PANDEMIC CAUSES RENEWED RECYCLING CRISIS
Loss of foreign markets, falling prices take toll
Even before the coronavirus arrived on U.S. shores, California’s waste recyclers were reeling from the collapse of global markets for used plastics and other scrap materials — a predicament that diverted the contents of many blue recycling bins to local landfills.
Now, as COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc on all aspects of the economy, the situation has become even more dire for the struggling California waste recycling industry.
Even as hospitals and health officials attempt to cope with a new surge in infections, the pandemic has significantly altered the waste stream, reducing the profits of many recyclers. Outbreaks and financial concerns have forced the closure of many redemption centers, while those that remain open have been f looded with customers. And, in a development recycling advocates find particularly distressing, manufacturers are increasingly turn
ing to cheaper, non-recycled plastics.
“This is the horror story that’s coming at us,” said Kreigh Hampel, recycling coordinator at Burbank Recycling Center. “Plastic is going to increase, and with COVID, it was the perfect storm.”
In the face of this new crisis, recyclers are having to adjust to the paradox of pandemic life. While the increased use of packaging for disposable personal protective equipment, takeout food and medical gear would lead many to believe that more recyclables have entered the waste stream, business closures and at-home living have led to Californians producing less waste overall.
Commercial waste pickup is typically more profitable for recyclers, since businesses usually pay by volume of material.
“For any business, one less customer is always a negative impact,” Zaldivar said. In Los Angeles, “there’s somewhere in the order of 5,000 businesses that no longer have trash service or have discontinued temporarily; hopefully, not permanently.”
In contrast, residential waste operates with a fixed rate, so even when haulers are picking up more stuff, they’re not making more money. However, it’s likely that these rates could increase for customers in the future.
More residential waste has highlighted the need for revamped public recycling education.
“We’re telling them: You have a blue bin. All you have to do is throw this stuff in the blue bin, and you’ve done your part,” said Assemblywoman Laura Friedman at a hearing last month. “So this is the fiction that’s been created by the industry and by us. And the result is mountains of plastic filling up our landfills.”
A recent study showed that more than 1 million tons of U.S. plastic trash goes astray every year.
Even when something is signed off as “recycled,” it might not be in the way we expect. When material is exported from California, it is counted as “recycled,” even though there is “no way of tracking when we export those materials if they’re actually getting recycled in those countries,” Zoe Heller, deputy director of policy development for CalRecycle, said last month at a state Assembly hearing. Historically, exported materials account for about one-third of California recyclables.
That number has been decreasing since 2017, when China dramatically narrowed its global market for imports of certain scrap materials and plastics.
Environmentally, the decrease in exports is “a good thing,” according to Heller, creating more accountability for the endpoint of American-generated waste.
But economically, the loss of China and countries in Southeast Asia as avenues for exportation presents major challenges, especially for mixed paper and mixed plastic, materials that don’t have strong domestic markets.
The Basel Convention, a 1989 global treaty aimed at regulating the disposal and exportation of waste, will add mixed plastic to its reach of regulated materials at the start of 2021. This will further limit the U.S.’ ability to export mixed plastic, especially since it is one of the few countries that has not ratified the treaty.
In the meantime, recycling facilities across California are working to manage those materials. Large waste management companies are not in danger of shuttering; at greater economic risk are
the facilities.
Burbank Recycling Center closed to the public in late March out of concern for the safety of its staff. As more information about the coronavirus became known, it reopened at the end of June.
“I was really nervous,” said Hampel. “I made a lot of ‘closed’ signs, because I just didn’t think this thing was going to go right.”
The facility opened on a Tuesday with new COVID-19 safety protocols in place. That Saturday, one staff member was showing symptoms. Within a week, 17 staff members had contracted the virus, and 27 others had to quarantine due to possible exposure.
Since then, the facility has remained closed.
In June, Gov. Gavin Newsom implemented an executive order that temporarily lifted the statewide ban on single-use plastic bags. It also allowed recycling centers to be open for fewer than the previously mandated number of hours and to close in-store redemption of beverage containers, in order to protect staff members.
Still, many facilities have struggled to stop the spread of infection among workers. Waste management is an essential service, and at facilities that still have public-facing centers open, staff interact daily with hundreds of people.
In Northern California, a bottleneck has formed from the high number of closed facilities, placing a strain on those that remain open.
Union City’s Tri-CED Recycling, the largest non
smaller
profit recycling center in California, has managed to stay open but has had to adapt to accommodate more than twice the usual number of customers. Before the pandemic, the facility averaged 150 to 185 customers per day; now, it’s at 350 to 385.
Lines are long — cars snake around the block as customers wait between 45 and 75 minutes to redeem recycling.
The center buys and provides masks to all customers and has even begun operating two portable toilets for those waiting in line.
Richard Valle, president of Tri-CED Recycling, said other facilities near him shut their doors officially due to coronavirus but are staying closed because it’s “just not profitable to run redemption centers” with the current reality of recycling economics.
The financial toll has grown over the years. In 2012, Burbank’s recycling program “used to make about $50,000 a month,” said Hampel. Now, with the low value of recyclables, it is “paying about $50,000 a month” to get rid of the material.
All these factors have contributed to another economic concern: the decreasing costs of virgin (or newly created) PET plastic — the kind in disposable water and shampoo bottles and food packaging.
It’s cheaper for manufacturers to use virgin PET plastic than recycled material. And the gap has grown significantly throughout the pandemic.
Recycled plastic is getting costlier to make, due to slowed facility productivity due to social distancing, the closure of international markets and higher contamination rates.
“Brands revert back to using virgin material because it’s generally always going to be cheaper,” said Pete Keller, vice president of recycling and sustainability for waste-collection company Republic Services.
Virgin PET plastic is made in part from oil and, most frequently in North America, natural gas. This April, oil dropped to a record $0 trading price — a collapse ref lecting the oversupplied U.S. oil market — which has made virgin plastic even cheaper.
Before the pandemic, PET plastic costs were already dropping, with a record-low scrap price of $130 per ton in October 2019. This August, it was at $56 per ton.
“We thought, like, ‘Oh, my God, this is the basement, it’s never been this low,’ and now it’s half that amount,” said Murray. “It’s a financial shock to the system.”
This year, California passed the nation’s first law requiring recycled content in plastic bottles. AB 793 requires all plastic bottles covered by the state’s container redemption program to average 15 percent recycled plastic content by 2022 and 50 percent by 2030.
Moving forward, Californians can expect their recycling program to continue, perhaps at a greater personal cost.
To find more solid footing, the industry is looking toward government mandates like AB 793 and increased public education and support. Many industry leaders have urged the U.S. to join the Basel Convention in hopes that it will increase international trade possibilities in the future.
And in the meantime, they’re gearing up for the next round of business closures. The pandemic continues to spike, with California’s number of new daily cases tripling in November.