State

AUSTIN (AP) - The city of Austin is hoping a new plan will help reduce its landfill waste to nothing.

The city has hired a California firm, Gary Liss & Associates, to write a zero-waste plan - a strategy to reduce to zero the amount of garbage sent to landfills by reusing, recycling and composting materials instead.

Several cities, such as Seattle and San Francisco, and countries either have or are writing zero-waste plans.

The goal of Austin's plan will be to reduce the garbage sent to landfills by 20 percent per capita by 2012 and to achieve zero waste - an international standard set by the U.N. Environmental Accord - by 2040.

"With the focus on global warming in the past few years, more communities seem to feel comfortable adopting the zero waste goal," said Gary Liss, who has written zero-waste plans for cities like Palo Alto and Oakland, Calif. "These plans could dramatically affect climate change by reducing the methane from landfills and changing the flow of materials through the economy."

Austin Solid Waste Services Director Willie Rhodes said that besides the zero-waste plan, the city will also boost recycling with the opening of a single-stream recycling facility in Southeast Austin in the next two years. That program will let homeowners place various recyclable materials in one big curbside bin rather than having to sort them.