanted to buy it yeah okay abs pipe at one time was a fairly uh used pipe here in fact it was a lot of your water vents right water tank vent pipes but that's been replaced now uh abs is used in some packaging applications well open up your refrigerator you look inside that big plastic liner that's abs right um one one more i know there's legislation in california
083i think they passed it that is going to limit the use of that those chasing arrows that triangle only for plastics that they have a market for so there won't be any they won't allow any chasing arrow triangles put on number three plastics i think if i read the legislation right do i have that right and if i do what do you think of that law uh i don't i'm not familiar well let's go back i'm not familiar with the part about number three would be vinyl which is a very limited market for reset because vinyl is very broad scope you know that's why there's other classifications you got rigid vinyl which is your plastic windows your siding then you have flex vinyl which is medical tubing it's door seals it's hose it's your garden
084hoses there's vinyl and wire and cable applications i mean vinyl is a very broad spectrum but anything that's trying to clear up the confusion of what's recyclable what isn't would be good legislation you know here's a i'm having a running battle right now with myers i've written to them several times and had responses here's peaches in a aluminum can which can be recycled right here are peaches in what's actually a polypropylene container except if you could see it it's labeled number seven not five and the reason for that is there's a barrier layer inside here that tries to keep this product fresh because i believe this product actually has come from china because there's a stamp on here called epco which is a chinese-based blow molder for this container this container is made by a
085process called glow molding so it's being shipped basically to united states from china so to help preserve it they have to put a barrier layer in here but it converts it from a recyclable container to a non-recyclable container once it gets that number seven on it it's basically the kiss of that uh it's it's just gonna go to the landfill unless you know you can make parking lot bumpers out of it you may be able to make some park benches out of it but number seven plastic are your pouches it's everything is just kind of a general catch-all abs uh that just gets thrown into it one more quick question and i'll get off um what are you what can our new murph conveniently sort it can sort out ones and twos and fives or
086what else can it do something froze up yeah now you're frozen okay well yeah let's wait for all to come back but in the meantime let me just say that this is not just a this is just not just a waste problem it's a health problem because these plastics wear down ultimately to sizes that are smaller than the cells in your body they will be um they will be your macrophages will try to try to remove it as a foreign object um they uh uh there's recent you know scientific studies that show that these microplastics especially have a particular especially problem um you know with reproduction because they interfere with embryogenesis they interfere with placenta they cross the placenta uh there's uh it's a significant health problem not just a waste problem and that and
087uh of course this is in um fish and um these studies were done in fish and other smaller organisms but of course there's no reason to believe that humans would be exempt from this sort of toxic reaction so um i don't see i'll come back um we do have hands up though so i'll chris you and then young and then leah i think it's a wall street journal i think is the wall street journal i was reading an article that oil and gas companies are planning to compensate for their reduced supply to producing electrical energy by radically increasing their work in plastics making a net increase in carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere rather than a decline um [Music] i i wish i was back i'm also wondering um how i might install a microplastic
088filter on my washing machine i haven't i've been googling this and trying to figure out how to do that and haven't found anything that seems practical but the idea of ingesting those kinds of plastics to the degree we are unknowingly already is pretty striking chris is it possible to put a uh a pantyhose or something like that or a stocking on your drain you know like the spout that goes out from your washer machine to catch those plastics i would guess they're smaller than that galena and another interesting question about that okay you're filtering them and presumably it'll plug up pretty fast and then of course you don't wash it off in the sink what do you do with it vacuum it or something i can um well i can speak something to that um
089for a couple years there have been these um um balls i think they're made out of plastic that you can put in your washer they will bind up some micro plastics um but that's um you know that's not a real solution that's not a real solution i mean my solution is i just don't you know buy synthetic fibers and if you buy natural fibers you won't have a problem like this but it's hard to avoid with socks you know anything you know like the socks um underwear that's the hardest thing for the song almost everything has some in it i you can buy cotton shirts and t-shirts and but uh nearly everything except wool sweaters and cotton t-shirts has synthetic fiber in it now well um okay uh thanks chris um young when now you
090have the floor uh i have two comments and a question um and i guess for the micro plastic that chris was talking about i guess you could just like put it in the plastic bottle if you have in at home and like because i've seen people using that like field fill the plastic bottle up and use that as a building blocks for like parks and like small infrastructures and like that could potentially just make more use of existing plastics and another comment i was gonna set about it's like about steve's point that like uh plastic and harm local community like can harm think oh can cause like health effects on people and another thing i want to point out is that like at the position or like other places where plastics mind is typically like
091a poorer community and like community of colors and the minority communities and then at those places where the plastic is online they cause like a lot of air pollution and that's also causing like health effects and also like this professionally impact the population especially like people of color and like poor communities and third thing was a question is that like at places like like in the u.s that says like there is no market for like plastic outside of plus type one and two like generally like how are these markets set up is like just like private companies or is it just more like non-profit non-profits and also like private companies like or is it just a way for government to step in to like create a market for these classics and like subsidize the program
