Circular Philadelphia's Case for Treating Waste as Inventory

Most conversations about what Philadelphia throws away begin and end with pickup schedules. Containers go out on certain mornings, trucks arrive, material disappears, the sidewalk clears. What happens after that is rarely the subject of serious civic discussion, and what that material might be worth in the hands of the right business or the right process is almost never the question anyone puts on the table. Harry Hayman recently sat down with Mike Tannenbaum, President of the Board of Directors of Circular Philadelphia, and found himself inside a conversation that refused to stay inside those limits. The idea that kept resurfacing was a reframe simple enough to sound obvious: what if the material the city pays to haul away, bury, or burn is not waste at all? What if it is inventory that has not yet found its buyer?

Who Mike Tannenbaum Is and What Circular Philadelphia Does

Tannenbaum brings a particular kind of professional background to his work at Circular Philadelphia. Before taking on his current role, he held positions at GreenBlue, where he served as Director of Sustainability Solutions and Optimization, working with the Sustainable Packaging Coalition and How2Recycle, and later as Director of Organizational Effectiveness at The Recycling Partnership. Both are national organizations that operate at the intersection of policy, industry practice, and material systems design. The common thread across that work is systems thinking: less interested in individual acts of recycling and more focused on the rules, markets, and relationships that determine whether a recovered material ends up as a useful input or a landfill entry.

Circular Philadelphia describes its own purpose as leading the shift to a circular economy in the Philadelphia region. The organization works across three program areas: policy and advocacy, market transformation, and education and outreach. Its active focus sectors include the built environment, food systems, textiles, and vacant land. Circular Philadelphia is not a recycling company. It convenes researchers, policymakers, material recovery operators, and entrepreneurs, and it advocates for the conditions under which circular material flows can become economically viable at the scale a city actually requires.

Harry Hayman came to the conversation through his longstanding interest in systems change in Philadelphia, a thread running through his fellowship work at the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia and his years of engagement with the city’s food justice community. He has spent enough time watching promising initiatives stall on structural problems to be skeptical of good ideas that lack a clear mechanism. What drew him to this particular conversation was the possibility that the obstacle was not values or technology but coordination.

What a Circular Economy Actually Means

The phrase “circular economy” gets used loosely enough that it is worth being precise about what it describes. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the primary international reference organization for the concept, defines it as “a system where materials never become waste and nature is regenerated.” The Foundation contrasts this explicitly with the linear economy, which takes materials from the earth, makes products from them, and eventually throws them away.

The three governing principles the Foundation sets out are: eliminate waste and pollution, circulate products and materials at their highest value, and regenerate nature. That middle principle carries the most economic weight. Circulating materials at their highest value means that a glass bottle returned to a glass manufacturer is worth more than one melted into aggregate. A piece of timber salvaged from a demolished rowhouse is worth more going to a local woodworker than going to a landfill. Food scraps are worth more as finished compost sold to gardeners and farmers than as methane emissions from a landfill cell. The concept is not technically obscure, and the problem is not that Philadelphia lacks people who understand it. The problem is that the infrastructure and market connections needed to realize that higher value do not yet exist at any meaningful scale.

Philadelphia’s Current Waste Equation

Understanding why this conversation matters now requires some sense of where Philadelphia’s material actually goes. WHYY has reported that approximately 40 percent of Philadelphia’s trash is incinerated, with most of it going to the Reworld facility in Chester, Delaware County, formerly known as Covanta. Waste Dive reporting on the facility puts its annual throughput at roughly 1.2 million tons of municipal solid waste, and Philadelphia generates roughly one third of the material burned there.

Chester is a majority Black city with longstanding environmental justice concerns around air quality, and the political debate over Philadelphia’s waste contract with Reworld intensified considerably in 2025, when City Council member Jamie Gauthier introduced legislation that would prevent the city from contracting with incineration facilities. The bill drew significant attention and substantial lobbying expenditure from the facility’s operator.

