It’s such a waste debating recycling
When my fiance and I moved in together, I braced myself for a difficult domestic adjustment. It’s never easy to merge households, and people have different standards for everything from cleaning to decorating choices.
So I was both surprised and delighted when we turned out to have only one serious point of disagreement: the recycling bin.
My fiance is a stickler for San Francisco’s many, many recycling rules. He believes that the more we stick to the exact rules Recology has laid out on its website, the better it is for the recycling program.
Meanwhile, I am more aspirational in my recycling. If an item is marginal, or if it doesn’t show up on the blue bin’s visual guide but it seems like it should be recyclable, I’ll toss it in the blue bin.
This difference between us led to some tense moments around the refuse corner. I’d casually toss, say, an empty plastic food packet from the supermarket into the recycling bin, and he’d race behind me to fish it out.
The disagreement wouldn’t go away. We didn’t want it to become completely intractable. So we decided to settle it like adults. We’d each plead our case before the experts at Recology.
We showed up for a tour at Recology’s major recycling facility at Pier 96, near Heron’s Head Park. The building is massive — 200,000 square feet — and so is the operation. Recology handles 600-650 tons of “commingled recycling” at the building every day.
Our handlers were swift to emphasize San Francisco’s national reputation for high-quality paper and excellent compost.
“People are very proud recyclers in San Francisco,” said Peter Gallotta, public relations coordinator for San Francisco’s Department of the Environment. “Only between 5 and 8 percent of material that comes in for recycling is a mistake.”
My fiance gloated — Gallotta’s comments would clearly seem to be a point in his favor — but I hadn’t lost the battle yet.
As we walked through the plant, they pointed out much of the new machinery that’s allowed the plant to improve its “recovery” rate since it finished a building-wide upgrade last winter.
There’s a cardboard streaming machine from the Netherlands that’s allowed employees to focus on more exacting tasks than sorting your boxes from Amazon. They’ve added two new optical sorting machines for plastics, which allows them to recycle more of the smaller plastic objects that I’m constantly trying to toss into our recycling bin.
“Do people put a lot of plastic in the trash can that could be recycled?” I asked.
“About 50 percent of what’s going in the black bin (for trash) can be recycled,” Gallotta said. Point, me. The more we learned on the tour, however, the clearer it became that there was no simple winner in our recycling war.
Recology’s 175 employees at the plant work hard. Watching them at the conveyor belt, sorting an unending stream of trash, brought to mind the “I Love Lucy” conveyor belt scene in the chocolate factory — an unseen job that seems easy until you see it up close.
The massive new machines, using magnets and eddy currents to whirl through tin cans and clamshell takeout containers, affected me, too. I walked away from the tour feeling the need to be more careful with my sorting, if only because it was so impressive to see the results of all of our garbage. I wanted the employees’ jobs to be easier, and I wanted the machines to find the most effective material for the world to reuse. That requires some vigilance. “There are a few things that are still problematic materials,” said Debbie Raphael, director of the Department of the Environment for San Francisco. “We don’t have the ability to sort them or we don’t have a (recyclable) market for them.”
In addition to putting some obvious environmental baddies in the trash — like Styrofoam containers and the ice packs meal-kit companies love to use for deliveries — Recology needs San Franciscans to be careful about their behavior.
I’ve stopped putting half-full food containers in the recycling bin; I now know they have to be empty. My fiance applauds when he sees these changes in my recycling practices (especially when I perform them grudgingly).
But Recology is also catching up with my aspirations. As of this week, Recology has given San Franciscans the thumbs-up to start recycling more items — including a lot of items that residents like myself probably felt
should have been recyclable all along. So now you can toss your (empty!) soy milk and prepared soup boxes into the blue bin, along with your entire takeout coffee cup. Ball up your plastic wrap, stick it in a plastic bag, knot it, and send it over to Recology. (Find the full list of changes at https://www. sfrecycles.org/)
It’ll take my fiance a few weeks to get used to these changes. But don’t worry — I’ll applaud him as he does.
I’d casually toss, say, an empty plastic food packet from the supermarket into the recycling bin, and he’d race behind me to fish it out.