Some may find this helpful - Ivan
*Mother Jones *
*One Very Bad Habit Is Fueling the Global Recycling Meltdown*
*It’s called “wishcycling,” and pretty much all of us do it.*
By Jackie Flynn Mogenson
If you’re like me*,* you’ve looked at a paper coffee cup or an empty tube
of toothpaste and thought, “Is this recyclable?” before tossing it in the
recycling bin, hoping someone, somewhere, would sort it out. People in the
waste management industry call this habit “wishcycling.” According to
Marian Chertow, director of the Solid Waste Policy program at Yale
University, “a wishcycler wants to do the right thing and feels that the
more that he or she can recycle, the better.”
Well, I hate to break it to you, but this well-intentioned reflex is doing
more harm than good. Not only that, but wishcycling is playing a big role
in the current global recycling meltdown.
This well-intentioned reflex is doing more harm than good.
First, a bit about the process. When my recycling is scooped up by a truck
every week, it goes to a materials recovery facility (MRF) run by a company
called Recology. After the goods travel through the facility’s jungle of
conveyor belts and sorting machinery, they are shipped as bales to buyers
in the United States and abroad, who turn that material into products like
cereal boxes and aluminum cans.
But in an effort to get more people recycling, companies like Recology have
become victims of their own success. In the early 2000s, many communities
switched from a dual-stream system, where plastics and glass*,* and paper
and cardboard, each had their own bins, to single-stream, in which all
recyclables go into one bin and the sorting is done at the MRF. But when
“we decided to put all the things together, we decided to create a
contaminated system,” says Darby Hoover, a senior resource specialist at
the Natural Resources Defense Council. It’s almost impossible, for example,
to put paper in a bin with beverage containers without the paper getting
wet, which makes it unrecyclable.
And it doesn’t help that many of us are wildly confused about what we
should recycle. A decade ago, according to one estimate 7 percent of the
objects Americans put into their bins weren’t supposed to be there. Today,
it’s 25 percent. “For every ton of material we get in, there’s 500 pounds
of trash that has to be taken out of it,” says Brent Bell, vice president
of recycling operations at Waste Management, the country’s largest waste
disposal company. This garbage ranges from recyclables that are too dirty
to process—mayonnaise jars still coated in a thick layer of eggy goo, for
example—to items that just shouldn’t be there in the first place, like
plastic bags.
Nearly a third of us have no idea what types of plastic our municipalities
accept.
Nearly a third of us have no idea what types of plastic our municipalities
accept, according to a 2014 survey. When I did a quick audit of my
household’s bin in April, I found three plastic sandwich bags, a plastic
freezer bag, and a disposable razor—none of which are recyclable. (Though
places like San Francisco let you recycle plastic bags if you bundle them.)
Our uncertainty leads to climbing costs and waning productivity at
recycling facilities; contamination costs Waste Management about $100
million annually, or 20 percent of its total budget.
In July 2017, our recycling system faced an even bigger setback: China,
which had been buying about half of US plastic, announced it would ban the
import of 24 materials, including mixed plastics, largely because the goods
we sent them were too contaminated. The policy, which took effect on
January 1, 2018, sent shockwaves through the industry.
“It’s a global recycling crisis,” says Johnny Duong, director of
international sales at California Waste Solutions, a collection company
whose costs have risen by 200 percent since the ban. The situation isn’t
likely to improve anytime soon: China’s policy could displace an estimated
111 million metric tons of the world’s plastic waste by 2030. Some of that
is going to Turkey, Vietnam, and Indonesia, but according to National Waste
and Recycling Association spokesperson Brandon Wright, those countries
can’t handle the volume because they don’t have China’s recycling
infrastructure.
The United States doesn’t either. Authorities in some cities have tried to
change behavior through policy measures. Oakland, California, for example,
fines residents $25 if they place “the wrong materials” in recycling
containers three times within six months. Several states have banned
single-use plastic bags. At the federal level, it would help to follow the
European Union’s lead and establish a national policy that defines what is
recyclable rather than leaving that up to municipalities, says Kate
O’Neill, an associate environmental professor at University of
California–Berkeley and author of the forthcoming book *Waste*. The
Environmental Protection Agency is still in the early stages of developing
a national framework, a spokesperson tells me. Presidential hopeful Bernie
Sanders proposes in his Green New Deal a national recycling program that’d
require companies to pay to take back consumer scrap in order to build
things like wind turbines, batteries, and other renewable energy equipment
with as many recycled materials as possible.
For consumers, maybe the old mantra needs an update: Don’t just
recycle—reduce and reuse. Zero-waste grocery stores offer shoppers
house-cleaning products and bulk groceries without the plastic packaging. A
new service called Loop, available in the mid-Atlantic since May, delivers
items like ice cream and shampoo in reusable containers to people’s doors
and collects the containers when they’re done. (It remains to be seen how
many customers will be willing to pony up the deposit fees, which range
from $1 to $15.75.)
When you do recycle, you should know what belongs in the bin. Rinsed
plastic containers and glass bottles, cardboard, and beverage and food cans
are almost always acceptable. Plastic bags, electronics, and paper covered
with food generally are not. Neither are insulated coffee cups and
toothpaste tubes, in most cases. And if you’ve checked your local
guidelines to see if an item is recyclable and you still aren’t sure, it’s
best to ignore your wishful instincts and throw it in the trash.
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