Pittsburgh recycles recylcing rhetoric
I’m a garbage guy,” Justin Stockdale said. “I stare at a dumpster all day.” I’d reached out to Mr. Stockdale, western regional director for the Pennsylvania Resources Council, because I wanted an independent critique of Pittsburgh’s supposed commitment to combating climate change. Mayor Bill Peduto’s zerowaste rhetoric doesn’t seem close to the reality on the ground.
Part of that’s just the nature of modern life. We go through a lot of stuff and most of it’s not recyclable. What’s weird is the way some on the “green” team just keep pretending it is. The city continues with a single-stream method of collection that helps make a lot of the intake worthless.
“In the single-stream world, it’s a series of bargains and exchanges,” Mr. Stockdale said. “Your convenience is an important piece of it.”
Trouble is we may be wasting our time. Take milk cartons. They are not recyclable and never were, he said. Even if they manage to get mixed in with a bail of paper, that only downgrades the worth of the paper, meaning the end product can’t be used for much.
Most plastic is the same way. It doesn’t necessarily matter what the little number on the back says; the shape is important, too. Those plastic containers that hold the blueberries from the grocery store, the black plastic tray that holds the rotisserie chicken —
don’t bother washing them out for the recycling bin. They’re garbage.
“You were led to believe this thing is recyclable and it’s never been recyclable. You were just told it was and you believed it.”
To its credit, the city has begun addressing this. The new recycling supervisor, Teresa Bradley, sent every household a “Back to Basics” message this past winter. “No longer do you need to worry about numbers on plastic containers. If it is a clean plastic bottle, jug, jar or tub 3 gallons or less: recycle it. If it’s not — throw it out.”
But the city is still taking glass at the curb, which may make everyone feel like they’re accomplishing something, and in a sense they have been and will be: Once it’s smashed and mixed with the paper that’s also in the recycling trucks, “it devalues the paper,” Mr. Stockdale said. “It devalues the glass.”
If nobody buys the end product, he said, “It’s not recyclable.” State recycling goals are measured by what’s delivered at the front door “but no one ever asks what gets sold out the back door.”
In an effort to get some glass out of the single-stream, the city was supposed to have a supersized glass-only bin at Construction Junction in Point Breeze and by now. But Ms. Bradley emailed this week to say the vendor doesn’t have it ready. When it is delivered to Construction Junction and two other drop-off sites, the city will dedicate a truck to hauling that glass away on a regular basis. She hopes to have that going “by summer,” she said.
Until then, the city will continue to send a single truck to pick up all the individual bins at dropoff sites. Each bin is marked for cardboard, or plastic/glass, or mixed paper, but current pickups obliterate all the sorting people have done at the site.
City Councilwoman Erika Strassburger holds the East End seat that Bill Peduto once did, and she recently pushed the bill that streamlined the city’s waste code, codifying things such as set-out times (no sooner than 6 p.m. the night before pickup) and making the mandate to recycle explicit. But the bigger problem seems to be on the city’s side of the recycling process.
Ms. Strassburger is on maternity leave after the birth of her son, Evan, eight weeks ago. She responded to my call to her office, however, saying one of her goals is move from biweekly to weekly recycling pickup. She’d also like to help people reduce what they throw away, perhaps with composting opportunities.
She’s open to suggestions that the city distribute more 34-gallon recycling bins to homeowners. (Those blue plastic bags from the grocery store muck up the sorting machinery.) Picking up leaf waste for recycling more than twice a year also seems like a good idea; about a third of municipal waste landfilled in Pennsylvania is made of up of yard trimmings, food scraps and other organics.
I’d suggest the city step up the recycling of leaf waste in the lawnheavy neighborhoods first, saving the streets thick with rowhouses (like mine) for later. “It’s all about money,” Ms. Strassburger said.
Indeed. But with all the hotels and high-end apartments that have sprung up in recent years, some of that additional property tax revenue could be dedicated to buying blue bins or hiring more workers to take on more pickups.
Or not. The citizenry should decide where we dedicate our resources. But if Pittsburgh is not going to be at the forefront of combating climate change, Mr. Peduto should stop saying we are. Reducing “landfill waste by 90 percent by 2030”? Get real.
Plastic bottles, cardboard, newspapers, aluminum cans, steel cans and glass — all that is worth money when it’s collected the right way. But much of what Pittsburghers think they’re recycling is trash.