092for those like plastic to be recycled that was a question for al but it's not here right he's not here and um yeah i don't feel confident to answer that if anybody else feels like they could step up oh here else back yeah you're muted you're muted sorry about that uh once again xfinity is come through that will happen so young one do you want to repeat your question yeah i have a question about like the market for plastic recycling so in us it's like only type one and two plastic recycled and i'm just wondering like how are this market like defined like who created this market is like private companies and or non-profit organizations was is there like a governmental like thing to like recycle this plastic is it possible for the government to
093like implement a policy or like create a facility to recycle plastic outside of type one and two and subsidize these programs like or is it like anything that's exists already was it something that's not uh no nothing like that exists from a government standpoint yeah i mean the answer of course the government could do it uh and somehow that's probably what's going to have to happen uh to get these plastics uh recycled or at least in the attempt to get them back into some sort of product form right now the free market dictates what plastics are going to be recycled and there's some pressure you know by the public certainly by a number of different organizations to try to get plastics recycled but since number one and number two the most volume or the low-hanging
094fruit so that's the materials that get recycled uh that's why you see out western california that a lot of government you know this the government has stepped in the state level to try to force the recycling of other plastics into the picture i see but there's a it's so complicated involved just go in your yogurt container mark ow okay you have mostly polypropylene but yet in mixed in without is some polystyrene the two containers look exactly alike you cannot tell them the part an optical sorter can't separate the two so why not just make all yogurt containers polypropylene you know why not just do that but you also have to look at it even further a lot of the labels on it aren't recyclable the link is stocks in the containers so why can't you
095make those out of a recyclable material as well or even print on the container versus putting a label on the container there's a lot that can be done just by product design to help solve this issue that aren't being done right now you still have a lot of paper labels that go on plastic containers and paper labels give recyclers a fit because you got to wash them off and now going to get special washing machines that come in he's a very big water bass they have to shake and vibrate the plastic to get the labels to separate it's another cost item it's another step along the process i mean the best thing to me right now is to try to stop as much as coming in but the fact that somewhere that you know the
096government's gonna have to step in to force uh the issue here uh because left our the free market it's not going to happen it's just not going to happen well um uh al do you see any hope in these uh extended producer responsibility laws like the state of maine has passed as well as oregon and california recently yeah absolutely yeah absolutely it will it will change the way the processors produce their products absolutely so that has the potential to have that sort of impact but uh i'm not sure uh i mean i would just like to know what kind of do you think that those are an effective tool or what other tools do you think would be more effective than an epr law uh looking at this i have a little stat here i
097was looking at there are 42 plastic resin plants coming online in the united states by 2025. so that's going to add about another 55 million tons of plastic into the stream so we're not even hailing the resize the plastic we have now let alone more volume coming in so one of the first things to do is to stop the volume coming in and that's part of what that legislation i think they're trying to attempt with that 20 cent tax on the resin is trying to limit some of this but one of the first things we got to do is stop just simply stop the amount of plastic being produced and rethink of the packaging that we have do we need all these varieties of yogurt containers orange juices we need all these other pouches on
098the shelf and you know maybe it's time we stop really rationalize that approach but making the processors accountable for bringing that material back into their facility and recycling it to me is a very credible way to force the products to get you have some sort of recycled content put back into the product lines because if you don't do that it's just not going to happen okay proctor gamble likes to do this but i think it's a little bit more of a pr uh gimmick than it is a real life attempt at uh trying to be you know responsible good environmental response okay um young when did you have a further comment or question follow-up question i guess no but thank you for answering the question okay all right um uh rita you have your hand
099up and then chris thank you um i was struck by your graph that showed the rapid rise in use of plastics so people lived without plastic before what do we know about the before plastics that we could apply now well there was life before plastics wasn't there you know life went along pretty well without it within reason i mean you know it was promoted as the disposable lifestyle unfortunately uh you know the tupperwares and all that when they first started coming in i mean there's there look that plastics do have some great value uh in certain areas but yeah classics industry association as soon as you start to let try to say look we want to limit plastic one of the responses always we're going to lose jobs look all the jobs that plastic has
100created and the second thing is we're going to say look how much more fuel it takes to transport a truckload of glass containers or aluminum containers as opposed to plastic so that's always the great reply back then also the the other one that they've come up with now is okay so bad plastics what are you gonna do we're going to get all these glass containers since we've probably shut down a great many of our glass producing plants we're going to get all this aluminum it's tough right now to get you to get aluminum cans in the marketplace so we've always come back with that type of a response so yeah we can limit plastics but if we don't rationalize the whole pro whole product line of containers that's simply shutting off plastic and throwing in
101some other container where are they going to come from and how we're going to do that substitution you know it has to be kind of a good holistic plan but life went on very well until 1980 and what's significant about 1980 is that's about when a guy local here by the name of don graham who's an alumni of the university of michigan invented his mechanical engineer invented the graham wheel the graham will is a high-speed blow molding wheel that started doing the oil can oil bottles okay if you go back to 1980 you could still buy an oil cord of oil in an aluminum container right you had to punch the spout into it well don graham made millions upon millions on this concept and that then led to wheels for the milk industry lead
