Fighting Fires and Reducing Waste: How the National Greening Fire Team Started a Recycling Program

Forest fires burn millions of acres each year, leaving devastation in their path.

In 2020, 10.1 million acres were destroyed, up from 4.6 million acres the year before, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center.

Along with the destruction of homes, business and wildlife, the trash generated from fighting these massive blazes each year amounts to millions of pounds of waste being sent to landfills.

“Fighting fires can require thousands of support personnel and thousands of firefighters. Incidents may be near urban areas or remote locations,” explained Kelly Jaramillo, Sustainable Operations Coordinator and National Greening Fire Team Chair, U.S. Forest Service Region 3, during a virtual event. “Fire camps may include tents. Food and supplies arrive in cardboard boxes and there are crates of bottled water and sports drinks.”

Jaramillo described the complexities of coordinating such a wide-scale response to fires while implementing sustainable best practices and, above all, keeping the mission of fighting fires as the top priority.

The U.S. Forest Service has a goal to achieve net zero waste for all large fire incidents by 2030.

When she first started working to reduce waste, Jaramillo first asked herself why does trash matter? She pointed to Congressional data that stated many cities in the United States will be at full capacity at their landfills within the next five years.

She then began to look how much trash the Forest Service generated and found that, in 2017, fire camps in the Southwest generated 6.1 million pounds of trash while offices in Arizona and New Mexico generated 6.98 million pounds annually.

“Importantly the U.S. Department of Agriculture requires agencies to divert 55% of their solid waste from landfills. So, taking away from incidents in my region is an important opportunity for my agency and others to achieve our waste diversion goals,” Jaramillo said.

The average cost of hauling roll-off dumpsters varies between $400 and $800 per load. For a larger fire incident, this could meat up to $22,400 per week spent on trash.

In the past, the Greening Fire Team implemented recycling programs using in-house personnel, making it an additional duty. The extra task made it more of a chore, leading to inefficiencies.

“We struggled with sufficient staffing and training, inadequate training and signs and heavy contamination and a lack of knowledge of how to take recyclable an to the closest outlet,” Jaramillo said. “Our Greening Fire Team knew we could achieve results through a streamlined contract vehicle. However, if we were with going to do this, we needed to address the perception that recycling is too expensive.”

With a lack of standardization for equipment and processes, the team looked to on-site recycling. A search began for a vendor that could provide on-site recycling similar to zero waste music festivals, but the caveat was that workers would need to work under extreme conditions and for a long period of time.

Jaramillo continued: “Next, we needed to write the scope of work and describe the services we needed to implement this program in a dynamic environment. In terms of geographic scope, we wanted to pilot the effort in multiple areas but we needed to define which ones and lastly, who is going to do all of this?”

Jaramillo began these efforts as a solo million in 2017. With the help of other team members and leadership support, the National Greening Fire Team is now in its third-year effort to pilot incident recycling across four geographic areas: Northwest, Northern California, Southern California and the Southwest.

In 2020, the team saw a 50% increase in the number of orders for incident recycling. Jaramillo indicated that she expects another increase in 2021 as more teams learn about the service, which provides on-site set-up/maintenance/tear-down of incident recycling equipment; standardized collection and sorting of waste and recyclables; processing of back-hauled waste and recyclables from remote camps; transportation of recyclables to the nearest recycle outlet; waste diversion tracking and reporting; and recycle revenue management.

Once services are ordered, vendors place trash and recycle stations throughout the camp and are required to manage them regularly to prevent overflow. They are also required to transport the contents to appropriate outlets and document the data along the way.

“It was important to us that our program be  professional, transparent and accountable so we developed data tools for mandatory reporting of the trash and recycle quantities,” Jaramillo said. “Lastly, our recycling vendors are required to  provide a final written waste diversion report that not only summarizes waste and recycling data, but provides insight into the challenges they encountered, lessons learned  and opportunities for improvement so that our National Greening Fire Team can use these reports to continuously improve our program in the future.”

The whole program was designed to be turnkey. Vendors are required to recycle cardboard, paper, plastic and several other items. It not only reduces the waste hauled to community landfills, but it also has significantly reduced hauling costs.

Jaramillo broke down the savings and found that when comparing recycling to the cost of portable toilets and hand wash stations, the portable stations costs three times as much as incident recycling. Compared to the total daily camp operating costs on a daily fire, recycling amounted to half of a percent of the total daily cost.

“By diverting recycling out of the waste stream, we estimate we can save between 50 and 80% on trash haul incidents, which could save up to $18,000 per week,” she said.

Referring to the Slater Fire in the Washington and Oregon area in 2020, recycling vendors and the incident management team achieved a 43% waste diversion rate and diverted 47,000 pounds of material as well as 36,000 pounds of nonperishable food. 

“Something that was unexpected but welcomed was feedback that the recycling vendors helped to make the camp feel more clean and well organized,” Jaramillo said. “This intangible benefit is something our vendors have shared with us and say common with other zero waste events when they're providing on-site waste diversion and recycling services.”

Now that the three-year pilot is coming to a close, the National Greening Fire Team is building a roadmap to get to net zero waste by 2030 utilizing supply chain analysis, regional recycling infrastructure and potential partnerships as well as completing on-site waste audits. 

The team also is looking to expand services to the Northern Rockies, Rocky Mountain, Great Basin and other geographic areas.

“We have made great strides and we hope to make greater strides in the future,” Jaramillo concluded.