The Sustainable DC Plan, which came out in 2013, said the District should begin diverting 80% of its waste away from landfills and incinerators by 2032. Two decades later, the city has made some progress, particularly when it comes to composting and recycling—but it’s not likely to achieve the original goal.
A long-awaited Zero Waste DC Plan, which the D.C. Department of Public Works (DPW) released earlier this year, pushed the target date back eight years. To reach 80% waste diversion by 2040, the plan lays out 43 actions aimed at seven overarching goals, which include reducing how much waste we generate, increasing how much we reuse and expanding access to recycling and composting services.
By next year, the plan calls for policies to phase out certain single-use plastics—specifically, items that commonly show up in D.C.’s waterways or contaminate our recycling streams. It recommends a complete ban on some single-use plastics by 2030, and a ban on some single-use items of other materials by 2035.
Some of the other steps listed in the plan primarily involve action by District agencies, trash haulers and commercial businesses. But many could directly affect the average D.C. resident—such as the installation of more water bottle refill stations and the creation of citywide curbside composting for single-family homes.
What Progress Looks Like So Far
DPW’s most recent Solid Waste Diversion Report, published this spring and showing waste data from 2019 through 2022, indicated some positive signs. In 2018, the District sent about 84% of all of its waste to landfills and trash incinerators; by 2022, that number was just over 72%.
A lot of that increase in diversion comes from improvements in how the city deals with organic waste, like food scraps and yard trimmings, according to Sarah Hofman-Graham, a program analyst at DPW. Since 2017, D.C. has launched curbside yard waste pickup and farmer’s market food waste drop offs in all eight wards; both programs have proved popular.
Last year, the city started a curbside composting pilot program for about 9,000 single-family households.
“We’re seeing some pretty exciting early results on the amount of food waste we can collect and divert through that program,” Hofman-Graham said.
DPW also offers several programs and regular events aimed at helping D.C. residents repair, reuse and swap a wide range of items that might otherwise end up in the trash.
Additionally, the District has seen a significant drop in single-family households’ recycling contamination. According to a letter from DPW Director Timothy Spriggs introducing the diversion report, residential recycling contamination went from 33% in 2017 down to 11% in 2021. That matters a lot because a batch of recycling that includes too many “wrong” items can sometimes cause the whole load to be landfilled.
“It’s very rare to have cleaner single family recycling, down into the single percentages range for contamination—so reaching 11% is a really big achievement,” said Charlotte Dreizen, the Plastics Industry Association’s sustainability director and a former analyst in DPW’s Office of Waste Diversion.
Big Challenges Ahead
As D.C.’s population grows, so does its trash: DPW expects the District to generate about 270,000 tons more solid waste in 2038 than it did in 2018. Reducing the amount of waste our growing city sends to landfills will be expensive. The Zero Waste Plan estimates it would cost more than $900 million over the 2023-2040 timeframe to implement all 43 actions.
“Composting costs more than recycling, which costs more than trash. Waste reduction programs tend to be very expensive, [as do] reuse programs,” Dreizen said. “It’s the antithesis of a level playing field—the worst disposal pathways are the cheapest by a large margin.”
Further, most of D.C.’s growth will come from people moving into apartments or condominiums, not single-family houses. That’s important because, according to Dreizen, while D.C.’s single-family recycling has gotten much cleaner in recent years, it’s not clear whether multifamily housing waste has seen the same improvement. Hofman-Graham said that DPW recently hired a team of “recycling outreach specialists” to work specifically with multifamily properties.
All residences combined contribute less than 30% of D.C.’s waste; most of our trash comes from businesses. But John Johnson, the head of DPW’s Office of Waste Diversion, said that if D.C. households focus on reducing consumption and recycling more effectively, that can still make a “tremendous” difference.
“While we can have all these sort of pie in the sky ideas, if people don’t really participate in them, they don’t really work,” Johnson said. “Just getting folks to get involved and do the basics—that’s the first place I would like to start.”