102meals for the sodas industries the blow uh for your detergents that's why 1980 is kind of significant that's where technology from a mechanical electrical standpoint really started to hit the market that allowed processors to produce in volume and that's what keeps going on i mean you go into some of these plants and we're surrounded by some very large uh plastic facility pasta form is based up in uh plymouth uh and they are one of the largest producers of blow molded containers and they have a facility down in uh ohio if you ever got into it and blow your mind to watch inside see millions of containers just being produced in this just this one facility into the market so the dilemma you have with plastic right now it is taking so much of the containers
103over if you start to pull it out what are you going to replace it with but i go back to my original point do we need all these different varieties of product uh you know there's a time really a scale because i imagine if you went back to 1980 they probably only had say a dozen chip offerings let's say not 50 all in number seven type plastic pouches that can't be recycled probably not um could i just have like two quick ones um the paralysis that you mentioned i assume that there's quite a bit of toxic material released into the atmosphere from that is that correct no actually it's relatively little it's not it's a low burn uh process it's not a high temperature burn uh i mean like i said uh europe uses it
104pretty free there's a number of facilities in europe and europe's got very stringent air quality uh requirements uh only thing about that is uh can you build enough plants to really make a difference you know and how long is it going to take that's why the to me this bill going through michigan right now about wanting a little more recycler wanting us to produce a little bit more recycling that's a nice statement but where's the money going to come from to build these plants and who's who's going to be the investors for this you know they're just going to build p e t and high density plants which would be okay or is somebody going to actually build polypropylene and polystyrene recycling facilities and um i i assume there's quite a bit of um subsidies
105that go into production of plastics though like from the oil companies right or the government subsidies of oil companies that as the raw material to produce plastic isn't that correct i can't necessarily tell you what all the subsidies are but i mean uh again you're talking exxonmobil's one of the largest producers of high-density polyethylene in fact that's actually a more profitable side of their business than the actual oil gas part of it is they just built a huge facility about it it's one of those plants coming online uh right now there are some very large volume polyethylene plants coming online if you go over to banaca pennsylvania which is just outside of pittsburgh shell is building a mammoth facility using fracking oil as the basis for the high density so now you've got a double
106disaster occurring you've got plastic resin but you're using fracking oil for it and the only good thing about that plant is it's it they tore out an old coke making facility that was just a an eyesore and they cleaned up the site and they but they built a petrochemical plant on top of it it's a it's not going to come online i think next year it's a mammoth facility it was just a mind-blowing large facility right wow okay here's my last one um the corn plastic that um is called compostable the result of it is it essentially microplastics it can be if it okay if you would take a cup of pla with this cup of styrene and just do it in your backyard it's going to take about 400 years to decompose right maybe
107but it would still be plastic right what's that it would still be plastic right whatever it decomposes into is still plastic molecules that's right what happens is it starts to deteriorate breaks apart becomes brittle and then that's becomes the power plastic particles that then continue to degrade in the micropolymers which degrade into nanoplastics which then get everywhere they get into your food they get into farm animals uh they get into the oceans right now the status it's 100 of all ocean birds have some sort of form of plastics inside them because they confuse it as a feed source and they'll actually ingest the plastics so unless it's decomposed properly which is one of the problems it's only i said you the facility here in harbor has done an extractional job it's one of the few
108in the entire country that can properly uh compost pla most plas just get thrown into the landfill right now but really my question is does that the resulting compost does it have something in it that's really plastic no it just deteriorates down to a carbon-based uh product as i understand but it has no nutrient values to it okay it's not like interesting a regular compost that you would have some sort of valuable ingredients coming out of it that could be used for fertilizer or whatever it has no value okay thank you now i asked the question while you were away about how i filter nano plastics out of my washing machine and i haven't found a device that makes any sense to me do you know something i answered as no but it was a
109good attempt to do so i don't know of any device right now that will filter out the uh nanoplastics um you know i don't think that'll ever happen because of the back pressures that are required to force the water through such a fine filter uh this really is a problem then well that's why we that's right yeah so i i i'm extraordinarily grateful to you because i've been very bothered about this whole problem area i hope you'll come back how i um [Music] in each part of your presentation are about a hundred questions i would ask and i would want the answers to those questions to lead to good public policy and going from here to there is really quite difficult it is and you know as i keep digging into this uh it becomes
110[Music] very very difficult uh there's like no continuity anywhere in any part of this it's like we're in some sort of a whirlwind that you can't figure out how to get out of you know even these environmental groups you know whether it be greenpeace or sierra club or uh plastic pollute pacific plastic pollution groups there's a whole bunch of them i belong to probably six seven of them there's no continuity between any of them everybody's trying to do their own goals or try to set their own past and uh so as a result there's no one forceful legislation or effort to try to to try to control this in some sort of meaningful manner everybody's doing their own thing out there plastics industry is doing their own thing the american chemical corporation is doing their
111own thing uh so it's just like a whirlwind of of activities and plastic industries saying hey this is great because the jobs are crazy but it's like they live on some different planet don't they look at what the damage they're doing but it doesn't seem to affect them because you know they're they're in this together for the economic reasons and they have no attempt to slow down yeah there's um there's definitely a lot of questions here i'm going to pose one last one though if i may and that is that um a common um an alternative solution that has been proposed by the industry is uh chemical recycling you know where these solvents to dissolve the plastics and separate out the components um where do you see that going out uh right now it's pretty
