Leadership Quote by Ed Rendell

Rendell’s line is the political art of making peace with an unpleasant baseline. He starts by lowering the horizon: “I think we basically have to” landfill trash. That phrasing isn’t just hedging; it’s a preemptive strike against idealists and opponents alike. By treating landfilling as an inevitability rather than a policy choice, he shifts the debate from “should we” to “since we will,” a move that’s as strategic as it is revealing.

The key word is “upside.” Waste becomes an asset, a revenue stream, a bargaining chip. This is classic late-20th-century governance logic: you can’t eliminate the mess, so monetize it and earmark the proceeds for virtue. The subtext is that environmentalism will be more politically durable if it’s funded by something voters already tolerate (trash disposal fees, tipping fees, landfill-related deals) rather than new taxes. Rendell is also laundering a morally awkward tradeoff through the language of pragmatism: accept environmental harm in one place to finance environmental gains elsewhere.

The context is a governing reality where recycling, reduction, and infrastructure upgrades are expensive, contentious, and slow. Landfills are visible, hated locally, and convenient systemically. Rendell’s sentence tries to neutralize that contradiction by promising a kind of ecological restitution: we’ll do the bad thing, but we’ll pay ourselves back with the “upside.” It’s a pitch for incrementalism dressed up as environmental ambition, asking the public to applaud not purity, but compensation.