Port Authority of NY and NJ’s ‘zero waste’ plan propelled by new study

Most forms of public transportation in the United States still rely on fossil fuels. But in addition to cutting carbon, agencies in many U.S. cities are also looking for ways to counter another climate-change driver—the trash they send to landfills.

The Port Authority wants to address this issue head on by achieving “zero waste,” a sustainability strategy for “getting the most beneficial use out of materials as possible in order to avoid landfilling,” according to Alexandria Cassidy, who leads the Port Authority’s zero-waste efforts.

Landfilled waste is far from benign when it comes to climate. Practices like incineration, “waste-to-energy” (incineration in a power plant), and landfilling all levy significant environmental impacts. Zero-waste strategies aim to divert all solid waste from these outcomes.

Uneaten food, the most common material that goes into U.S. landfills, produces significant amounts of methane as it breaks down, a greenhouse gas that is 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide (CO2) when it comes to trapping the sun’s heat in the atmosphere. In 2021, CO2 emissions from wasted food in U.S. landfills was estimated to be equivalent to 42 coal-fired power plants operating for a year. Likewise, disposed plastic and paper packaging represent wasted energy and valuable materials that could otherwise be used again to avoid extracting raw materials and refining them through heavy industrial processes.

“The good news is that there are many proven and effective strategies for diverting waste to sustainable pathways that don’t require significant investment or technological innovation,” says Gillian Griffin, the supply chain sustainability program manager at NYSP2I who led the study.

Zero waste for net-zero

The Port Authority will release a zero-waste roadmap in 2025. The focus on zero waste is an important pillar of a much broader roadmap that the agency released in 2023 to achieve net-zero GHG emissions by 2050. Waste diversion has an important place in the decarbonization plan because it can deliver significant emissions reductions in the near term.

Early on, Cassidy and her team realized that the roadmap’s goals would need to reflect the Port Authority’s considerable size and diversity of services as a bi-state agency. In total, the agency operates five airports, two tunnels, four bridges, three bus terminals, and thirteen PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) train stations. Its jurisdiction also includes several maritime shipping and cruise terminals, as well as the World Trade Center campus in lower Manhattan.

Some facilities, like a train station, may have a lot of consumer waste (like coffee cups or food wrappers), while an operational site, like a train depot, will generate waste in the form of used or worn rail components. The variety of waste is just one dimension; the type and volume of waste also differs dramatically between locations, as do the ways in which the waste is managed.

“We had to learn the who, what, where, why, and how for waste across all our business lines,” Cassidy said. “So, we looked for partners who could help us get a systems-level view of our organization in order to put our zero-waste roadmap into real terms and numbers.”

First, the baseline

Cassidy and her team eventually connected with NYSP2I, a program sponsored by New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation and headquartered at Rochester Institute of Technology’s (RIT) Golisano Institute for Sustainability. She worked with NYSP2I’s supply chain sustainability program, which specializes in analyzing material flows in complex organizations to discover ways to cost-effectively divert waste using sustainable solutions. Think Zero LLC, a waste-reduction and -diversion firm, was brought into the project to provide expertise in conducting waste audits and working with large organizations on waste-management goals.

NYSP2I and Think Zero’s first step was to define exactly what zero waste would mean for the Port Authority. Before collecting data, they set clear boundaries for the assessment, determining what types of waste were to be targeted, how those were being handled at that time, and the available pathways for keeping them out of landfills.

“We tried to look at it in layers,” says Griffin about the team’s approach to assessing the gargantuan organization. “We started with the waste at individual facilities, and then looked at each business line before assessing waste at the agency-wide level.”

Working closely with Cassidy, NYSP2I and Think Zero set out to establish a baseline understanding of the Port Authority’s waste management in a sample of eleven facilities across all five of its business lines. The selected sites represented the wide range of the Port Authority’s portfolio, including the World Trade Center’s Oculus and the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, Newark Liberty International Airport’s Terminal B, the Journal Square PATH station, the Port of New York and New Jersey, and five other facilities.

“The waste challenges facing each facility really varied, as did the protocols in place for dealing with them,” Griffin explained. “A one-size-fits-all approach to the assessment wouldn’t work; there was too much variation to account for and we wanted to give as accurate a picture as we could.”

The research team went to each of the eleven sites where they met with Port Authority stakeholders and took part in guided tours. They learned at each facility what waste was being generated, why waste was being generated, how waste was being diverted, if at all, and at what rate. The team considered any waste that was reused or recovered through recycling, composting, or anaerobic digestion as qualifying for diversion. They also looked for ways in which waste could be avoided altogether, such as by using reusable knives and forks instead of disposable ones. These learnings helped determine the opportunities at each site.

In-depth waste audits were also performed at each site by Think Zero. Waste collected at each site was sorted and weighed by the auditors to determine volume and composition. They then documented the existing sorting practices at each facility. These audits were used to calculate baseline diversion rates that, once synced with what was learned through the site assessments, helped the team set realistic unique targets for increasing diversion at each facility.

“Waste audits are valuable tools for organizations to better understand and manage their waste streams,” explains Ushma Pandya, co-founder and partner at Think Zero. “Through the process of collecting, sorting, and weighing waste, audits provide insights related to waste composition, the efficacy of existing waste management programs, the behavior of waste generators, and potential strategies to reduce and divert waste.”

The results of the baseline study revealed that the ways that waste was dealt with was far from uniform across the agency. Some units did not have a recycling program in place, while others had advanced practices already in place.

Mapping the way to zero waste

The three largest waste streams across all sites operated by the Port Authority were organics, liquids, and compostables, according to the team’s assessment. The researchers found barriers to waste diversion that are common within organizations at the outset of a shift to zero waste. For example, waste wasn’t separated by type into dedicated bins and there was little or no information about waste diversion available to either staff members or members of the public. However, good practices were also noted that could be scaled across all facilities; for example, Newark Airport uses color-coded bins along with clear signage to indicate where different types of waste should go and the PATH maintenance yard has a robust reuse program in place for train and track components.

NYSP2I and Think Zero used what they observed to make actionable recommendations to contribute to Port Authority’s zero waste roadmap. They took what they learned to identify the best opportunities for diverting waste within each site. These were focused both on individual sites and then consolidated into global recommendations for the whole agency. “In our recommendations, we prioritized what could actually be achieved in the near term in terms of cost and feasibility,” Pandya explained.

A zero-waste plan involves many moving parts. Contracts need to be negotiated with third parties, like the waste haulers that transport material to various outlets and the vendors that generate waste while providing services. Internally, an organization’s people need to be educated and involved throughout, from those working at the ground level to make sure waste is being separated correctly to staff who are tasked with capturing key data points, standardizing the data, and reporting it out.

Engagement with internal and external stakeholders is crucial to a successful zero-waste strategy. The researchers helped Cassidy map out who these stakeholders would be within each site, outlining the best vendor and staff relationships for addressing each type of waste.

“Having internal champions across an organization is critical to the success of a zero-waste plan,” Griffin noted.