112much in a laboratory environment you know there's also this thing they've got some sort of micro uh organisms that devour plastics that's fine any attempt to this is a good thing but once again you gotta look at the volume how would you ever put enough of these type of efforts into trying to control plastics if you don't stop it from the source coming in at least limit the source coming in you could never build enough recycled facilities you couldn't do enough of this uh chemical uh decomposing of the problem it shows very good promise but it's only so far been basically done on a laboratory environment it's not been done in any type of large scale uh production environment okay um um edie juno you have your hand up you have the floor thank you
113um yeah i guess i just flagged that i think i think sometimes chemical recycling is the term used to refer to the paralysis and gasification um methods that al was referring to earlier too so um just just to add that um i also wanted to flag i guess in part in response to rita's comment um epa has just put out a notice of rule making on regulations around that sort of paralysis and gasification because there is kind of inconsistent clean air act enforcement of those facilities right now and they are trying to determine if they are perhaps more of a of an air quality threat than um and a pollutant disposal threat than um was perceived so sort of like that um i guess the other thing i would flag to is you know i
114think california right now is pursuing kind of in tandem a lot of the plastic recycling and and pfas in food packaging and that sort of um legislation um i think that's a really you know an opportunity for us to whatever we do in the city of ann arbor and whatever we advocate for as a city to pursue both of those things right because we wouldn't want um that increased awareness of the pfas and these compostable packaging to to veer us back towards a plastic use and just to really pursue those in tandem to the extent that we can yeah if you walk into any hardware store and you go where you have your yard care products uh your roundups fertilizer bug control those containers are polyethylene but they've been fluorinated uh with flooring and that's
115a process that they can do as it's being bottles being made or they do it as a step afterward when you fluorinate that container you essentially create a source for pfas in plastics that is one that emits a tremendous amount of ppas in it and they're trying to figure out what to do that a simple way would be just to put a barrier layer into it to get rid of that fluorination process but that requires all new you know requires additional machinery it's a major investment for a processor uh to change and add a barrier layer in versus the p versus the fluorination process but they fluorinate so it kills the odor so there's no because if you didn't have that if you walked into a uh your garden center you'd smell all these chemicals
116coming at you so they do that to try to eliminate this the smell but yet they contain they create a container now that is environmental hazard okay thank you al are there any more questions bro tonight all right boy thank you al yeah well thank you all very much i appreciate the opportunity thank you so um we have no unfinished business on the agenda uh we have no new business so let's move directly to reports from committees other commissions council and chairs so let's start with the natural features hi um we've been or i guess more accurately i have been working on a resolution for you for the next meeting about deer management um and of course the connection to natural features is that um if we allow an overabundance of deer in ann arbor
117we will essentially destroy our natural areas did you eat them yeah okay okay chris do you think um you will do you want some time on december 2nd absolutely okay i wanted to say that the resolution is in draft form i'm going to afford it each of the environmental commissioners along with um a lot of uh discussion about refuting arguments that were made in a very serious and i would say extraordinarily difficult way five years ago when we first started their management in ann arbor um refuting some of the arguments that were made against against doing it um and uh i'm hoping i can contact and work with each member of the commission between now and the december meeting to answer questions and try to get um a full understanding among many of you who
118i'm sure weren't here five years ago and haven't didn't go through the very difficult process that led to the city being willing to manage deer okay yeah i hope you can bring bob um you know bob meet him into the discussion i will you started this uh started this bowl rolling please say a dish you have your hand up lisa yeah i just wanted to say that um i think it would be can you hear me i don't know this it's so bad it looks like you can um it would be extremely helpful to do some education with the city council members um i was extremely disappointed at the budget session this past year that deer management was like the first thing to go and you know because it's an unpopular thing and oh there's
119120 000 and we can split it up among other things that we want to fund and didn't get funded and there was just no there was absolutely no serious consideration of the need for deer management and um so i mean i had spoken to some people but i think there's a need for education so i don't know i don't know if environmental condition commission can do a work session probably not i don't know though um but you know i think uh some you know one-on-ones or invite them to a meeting environmental commission where you present your report or something would be great well thanks they say yeah personally i think one-on-ones are good i mean commissioners come from every ward in the city so if we chose to just use the documents that were presented
120at previous environmental commission meetings and discussed you know with our own you know uh council members um i think that would be maybe uh the most effective way to go in my experience um and um let's see one more thing and that is that um you know uh this was brought up some time ago i think back in march and we had these presentations in july and bob has been inviting um the opposing argument from the heroin valley humane society and they have chosen not to step up to the plate here so i think so i don't i have not heard any rational arguments for not instituting the deer called myself that i that but their uh their behavior indicates to me that there is no rational argument so we ought to provide some opportunity
121a last chance for them at december december 2nd before we you know before we uh we pass a resolution okay that's my only comment at this point um chris you have your hand up um lisa we the passage of this resolution by the environment commission would then trigger that being taken up to council and at that time then i think we would have to again work with the council members who were in opposition last last spring and try to get them on board the discussion as with climate change and plastics and a lot of other things is is complicated and it's it's not intuitive that dear those wonderful animals out in our backyard are a problem it's not intuitive and and so we did five years ago work with every single council member trying our
