It has become obvious. We are a wasteful society.

The Global Shapers Cleveland Hub recently presented a forum, “Shaping the Future of Waste,” with a panel of speakers who suggested strategies on the challenges of eliminating and reusing waste and how to make waste streams profitable.

The panel included Nathan Rutz, director of soil at Rust Belt Riders, Elizabeth “Beth” Biggins-Ramers, executive director of Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District, Ismail Samad, co-founder of Loiter-East Cleveland, and Daniel Kietzer, director of ecosystem growth at Rheaply & Ohio Materials Marketplace. The moderator for the event was Cameron Tolbert.

The forum highlighted not only the problems but the future solutions of waste in our region and for our economy.

Organizational origins and practices

For nearly a decade now, Rust Belt Riders has hauled food waste from neighborhood homes and local businesses to make potting soils, seedling mixes, and raised bed mixes with the compost the company makes from the waste.

“We started on bicycles picking up food scraps in 2014 with two people,” said Rutz of their early days. “We are a worker-owned cooperative, and we think that the way we do things is just as important as what we do. We practice workplace democracy and horizontality, and we have some ambitious goals of diverting about 20,000 tons of food scraps by 2025.”

Samad with Loiter/Wake Robin in East Cleveland, said his organization wants to change the negative perceptions of East Cleveland by creating vibrant community, agricultural, and retail spaces.

Ismail Samad, Co-Founder of Loiter - East Cleveland“I am also a chef and restaurant owner,” he said. “Waste has been part of my life for a while and Loiter is a nonprofit organization focused on a citywide effort to create a closed loop food system within the city of East Cleveland.”

His organization deploys its resources and connections to eventually have one of the most sustainable cities and the state of Ohio and the nation.

“We're beginning from a place that is the poster child of what extraction looks like when you have people of power who continue to deliver unprincipled decisions for 95% of the population of Black folks,” said Samad.

The city doesn’t have institutions to save the day with economics, meaning residents must create an economic base from the beginning.

Additionally, he said large companies are leaving East Cleveland, a dividing line has been drawn—cutting off the city from economic development.

“You've got GE leaving, you've got Cleveland Clinic leaving, and you've got Case leaving,” he said. “You've got the barrier at the bridge [at East 118th Street] and people not wanting to intentionally put large scale investment into a city that's probably about $20 million in the red every year.”

Kietzer describes Rheaply as a “technology company helping provide solutions for companies and organizations to get involved in the circular economy.

“I've been in the sustainability space since 2010 in a variety of different roles in the nonprofit and for-profit side of things,” Kietzer said, adding that he gravitated to the circular economy space, which is how the economy keeps materials, products, and services in circulation for as long as possible.

He said he is particularly interested in how technology can help grow and scale circular economies faster, more efficiently, and more equitably.

Biggins-Ramer with Cuyahoga County Solid Waste Management describes her company as the umbrella over the County’s communities. “We are a resource for businesses and residents both to support sustainable materials management and hopefully along the way reduce the impact waste has on our environment,” she told the panel.

Using waste for a market advantage

How do the panel members’ businesses reuse what would be a waste stream or an input and output for a market advantage?

According to Rutz, the answer is obvious: They pick up food scraps that would often go in landfills and make compost with them.

“The state of Ohio landfills about 1.2 million tons of food every single year—that's an appalling volume of food that is just straight up getting landfilled,” he said. “And in the landfill, there are all sorts of problems with anaerobic environment (an environment without oxygen) so it creates methane, which is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. You'd actually be better off burning the food scraps and filling them.”

Nathan Rutz, Director of Soil at Rust Belt RidersRutz said they can do better by combining the food scraps with wood chips and leaves and with other squandered resources, which we have in abundance in this area particularly during the fall.

“We can make compost, which stabilizes nutrients, which builds populations of microorganisms, and which is a really nice general lozenge for soil,” he explained. “I live on the east side of Cleveland, not in East Cleveland, but I have high lead in my soil and that's how I got started on this journey, actually.”

As far as output from food waste, Rust Belt Rider produces several products. “We have our base compost which is one,” said Rutz. “Then, we make four or five other specialty potting mixes. We make a seed starting mix for vegetable seedlings; a raised bed mix; a houseplant mix that has added nematodes. And we make a specialty mix for cannabis.”

With Loiter, Samad said they started by purchasing a partner's food depot to help. Then, they purchased the affirmative food company Wake Robin Foods, which has been recovering surplus foods from farmers for the last nine years.

The company makes fermented foods like Kimchi, pickles and Sauerkraut using locally sourced products. They want to use the glass and start a campaign of capturing the glass that they produce.

“They are opening a cafe and we're growing on raised beds which can be used in the cafe to keep the circular economy staying, and also to keep the dollar within the community,” Samad said.

He said he is trying to control the entire supply chain vertically, so he can get products created in a place that doesn't have a table or a cafe and then recycled while watching and keeping track of the whole thing from a supply chain management point.

“With the purchase of Wake Robin we're able to actually cure the product,” said Samad. “We're able to secure products from our production center, so we're maybe getting ugly stuff that is misshapen. We then process it, and of course we have shrink within the process, and we put it into the compost. We're growing our own compost business so that's an entire closed loop right there.”

Rust Belt Rider hauls food waste from neighborhood homes and local businessesThe challenges of eliminating waste

When asked to discuss how their organizations interact with and try to eliminate waste, and what the challenges are, the panelists had a variety of responses.

