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-------- Original message --------From: Ivan Ussach <ivanussach@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: 9/18/19 10:59 PM (GMT-05:00) To: warwicklist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject:
[The-L] Fwd: One Very Bad Habit Is Fueling the Global Recycling Meltdown
8/30/2019 Mother Jones 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.
