It was at that city that Ochoa moved from department to department over the years, serving as solid waste manager, assistant director of redevelopment and, eventually, city manager.
"The community groups are clearly the winners here, but from an overall policy view, the plan falls short in that it doesn't incorporate a means of reducing the trash flow," said David Higby, the solid waste project director for Environmental Advocates, an Albany conservation group.
"We spend millions of dollars a year on solid waste management," said Phil Nolan, director of environmental waste for the Town of Huntington.
In Putnam, as much as 70percentt of the business is still controlled by James Galante, said Gordon Maxwell, the county's director of solid waste.
Against this backdrop, several million people in Indonesia sort and haul away rubbish in an unofficial capacity, estimates Novrizal Tahar, the government's director of solid waste management.
Hold on there, said Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist and director of the solid waste project at the environmental organization the Natural Resources Defense Council.
"This is becoming a very serious problem, because the amount of cellphone waste is growing tremendously," said Eric Most, director of the solid waste prevention program at Inform.
Yan Jianhua, a professor at the State Key Laboratory of Clean Energy Utilization at Zhejiang University and director of the solid waste treatment expert group in Zhejiang Province, a center of incinerator equipment manufacturing, defended the industry's record on dioxin.
Yan Jianhua, the director of the solid waste treatment expert group in Zhejiang province, a center of incinerator equipment manufacturing in China, defended the industry's record on dioxin, saying that households that burn their trash outdoors emit far more dioxin.
Allen Hershkowitz, director of the solid waste project of the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the new campaign "very welcome," but questioned how effective it would be given that recycling programs in the United States were underwritten by budget-cramped municipal governments that must also finance education and social service initiatives, as well as police and fire departments.