122best to get them informed and and they supported a five-year program that was really quite successful and we need to revisit the discussions with a new batch of council members and and [Music] finally get through this the very existence of our natural areas in our parks and elsewhere depend upon solving this problem on an ongoing basis it is fundamental to the protection of our natural features chris sean keller do you have your hand up yeah i just add to this discussion that as we think about how we approach it so far i've been hearing those kind of supportive of a deer management program or we're saying others are opposed to it i think we have to make sure we're creating space for folks who understand the issue but are kind of looking at other priorities
123too so i hope we are not just kind of bifurcating this discussion yeah i i will send you um documents that have been developed over the last half decade that address objections that were made and i'm sorry to say a great number of those were based on faults pretense and and emotions and the members of the council who supported working on this matter received worldwide condemnation by email and telephone calls from people who were believing things that weren't true and were so offended by what the city of and our people were doing this as i say is a controversial issue back five six years ago when i first suggested the environmental commission and as chair of the natural features committee feeling very strongly about the protection of our natural areas suggesting around male commission get
124involved in this there was huge resistance from matt um at that time because of the controversy um i don't think you all will be in a hot seat it's the council's decision and i think those who um are um offended by this work um uh will rest their objections there whenever the council gets to a decision but yes i in our time next month i hope the people who would like to talk about it come and speak with us and you can see for yourself all right thank you um thanks chris all right the next group would be pollinators um we are continuing to work on developing some materials to post online ideally on the nap website that will uh provide people with kind of um seasonal information about working with pollinators native plantings sources
125for native plantings and on and on so that's that's one thing that the pollinator work group is going on and just today i had a great meeting with um a staffer from math ed botanical gardens about the potential for um just getting some some comments guidance and ideas on establishing some alternate lawn um areas in some of our parks some demonstrations that people can see walk on um get information on how they're established etc so that's that's a start point um that's been nicely supported by parks as well so i'm pretty excited about that i want to thank shannon for the idea um and um i'll be happy to hear comments from anyone and ideas on moving that forward that's where we are right now all right thank you um zero waste working group well
126let's see john or lisa do you want me to take this yes because okay i already did one tonight you can do our other one okay great yes uh so just a quick update on the work around the circular economy metrics initiative we had submitted a grant to nexcycle under their micros opportunity program for ten thousand dollars to kind of get the work started hiring an intern we haven't got the official word but we're getting a lot of messaging that we should resubmit by the deadline for the next cycle so we're doing that and that will go in tomorrow i think the message is we probably weren't selected in the second round due to a high volume of applications um but we've been getting multiple messages to resubmit for the third round so we're gonna
127we lisa did a great job today kind of updating it based on some feedback we got and that'll be submitted by the office of sustainability and innovations tomorrow um we are still kind of moving ahead with the work uh we are interviewing several candidates who have applied for the intern to work with us on kind of the initial stage of kind of research or and literature review around the topic so we'll hopefully have that person identified soon and started with us next month um also monday evening i'm participating in a student project fair for me sees master's project we submitted that proposal several weeks ago and have identified a faculty advisor so hopefully they'll work but the faculty have told us there's going to be interest in this but of course we have to get
128students on board and a team has to form before we can move forward with that and the plan with that group is that they would help kind of move us beyond kind of the the research and literature review stage and actually start implementing some of the things that we're going to be developing during the first phase so several things going on um just want to thank the jenny patoski for all of her efforts on this and also the osi folks for the collaboration and i guess the other piece to mention multiple parts here the next phase would also involve a couple of partnerships one is with another next cycle opportunity for municipalities called i2p3 i can't remember the acronym right now but it's kind of a boot camp kind of opportunity for folks working on
129the circular economy and then ann arbor has also been invited to participate in ickley uh he's a circular city scan tool another national uh circular economy initiative that ickley um which works with sustainability in communities around the world they've identified a couple of municipal partners ann arbor was selected and so we're going to be connecting the circular economy work to see how that can be enhanced by participating in the ickery opportunity that's it okay thank you um so for construction and demolition i don't have anything to report right now but i expect momentum to to be regained now that there's a new city staff member and there may be some more bandwidth available in the city to participate so um [Music] let's see the next uh the next item would be other commissions um planning
130commission yeah i would say that the the biggest kind of connection that's happening right now is that we are working on um a a set of um site plan standards for smaller projects that were kind of burdened by how complex and expensive the larger site plan review process is and we're thinking about different ways of making it a little easier for people to get through that they have a smaller project and in doing so we've realized there's some funny little loopholes around stormwater which we are trying to close and so we can expect to get some language from planning commission around stormwater and some of the changes around that that they had expressed uh wanting the environmental commission to be able to take a look at before it goes on to to be um approved
