Recycling market is in a heap of trouble
The eve of Earth Day finds the industry facing rising costs and falling demand
ELKRIDGE, MD. If you are recycling at home, you are probably doing it wrong.
That is why a worker lunged to grab a garden hose off the conveyor belt at a Waste Management recycling facility here Wednesday before it got caught in a giant sorting machine. Such tangles frequently require the plant to stop the waste processing line and clean out the jaws by hand.
“Our contamination changes by the season,” said Mike Taylor, the company’s director of recycling operations. It’s spring, and the facility is getting a lot of garden hoses. Around the holidays, it gets broken strands of Christmas lights, another choking hazard for the sorting line. And all day, every day, there are plastic shopping bags (recyclable at a grocery store but not from a household), chunks of styrofoam, diapers, syringes, food-contaminated containers — a nearly endless litany of things residents throw into their curbside carts figuring they are or ought to be recyclable. One worker grabs the remnants of a screen door off the sorting line, and another snags a wire rack from a DIY shelving unit.
Many cities around the country will celebrate the 47th Earth Day on Saturday by highlighting their recycling programs, but the industry is grappling with a dual threat: The value of recovered waste products has plummeted over the past five years, and the effort required to extract them has risen.
A study by Rob Taylor of the State Recycling Program in the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality estimated that the average market value of a ton of mixed recyclable material arriving at a state recovery facility
“What was once a valuable commodity five years ago is less valuable now.” David Biderman, executive director and CEO of the Solid Waste Association of North America
dropped from just over $180 in early 2011 to less than $80 at the end of 2015. That value has since rebounded, Taylor found, to a little over $100, but it still leaves the industry struggling to extract profit from the millions of tons of recyclable material Americans throw away every year.
There are a host of reasons for the decline in the recycling market, ranging from global trade policy to the decline in newspa- per readership, said David Biderman, executive director and CEO of the Solid Waste Association of North America. Much of reclaimed American waste is shipped overseas, but China established new limits on imported waste in 2013. In other nations, “there has been a decrease in demand for that material as growth rate in foreign countries has leveled off,” Biderman said. Low oil prices have made it cheaper to produce new plastic bottles, so manufacturers don’t have as much need for reclaimed plastic. In addition, packaging producers have figured out how to make bottles and cans thinner, so they don’t need as much raw material.
And as the circulation for print newspapers has plummeted, the recycling industry has lost both a massive customer for reclaimed paper fiber and a huge source of incoming material.
Across the industry, “what was once a valuable commodity five years ago is less valuable now,” Biderman said.
The change is perhaps most dramatic for glass. In most American cities, the glass bottle you toss in the recycling cart is essentially worthless, and if it breaks, the shards may make the paper in a mixed cart worthless as well.
“We work hard to keep glass in the system because it is an iconic recycled item,” said Keefe Harrison, CEO of the Recycling Partnership, a non-profit committed to improving recycling programs nationwide. But “it has very minimal market value because it has to compete with sand,” the raw material from which glass is made. Some municipalities have simply stopped collecting glass in their curbside recycling programs. Santa Fe overhauled its recycling program this month and said it would no longer collect glass from households.
When cities launched recycling programs in the 1980s and 1990s, the theory was that the revenue from the recovered materials would offset the costs of collecting and separating the waste, but it hasn’t worked out that way. Kevin Miller, recycling manager for the city of Napa, Calif., said that the city gets back about 20% of the costs of collecting, sorting and shipping materials.
Miller and environmental advocates point out that recycling has other economic benefits, such as reducing the use and cost of landfills and reducing the need for harvesting virgin materials.
But the burden of paying for it falls on cities — or residents who pay for the trash service — because the U.S. has not followed the path of many European countries of requiring manufacturers to take responsibility for the disposal or recovery of their products and packaging.
But it is not all bad news in the industry, Napa’s Miller said. The growth of online shopping has generated an explosion of cardboard packaging coming into the recycling stream.
“There is more corrugated cardboard in the system than ever before,” he said, which is a valuable and readily recyclable product — as long as it is not contaminated in a recycling bin by a dirty diaper or broken bottle.