Rust Belt Riders has a residential service where people pay to drop off their food scraps. “These are excellent [customers] because they're highly motivated,” explained Rutz. “We have an internal difficulty among ourselves in taking compostable plastics. Any compost with compostable plastics in it is not allowed in certified organic production.

Rutz said the long-term decomposition effects of compostable plastics are still unknown. “[Just] because you can't see them doesn't mean the molecules aren't still around,” he said, “but we don't really know what those molecules are doing in the environment.”

He said there are a lot of things that are labeled as compostable plastics that are coated in PFOS These fluorinated compounds are good at repelling water, but they are also good at suppressing the human immune system forever, Rutz said.

Rust Belt Riders’ biggest customer is Heinen's Grocery Store. Several times a week, staff members pick up compostable material from each of the store’s locations. “I would say 20% of the stuff we get from them is definitely edible, still good this time of year,” said Rutz. “You can just go in and grocery shop from garbage. We do it all the time.”

We have to get to a new way of thinking where we start to curb our over consumptionCorporate waste and a circular economy

Rheaply’s Kietzer said they work around the principles of a circular economy when dealing with corporate waste. A lot of Rheaply’s business centers around facilitating a large company’s internal reuse of assets and materials.

“Buy less, use the stuff that you have more efficiently—use the stuff that you have longer, use it more effectively,” he said. “Then, when you truly have exhausted using the things you have around, then let's think about how we put those things into the hands of somebody else who can keep it at its highest and best use for the longest amount of time.”

Then, he suggests whether talking about a national materials marketplace or talking about a company like Google or Target, it's that same principle.

“When the ecosystem that can put this stuff into the highest how-you-use, as it moves into its next life, that highest value you use looks a lot different just depending on what it is you're working with,” Kietzer said. “We cover a very wide range of assets and materials here at Rheaply, but we're always trying to optimize our ecosystem to keep things as high as they can be.”

He said the first stage is the prevention of waste—finding all the stuff in large companies that they may not even know they have and recirculating that stuff in a more productive way.

What is the local government doing with waste?

Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District’s Biggins-Ramers said the district has been taking several approaches in attempting to raise awareness and change behaviors.

“We have launched a new grant program and it's pointed primarily to communities to service residents,” she said. “It can be for nonprofits and it can be for institutions to have them think outside the box. This grant is a larger dollar amount grant.”

There is $50,000 available in the pool annually to encourage organizations to take those next steps to make changes. For example, last year when the grant was launched, a Cleveland community that was trying to deal with the cardboard generated was given a grant used to purchase a compactor to manage the materials.

“We are also working with the Ohio EPA specifically on a cardboard project,” Biggins-Ramers said. “We need to have people understand that these are resources, these are commodities, it's not trash. It's not the old adage, ‘one man's trash is another man's treasure.’ They're all treasures and what we need to do is care for them and that way they are someone’s feedstock down the way.”

She adds that in the Midwest, there is more demand for cardboard because communities don’t recycle the cardboard they have.

She said small and medium businesses have become more wasteful in recent years, “unlike a few generations ago where everything was a resource; you didn't throw away a Mason jar,” she continues. “You used it for canning or you used it for drinking glass. All those things became another resource.”

The Solid Waste District is helping businesses by conducting a waste audit—essentially a dumpster dive to analyze what they are throwing out and identifying overruns or materials that could immediately be reused.

The district sends people to the Ohio materials marketplace, which is a free online platform that allows businesses and organizations to connect and find reuse and recycling solutions for their waste and byproducts.

Higgins-Ramers said the Midwest has eight paper mills. “We are the largest seat of that production and what's wonderful to know is all of those [mills] now use recycled material—they aren't sourcing virgin any longer,” she said of cardboard. “We have two more paper mills, one in Kentucky and one in Tennessee, coming online so again we can get those products to the highest and best use.”

Nathan Rutz of Rust Belt Riders checking the compost pileThe future of the waste industry

Loiter’s efforts are geared at changing the mindset of residents in the beleaguered East Cleveland neighborhood.

“The only thing you're working on is the mentality of the people,” said Samad. “Our theory is that mentality can change when the economics change, right? When you're voting at 10% and you're not a part of the change of your community and there's some savior coming in, why would you change? Why would you be involved in the process of community building?”

He said he believes that leveraging the communal work, changing the illegal composting situation, and growing on side lots to make them become producers to tie into the business that they are growing; the people will benefit from the economic growth.

“Like I said it's like a blessing and a curse that East Cleveland is what it is but that's just the reality of extraction,” Samad explained. “You have to be realistic when you live in an extractive society that there's going to be a place of waste. This is unfortunately the capture of waste as it relates to investment and just kind of like the forgotten people and forgotten land that's just flooded with the previous rise of an economy which was attached to some tycoons whose names we remember.”

Rheaply’s Kietzer summed up the future of waste by saying that the panel discussion generated good thinking, illustrated the desire to improve the situation, and confirmed support for the economy. But it’s not enough.

“We as a society buy too much stuff,” he said. We have to get to a new way of thinking where we start to curb our over consumption.”

He added that we have to make things in a better way, but we also have to slow down on the amount of things that we're making.

“I think there's just so much excitement to be had around thinking about things that are adding longevity, adding lifespans of things around us and truly building a new economy around these services around these businesses that are helping us use less things.”

Up next: The Future of Vacant Land Use.

This is the fifth story in a 10-part series designed to highlight how an intergenerational model is helpful in moving the needle in so many aspects of Cleveland as well as to uplift narratives of resilience and impact within the environmental justice space. Upcoming stories will spotlight different organizations working on environmental justice and climate change as well as capture the intergenerational voices working on these issues.