131by planning commission and then uh reviewed by city council so we should expect to be getting something from from planning commission in the next couple of months related to storm water and especially around just small right now i think it's under five thousand square feet you don't have to do anything and there's just some funny little things that got exposed as we were looking at these other um these other new standards that we're contemplating so stay tuned for that and then the other thing is that there was a project that was passed over on research drive that has tons of ev parking and lots of solar on top and some you know some developers are really starting to step up in terms of doing some exciting things with sustainability and nothing's perfect but a whole
132lot of people are also really starting to kind of think about ways that they can put themselves forward in that way and so it's exciting to see people doing it on their own without us having to ask them all the time so that's it that's great that's wonderful um about uh sierra parks representative isn't here tonight but we do have a new parks representative um i don't think she got the invitation um for before the meeting so um so i'll make sure that she gets uh gets a connection next time before we meet um how about energy commission yeah um our meeting this month um focused on presentations um from two cities that have pursued municipalization campaigns um the first was winter park florida a city that successfully pursued that campaign and the second was
133boulder colorado which has long been in the process and is currently on pause with that and currently um working with their utility the private utility again um and the intent is to kind of resolve outstanding questions at the next meeting and continue that discussion um and potentially consider the um option of recommending a feasibility study at that meeting um with the december deadline in mind okay thank you uh chris you have your hand up edie i hope i'm pronouncing your name correctly um there is there are two overtures going on one maybe just edison but a solar panel array around the wheeler center on at that road south of ellsworth and then the other is the 820 program that we just received a big report about are the two linked or are they two different
134things i got an overture for medicine suggesting i should pay 28 more a month to support renewable energy which maybe hooks to the thing on flat road and maybe not can you make sense of this for me um i want to make sure i'm understanding correctly and i might also volley to galen in this moment too galen i'm not sure if um you might be better equipped to answer that as well um you're referring to dte or i'm sorry edison gte is with the notifications we used to call it the droid data center but galen i i don't know if you might be better equipped to answer it and but i think thank you for flagging the scu study is another important um piece that's up for you chris can you uh say the question
135again i missed it what is the difference for me homeowner paying taxes and subscribing to um these overtures uh practically speaking is the thing happening out on platt road a dte or detroit edison project separate from the city and um or is what the city is doing with its 820 suv plan going to include that ultimately or asap i would say that dte will be responsible for it but they had a a detailed meeting tonight that was at six to eight and it's really technical um and that's out of my you know out of my lane but um if you send me the questions i can make sure that i can get a response for you uh for you for missy and the team okay i'm sorry i'll try to get more articulate about this
136there are two different things going on and i'm not understanding how to play thank you okay yeah well i probably i'm speaking out of turn here but my understanding is that you know community solar is illegal in michigan basically it's illegal so um the the what the contract that was negotiated i believe i'm not sure if it's finalized yet or what stage it is in the contract is basically it's going to be a dte owned and operated am i green renewable facility you know that's within their migraine energy program but that what's been negotiated is ann arbor will uh the city of ann arbor and whoever else wants to subscribe to this as a community solar kind of offering will get a discount compared to what residential customers get i think they're going to get
137the industrial rate discount that's my understanding and that's separate from setting up a city-owned um utility which would be a totally separate entity that would not have um any interconnection with any uh you know so that it would be basically having a new utility that's a small microgrid that's existing completely separate from dt and there would be no interconnection um and visit envisaged in the near future um edi is that am i wrong thank you um thanks for for providing that steve and and chris i apologize part of my confusion was i just didn't want to i wasn't sure if you were referring to what we've kind of been referring to the landfill solar site but that sounds like that is what you were referring to um and so yes um that as steve explained
138you know kind of has this this workaround with dte being it still being through dte and the city of ann arbor being the anchor tenant on that site um who kind of if no residents at all were interested in subscribing would would pick up the the subscriptions and that would be um comparable to municipal energy demands so it wouldn't um it it does fit within b20 goals um if that answers your question but as steve suggested we set up a municipal utility what are we going to put up wind rotors or or how are we generating electricity to supply current to our separate grid um well so there's a and and as you were i think alluding to as well there's a sustainable energy utility that is also being proposed as more of a parallel
139system and then the municipalization route would you know actually look more like a takeover of assets i'm not sure if that answers your question or if that's what you were getting at i'll try to ask them more articulately and we'll revisit this next month thank you i think you know ann arbor is not economical for wind so i imagine it's probably going to be solar and batteries but if we can't if we can't make our own then solar facility how do we do this i forgive me all this is brand new and i have not done enough reading and i'm i'm and and you're a new idi i'm forgive me i'll i'll get it on the table in a better way thank you okay lisa you have your hand up i just wanted to know
140if edie knows there was a report that was released to council last week that osi or perhaps galen knows actually that council got a copy of is that public yet or is it just energy commissioners in city council members or i think it is public i think it was on legistar last week right access it on the website yeah so chris you can find that or if you want me to send it to you i will it explains how we would sorry go ahead i was just gonna say yeah again that's that's a separate idea right so there's the standard municipalization concept and then this is kind of a distinct idea as well chris so um would be yeah would recommend as lisa said checking that out and i i will do my homework i
