Want to recycle? You have two options. Neither is good
To promote recycling, cities debunk myths about the practice, among them the belief that recyclables end up in the landfill anyway.
Not so much a myth anymore. Surprise made headlines last month, announcing it’s halting recycling and diverting all the collected material to the city dump. Casa Grande has done the same.
In May, Sierra Vista in southern Arizona stopped curbside recycling, directing residents to drop off metal cans and a few other select recyclables at a new facility instead.
Earlier in the year, the company that Nogales contracts to handle its recyclables decided to send most of it to the landfill. Dispiriting? For sure.
But it is also perhaps an opportunity to reframe how we view recycling.
The rollbacks, or complete suspensions, on recycling by various communities have been largely a dollar-andcents exercise. At one point, the revenue generated by sales of the reusable materials exceeded the costs to process them. Clean up mother Earth and make money. It was a win-win.
Then unfavorable circumstances happened.
Or China happened. Its Green Fence/ National Sword anti-pollution initiatives imposed bans on various plastics and mixed papers (such as office paper, magazines, junk mail and phone books), and set much stricter standards on contaminated materials that it accepts.
China’s policies closed a big door globally on recyclables, including the U.S.
For the city of Phoenix, net revenue from recyclables has dropped from roughly $500,000 a month at the start of 2017 to just north of $100,000 by February 2018. Peoria, a longtime partner with Phoenix, has gone from operating in the black to the red with its recycling program.
Changes in the global market for recycled materials, too, wreaked havoc. Prices for cardboard, mixed papers and some certain grades of plastic fell. There’s a glut of supply and no demand.
You and I are not entirely blameless, either. We contribute mightily to aforementioned contaminated materials given the commingling nature of recycling — one bin in which we drop detergent containers, soup cans, milk and egg cartons, pasta sauce jars, salad dressing bottles and the like.
To that a number of us toss in plastic bags, used clothes and shoes, grass clippings, and food and liquid waste to dirty up the pile — much of which has to be undone by workers at the processing facility, some unsalvageable and destined for the trash.
The more contaminated it is, the more processing time and labor involved. Pete Keller of recycling and trash provider Republic Services pegs the national contamination average at 25-30% and some Arizona communities it contracts with at higher than 50%.
Just about every city and town laments escalating costs and falling revenue.
Phoenix, with its sizable Public Works Department and budget, has stayed committed to recycling, as have many Valley cities. Phoenix upgraded one of its two processing facilities, using a $3 million no-interest loan and another $1.5 million, to improve the sifting of recyclables. It also renegotiated its contract with a Republic Services subsidiary to operate the facility, paying higher costs for the hand-sorting that complements machinery.
Some cities without facilities of their own decided they can’t make it work fiscally. Just a month before it decided to stop curbside recycling, Surprise had raised its waste disposal fees by about $3.25. To continue recycling just for the short haul, it was looking at another $1.20-a-month increase.
Phoenix upgraded one of its two processing facilities, using a $3 million no-interest loan and another $1.5 million, to improve the sifting of recyclables.
Keller, Republic Services’ vice president of recycling and sustainability, notes that recycling costs in the U.S. before National Sword were about $3 a month per household. It’s more like $8 today.
That reset makes clear that going green cannot be strictly a balance-sheet proposition. The question is how much government may be willing to subsidize recycling or pass on the costs to residents. And absent that, whether we’re OK with tossing away recyclables as trash, if only temporarily.
Not everyone sees the latter as necessarily a terrible thing. Thomas Kinnaman, an environmental economist at Bucknell University, told NPR in an interview in August that “(w)e’re better off, both economically and environmentally, by putting the plastic in a landfill rather than shipping it around the world” using fossil fuel.
Until constituents persuade them otherwise, more governments may elect to do just that with recyclables.