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Minnesota working to reduce landfill waste
The Twin Cities metro produces 3.3 million tons of waste every year and most of it goes to landfills. Two-thirds of what ends up in Minnesota landfills shouldn’t be there, partly because it’s not easy to figure out whether stuff should be recycled or tossed.
MINNEAPOLIS (FOX 9) - The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is giving the City of Minneapolis $4 million to help with its recycling program.
The EPA is set to meet with Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) Commissioner Katrina Kessler and Mayor Jacob Frey on Tuesday morning to highlight the grant and its impact on increasing recycling capacity and equity in Minneapolis.
The $4 million grant was awarded to the city in September 2023 as part of the Biden Administration's "Investing in America" agenda. The money will go toward redeveloping the north transfer station into a new self-haul waste disposal site, which would be the first of its kind in the community.
The EPA says this project is expected to increase self-haul transactions at the transfer station by 50% and lead to a 60% diversion rate of materials from landfills.
The recycling grants are steps toward achieving the EPA’s national recycling goal and the food loss and waste reduction goal, which are made possible through the Bipartisan infrastructure law Save Our Seas 2.0 Act, the largest recycling investment in 30 years.
Minnesota aims to achieve a 75% recycling rate by 2030. The MPCA says there has been some improvement in recycling within the Twin Cities as the recycling rate rose to 49% in 2022. The Twin Cities generated 3.3 million tons of trash in 2021, which is expected to grow 19% by 2042. The MPCA said more than two-thirds of the trash that ends up in landfills could be recycled or reused.
The MPCA released its Twin Cities 20-year waste reduction plan in 2024, with suggestions on how to combat the problem. Of the 70 ideas, some recommendations include collecting recycling weekly in all seven metro counties by 2025 and collecting recyclables, organics, and trash on the same day.