The fire at the Covanta energy plant in Doral that spewed smoke, called for multiple firefighter crews and forced residents to stay indoors has reopened the conversation about South Florida's relationship with trash.
The facility takes in roughly half of Miami-Dade County's garbage, from over 300,000 homes. The nearly week-long blaze caused temporary delays in collection in certain areas, prompting public officials to rethink how much waste people produce and where to put our garbage — for the long haul.
Miami-Dade County Commissioner said that waste management is not always top of mind for a lot of people.
WLRN's Danny Rivero spoke to Garcia about some of potential solutions to this public policy dilemma, particularly by working with neighboring counties to create a regional system of waste collection.
"Because if we don't do that now, then next ten years we're going to have some serious problems and we should not wait," he said.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WLRN: From your perspective, what are the biggest issues that the county is facing when it comes to recycling and also just waste management moving forward?
GARCIA: One of the things that we need to look at as we move towards a future is that Miami-Dade County is landlocked. There's not much land left in Miami-Dade County. Granted, in the south and on the west side, we do have a lot of agricultural land. I think for one, we should really protect those lands. Am I for development? Yeah, I'm for responsible development, but we need to make sure we protect those lands. When it comes to having another waste site, I don't think we have the capacity for it. We see some of our facilities that are getting to maybe have five, ten, maybe 15 years left as to the life of these these [landfills]. What do we do with them afterwards? What do we do when they get filled?
So one of the things that I've been working is, through the South Florida Regional Planning Council, to look at solid waste — through Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe, although Monroe doesn't have any landfills, but Dade, Broward and Palm Beach, they do. We want to regionalize a solid waste collection in our community. So, we are now trying to work together with the multiple jurisdictions to come up with a game plan to see how we best address the issue of of solid waste and garbage in our community, because if we don't do that now, then next ten years we're going to have some serious problems, and we should not wait.
At the heart of it, a lot of the issues we're talking about with the waste management and recycling come down to how much and what kind of waste we generate in the first place, before even putting it in the bin.
There is a bill in the Florida Senate now sponsored by Republican Sen. Anna Maria Rodriguez, who represents parts of Miami-Dade County and the Keys. That bill would let local governments set up pilot programs for regulating single-use plastics like shopping bags, water bottles, etc.
Would you be in favor of seeing something like that pass and giving municipalities the ability to maybe limit what kind of waste we're generating on the front end instead of the back end?
Yes. First of all, I have to say yes, because it's Anna Maria Rodriguez and she's my friend and I like everything [she does]. She does a lot of things that are very conscientious about the environment and ensure that corporations and organizations that work within Miami-Dade County or different jurisdictions are given notice, to make sure that the products that we use have multiple purposes or multiple uses or are recyclable.
Because one of the things that I have learned through this new endeavor that I'm in — garbage and recyclables — is that every recyclable plastic is not recycled. All of this has an educational component to it, we need to start educating the public on how to best treat our solid waste.
What's at risk if we don't do a lot to solve all these questions? What would it mean if we don't figure this out? It would mean we're going to be trucking things up to Central Florida and spending way more money than we're spending now?
What's at risk is. If we don't find a solution, we may not know what to do with our with our garbage. And yes, it's easy to say, well, truck it up, but we have to find communities that want to take it, right?
Look what happened with China. You know, we've become so accustomed to China taking our plastics, and now they're not. And now we're stuck. So we, as Americans, as local governments ... solid waste falls on us, not on the state or the federal government. It falls on local jurisdiction to take care of it.
