I believe things like plastic ziplocs, the kind of plastic bags potatoes come
in, the green newspaper bags, wrapping like around kitchen towels and toilet
paper, plastic like that...I bring it to plastic bag deposit places such as
Hannaford because I think it is recycled by companies such as the one that
makes Trex decking...sorry my spelling might be off. I still think we should
try avoiding acquiring plastic bags in the first place...been using my little
fabric gauze bags for fruits and veg and they are great!
Erika
On Sep 19, 2019, at 12:22 PM, dclara_2000 (Redacted sender "dclara_2000" for
DMARC) <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
When Reva Reck was alive, she kept us super informed of what was capable of
being recycled and where to be placed in the landfill.
.
Not too many errors in Warwick, but maybe it's time for another review.
Signs are up at landfill site too.
My 2 cents.
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: debcadwell <debcadwell@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 9/19/19 7:49 AM (GMT-05:00)
To: WarwickList@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [The-L] Re: Fwd: One Very Bad Habit Is Fueling the Global Recycling
Meltdown 8/30/2019 Mother Jones
Thank you Ivan!
-------- 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.