141apologize no no no no apologies this just came out last week i apologize i'll do my homework yeah stop sleeping yep um let's see so let's move on to council council report so kathy's not here right um that's correct correct okay so i i don't think that we've done much and uh commissioner gibrano can correct me if there's something i'm forgetting i think the one thing i would say is that we had to vote yes on a buy right project um which is called something pines or something like that it's partly on uh some land by concordia or it is on land that is by concordia college and it the site has a uh some close to 400 i think landmark trees quite a high percentage of which will be removed for this project and
142then it has a very low-grade woodland with a lot of invasives and those will also be removed for this project so council has gotten a lot of very um well we had a hard decision of it at the table it was a buy right project so it was not something that we could uh vote against without really facing a lawsuit that we would be unlikely to win so you know never you never want to say for sure but um so while i am willing to to go to court for a good cause when i think we have a chance this wasn't one though it is a good cause to be able to protect our landmark trees better and so i just wanted to convey that we had that hard discussion and then we got some
143communications from some um not happy residents i will put it that way and so all all this by way of just letting chris and the natural features group know that um the work that you're doing to try to strengthen our protection for landmark trees is important and really needed because right now we really just don't have much of a legal ground um to stand on when we get a byright project because of course any person any single family homeowner can cut down any trees in their yard right so um we so this was difficult and it would be great again as with many other things that that are really percolating on environmental commission right now it's a question of shoring up things that i think our city values resident values and council wants to do
144but we don't always have the legal standing for that i don't know commissioner gibrandal if you if i messed anything up or you want to specify anything i'd appreciate it no i i i um i agree with what you're saying it's uh i also just heard last week that there was some lawsuit in the state of michigan that was um challenging view protection too so this is a fine line we have to walk in terms of how we write our ordinances and strengthen these things too and i i guess encourage natural features group to look at that it was in the news last week and i think it's it's worth looking at to understand just what our own limitations are to in terms of that and that one was more i think with this single
145family residence where somebody took down like a thousand trees or something like that but i know part of what you all have been looking at is our potential single family tree resp uh you know restricting what you can take on a single family lot too so anyway um i would encourage you to look at that legislation too to understand where where we can safely draw the line on that level as well um i would just also say as as um that the the forest area in which this development set um was not a pristine okay woods at all it was a big pine plantation too and that there were definitely oaks and hickories in there but compared to like across the road and on earhart it's like nothing compared to some of the quality of
146the woods around there and i know that's is is lost on most like neighbors and things like that in terms of you know it's a place that they still find meaningful and powerful and um but in terms of ecological quality uh there are many more natural areas in that arbor that have much higher quality than what this area was it just had a whole lot of trees on it which makes it really hard so um i would just add that dimension to it as somebody who pays attention to that um that part of the that part of the puzzle too and in terms of going to bat for something i didn't personally feel as compelled to go to bat for that project because the quality of the woods was not high in my opinion so
147i go to bed on the ones that i feel are i have a much better case to make with that so that was me personally not necessarily the whole time well you have to pick your battles you know chris you have your hand up and then rita and thanks for bringing that up and thanks for knowing that you really have to walk a property to understand what the natural features there are and what their relative value is lisa i i i think the net result of the changes that we will propose will be to make the make a distinction between landmark trees and heritage trees and where you find heritage trees you have probably a much more valuable forest or woodland and there probably aren't many of those on that site if shannon is correct
148i need to go welcome so i can say [Music] and we're dramatically increasing the mitigation requirements and although i don't think that would stop a development like this it will definitely make it one part of the hoops that a developer has to go through a little more difficult um yes i did see the court ruling on canton's tree permitting ordinance which means you have to get a permit to cut a tree in canton that ordinance was attacked by a big law firm in texas and they've really been pushing to overturn it i don't i don't suspect we're going to come forward a tree permitting ordinance my suggestion is that we use the grading permit procedures of the city to require a mini natural features analysis of a property not just for storm water but for
149all other natural features before anything happens even on single-family properties with regard to a building permit for disturbance of over 200 square feet that will catch the lion's share of trees big trees we're losing every year on single family and two family properties without getting into requiring everybody to go downtown to get a permit to cut any tree anywhere um so i i um we're not going to get to any kind of perfect solution to this problem of losing trees in ann arbor but the next step i hope we can take or a couple steps i hope we can take will help okay thanks chris rita you have your hand up yeah thanks so i'm in the group that's really really sad about this um proposal moving forward um because of the the number of
150the the large trees that are lost and so i admit that i have not walked it but just knowing that large trees sequester more carbon as one thing and that they function and you know in a forest it's a whole different thing it's literally a type of ecosystem that that functions differently from a single tree i hope that we can come to that kind of approach of looking at the hole again when things things come forward and i also hope that for this um [Music] specific development there are so many trees being proposed to be removed and then wondering if there are options to save more than uh more as opposed to taking out the very large number that was uh proposed all right yeah thanks rita i know a lot of us are uncomfortable
