On Thursday, Evanston’s Environment Board heard the Circular Evanston Working Group’s proposal for reducing the amount of waste throughout the city.
Circular Evanston Working Group is a group of volunteers who have been working on a plan to keep as much waste out of landfills as possible through a combination of reusing, refurbishing and recycling. This was one of the goals of the city’s 2018 Climate Action and Resilience Plan (CARP). The group has been developing the proposal since 2022 and it held public workshops to get input in 2023.
Tom Mulhern, a facilitator for the group, gave a presentation on the end result during the Environment Board’s Feb. 13 meeting. The plan proposed a number of priorities, with notable focus on reducing food waste and getting better data on what Evanstonians throw away. But the future of the plan isn’t entirely clear. Some of the proposals overlap what the city is already working on and Mulhern said that they are discussing other ideas.
The board also sounded off on last month’s Land Use Commission meeting, where the Environment Board and several other advisory bodies were asked to discuss the Envision Evanston proposal. Board member and CARP Implementation Taskforce subcommittee chair Katarina Topalov said she felt commission members were at times dismissive of her input, which went against what she understood to be the purpose of the invitation — to get feedback from the subject matter experts.
Roadmap for presentation
Mulhern said the roadmap is about more than just recycling. It also involves encouraging composting and helping Evanstonians figure out how to repair and/or reuse products, as well as determine new uses for old items. This would reduce the need to buy “new stuff,” which would further reduce waste.
Figuring out how to grow and produce items locally also reduces waste and pollution, Mulhern said.
“A tremendous amount of emissions are involved [in] manufacturing things, moving them around the country,” he said.
The roadmap includes short-, medium- and long-term strategies. As the presentation noted, several of those suggestions, such as increasing composting, are either already being implemented or in the process of being implemented.
Notable short-term suggestions include encouraging Evanstonians to use food rescue apps (applications that connect users to restaurants and stores that have excess food that would normally end up thrown away), do more outreach around reducing food waste, do biannual “waste characterization studies” to get a sense of what kind of waste Evanston residents and businesses put out, and introducing technical assistance programs to help owners of multi-unit building keep waste out of the landfill.
Notable medium-term goals include providing composting for commercial and multi-family buildings, requiring commercial buildings to offer recycling, cracking down on littering and fly-dumping and setting targets for reducing emissions from waste haul trucks.
Notable longterm goals include requiring that buildings are deconstructed rather than demolished, launching a “materials marketplace” where businesses and city departments can share reusable materials for mutual benefit, offering incentives to developers to reuse rather than demolish buildings, increasing education about “contamination” of recycling and compost bins (where a person throws something in non-waste bins that doesn’t belong there) and introducing penalties for contamination further down the line.
Environment board co-chair Michelle Redfield asked Mulhern what the city should prioritize. He responded that the “biggest bang for the buck in terms of landfill diversion” would probably be increasing composting, as well as improving measurements.
Board member Gul Agha offered several ideas, including requiring building owners to have recycling and trash in the same space as well as not charging residents for composting but still charging them for waste removal to encourage the former.
Topalov wondered how the Environment Board could help the working group make it a reality. Mullhern said they would appreciate the board’s support if the City Council considered ordinances that would make any aspect of the roadmap a reality. But, beyond that, he admitted that he wasn’t sure.
“Part of it, I don’t know what the environment board does, [so] I don’t know what I can ask for,” Mulhern said.
“How did you come and present it to us when you’re not sure what Environment bros does? What was the hope?” Topalov asked.
Mulhern responded he wanted the board to hear him out.
“I can’t say I have higher hope than that,” he said.
After some further discussion, Mulhern told the board he could come back with more specific policy recommendations if there was interest.
Commission feedback on Envision
The Land Use Commission has been reviewing the proposed Envision Evanston comprehensive plan. In early January, it asked several city advisory bodies to give presentations on facets of the plan within their areas of expertise. The Environment Board was asked to comment on the sustainability elements.
Topalov said her presentation made similar points as the board’s previous memos to the planners — that sustainability should be included in all parts of the plan and the CARP goals should be the foundation of the city’s sustainability strategy. She said she was dismayed that “there was some outright denial” of some points she made. Topalov gave an example of her mentioning that tree coverage reducing heat.
“I would say it was met with a bit of a dismissal, which was alarming,” she said, especially since the board seemed receptive to encouraging native plants.
Board co-chair Matt Cotter felt they were still struggling against the “false narrative” that more sustainable, environmentally friendly measures are more expensive. The point he was hoping the board would be able to get across, he said, was that while the start-up costs are higher, it would save money in the long run.
Steve Ruger, one of Evanston’s two deputy city managers, said the city is hoping to get the revised version of Envision Evanston back to the Land Use Commission by Feb. 21, so that it can review the “Version 2 draft” on Feb. 26. While this will happen before the Environment Board’s next regularly scheduled meeting set for March 13, Ruger said that “I anticipated that Land Use will schedule a special meeting after the 26th as well.”
Environment board hears waste reduction recommendations, sounds off on Envision is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.