What gets less attention in that debate is the recycling rate that sits upstream of it. Grid Magazine reporting from May 2025 placed Philadelphia’s diversion rate at about 13 percent, well behind most of its peers among large American cities. The Philadelphia Department of Sanitation manages the city’s waste infrastructure and has worked toward diversion goals over the long term, but the gap between those goals and current practice is wide. The incineration debate and the recycling rate debate are connected: a city that captured more of its material streams before they reached a truck would have a fundamentally different set of options about what to do with what remained.

The question Harry Hayman brought out of the Tannenbaum conversation was not primarily about either of those debates. It was a step upstream of both: how much of what Philadelphia calls waste should never have been categorized as waste at all?

The Material Streams Nobody Is Calling an Asset

Circular Philadelphia’s own program work offers a useful inventory of where the opportunity sits. On food: the organization’s food systems program reports that food waste comprises about 25 percent of Philadelphia’s waste stream. The city simultaneously carries a 25 percent poverty rate and a 16 percent food insecurity rate. Those figures sit next to each other and describe a system that is paying to dispose of food in the same city where families cannot consistently afford it, while also foregoing the recoverable nutrients and energy that material contains.

On textiles: Circular Philadelphia’s textiles program highlights that 85 percent of all textiles continue to be thrown away rather than reused or recycled. The program is actively working to measure the volume and composition of textile waste in the Philadelphia region and to identify viable local markets for recycled fibers, a necessary step before any recovery infrastructure can be built on reliable economic grounds.

On construction debris: Circular Philadelphia has published a policy guide on expanding access to construction debris recycling that includes a finding relevant to the cost conversation. The guide cites that illegal dumping costs the city $619 per ton to clean up. A structured system for depositing material at existing sanitation convenience centers, the guide proposes, could recover its own costs or better. The gap between the cost of illegal dumping and the cost of a properly designed recovery system is itself an economic argument.

None of these material streams is a secret. Circular Philadelphia and researchers working on the city’s waste picture have documented each of them. What the Hayman and Tannenbaum conversation pointed toward is the question of what changes when food scraps, textiles, construction debris, glass, plastics, organics, furniture, and commercial packaging are treated not as separate disposal problems but as a single portfolio of undervalued assets moving through a city every day.

The Obstacle Is Coordination, Not Technology

Harry Hayman’s read of the conversation is that the barrier to a genuinely circular material economy in Philadelphia is not primarily technical. Composting technology exists and is operating in the city on a small scale. Textile sorting and fiber recovery infrastructure exists in some form. Building material salvage operations exist. The relevant question is why none of those systems operates at anything close to the scale that a city of 1.6 million people generates.

The answer Tannenbaum’s work points toward is that the systems require a kind of coordination that Philadelphia has not yet assembled. A material recovery economy depends on the City setting the procurement and permitting rules that make it viable, on major institutions generating consistent material volumes that a recovery operator can actually build a business around, on real estate owners and physical infrastructure operators having somewhere to send recovered material, on capital having a clear enough picture of the returns to invest, on entrepreneurs having access to that capital, and on community organizations being part of the governance of facilities that will be located in neighborhoods. Those are not technical dependencies. They are coordination dependencies, and the coordination is harder than any single technical problem because it requires people who have never worked together to agree on what they are trying to build.

Circular Philadelphia sits at exactly the connective layer that kind of coordination requires. The organization is not in the business of running material recovery operations. It works with the people who do, with the policymakers who set the rules they operate under, with the institutions that generate the material, and with the communities that are most directly affected by how the material is handled. That orientation is what made the conversation with Harry Hayman substantive rather than aspirational: both parties are interested in the mechanism, not the vision statement.

What Harry Hayman and Tannenbaum began exploring together is what a planning and feasibility conversation would look like in Philadelphia: who the right parties are, what questions would need answers, and what a first concrete move might be. Nothing has been secured or committed. No coalition has formed. What exists is a conversation and an intention to continue it, which is where most things in Philadelphia that eventually work actually begin.

Who Mike Tannenbaum Is and What Circular Philadelphia Does

What a Circular Economy Actually Means

Philadelphia’s Current Waste Equation

The Material Streams Nobody Is Calling an Asset

The Obstacle Is Coordination, Not Technology

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