151with the situation well just to clarify though i mean what's the conflicting laws of the state law or federal law [Music] uh conflicting on what um in the buy right that's uh state zoning enabling legislation and and if you zone a particular parcel for a particular use you have to accept any petitioner who comes to do that use okay yeah so it's state law yeah okay um so let's see anything um more to report from council all right then um we'll move to the chair i have sorry [Music] so i have a few um i have a few things um um you know eileen naples had left the city um she's the uh resource recovery manager for the uh for the public works department and uh her replacement is alluded to before but her replacement
152sarah mason is coming from houston texas and her first day will be monday november 1st so uh would john john kelleher was involved in her recruitment so would you like to say a few words john yeah just a little bit to add to that very excited that sarah was the candidate that was selected the committee worked on this in a couple of different rounds over the past couple of months um sarah has been with the city of houston since um 2005. um 2006 working first as an environmental analyst in the mayor's office and then for several years with the solid waste management department and most recently she's been the division manager for the recycling programs in environmental services um she's got degree certificate as a public manager she's got a master's degree in environmental analysis
153and decision making and a ba in biological sciences so she's going to be bringing i think a great set of skills and experiences and was very excited to you know through the interview process to learn about all the different things that are happening here in ann arbor great thank you john um and then the next thing is that um i want to thank the commissioners who helped staff the uh table that the commission had at the green fair it was held october 1st um luna oriole and uh chris vandenbroeck showed up for the full evening and it was uh very interesting we had a lot of people come by and so had a lot of interesting discussions and a lot of people were not aware that the environmental commission existed so this was a i
154think a really successful outreach activity um and uh let's see so that's all i had to say at this point um uh yes so galen would you like to do a report from the staff sure um we just held our uh neighborhood associations meeting on tuesday evening it was a great evening it was entitled talking trash in the circular economy uh we had uh andrea andrea garcia she presented on recycling basics and then um we had um oh jenny patoski she presented on the circular economy and going forward our next uh event we we're gonna hold will be in january and we're hoping to do it on racial covenant so um myself rita and some others from that evening will uh begin working to put together a calendar for uh next year okay and is
155that publicly posted uh [Music] it will be yes but but we haven't met yet we're just doodling right now to convene okay um anything else galen uh tonight we had our uh seu meeting i think we had almost 200 people in attendance um i think it went about two hours from six o'clock to eight o'clock uh everyone is is excited we've been getting calls from all across the uh you know state um got a couple of meetings coming up and you know especially with highland park and maybe a few other municipalities who want to know how did we do it and you know uh they want to know the steps you know to create an scu so you know our office is very excited about that and then also we're uh in the midst of
156uh hiring a intern for uh for osi okay um okay and in this um in this respect i mean where i found that uh myself i've gotten a lot of educated on this topic uh a lot from the institute for local self-reliance you know it's a national nonprofit that uh that uh their motto is keep your energy local so they're a great resource for information about um about anything like this community solar um and um you know and other things um you know dear to our hearts so um thanks thanks galen good luck so um the next item on the agenda is call for next items for the next agenda on december 2nd um um i've contacted city staff i will have a brief report on the status of the solid waste fund oh i'm
157sorry shannon you have your hand up um i just wanted to clarify um our meetings coming up because you had mentioned december 2nd but it wasn't like an invitation that came from you know what i'm saying like if there's any way galen that you could sort of send out the next few so that they're in our calendars because it's always you know whatever the third thursday but i know it gets goofy over the holidays and everything so if you could just make sure to send out that um that invitation so that it just automatically shows up that would be awesome okay yeah thanks shannon um and so um i've invited city staff molly ski and um presumably sarah mason will be able to come and talk about the solid waste fund you know where we
158many years ago we asked to get a quarterly status report of the solid waste fund you know which is a special fund uh there was a millage passed a number of years ago um that's supposed to be supporting um solid waste diversion efforts and other things like the landfill maintenance the old ann arbor landfill maintenance so we'll get a report on that and then we'll get a report on their circular economy and their vision from staff and uh i have a gear call potentially a deer call resolution on the menu we might as well go through with that if we can do some sufficient community education and education to council in the meantime i know it doesn't seem too far away but i i would i would hope that everybody can take the materials that
159were presented at our meeting and perhaps and especially what um you know the information that chris was gonna forward to us you know about the debate that that happened in 2015 we'll see if we can get somebody um you know from the opposite point of view to present their case um and uh and see where it goes from there um are there any other items that people would like to have discussed that are next meeting i don't hear anything i don't see anything so um so we'll leave it at that for now uh the next scheduled meeting is december 2nd in respect to the holidays uh the third thursday is um thanksgiving and uh christmas and potentially hanukkah and who knows what else so um we every year we have one meeting that's consolidated from
160both november and december uh that's held on this on the first thursday of december so this year it's on december 2nd so um the next uh item on the agenda is public commentary so this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call 888-853-5247-488-788-0099 and enter meeting id [Music] again the meeting id number is 955-1333-1828 this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and
161mute any television or background sounds so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and be patient it can be delayed up to 30 seconds before a connection is established do we have anybody on the line as yet kayla uh not at this time okay well let's wait uh let's wait 30 seconds and see what happens so i want to thank everybody for uh holding on till 9 40. i think it was um i think it was good to hear about the plastic situation because i'm not sure how we're going to plan a circular economy there are no callers okay well thanks galen um so um i call this meeting adjourned at 9 38 pm thanks everybody