Recycling
reused rather than having to use virgin materials. It also saves on the energy and effort required to make new items from scratch.
At holiday time, recycling bins can overflow with mountains of leftover packaging. UPS forecasts its crews will deliver 800 million packages this season, up from 762 million at the same time last year. Add 400 million or so more for FedEx if its total matches last year’s volume.
The online retailing revolution and home delivery have forced big changes in recycling. More cardboard boxes now go to homes rather than businesses, complicating pickup.
In Sacramento County, California, mixed paper was worth $85 to $95 a ton to recyclers a year ago. Lately, it’s been fetching $6.50 to $8.50. Lesserquality plastics were worth $45 a ton. Now it costs $35 to get it recycled. Cardboard prices fell, too.
Waste Management, which has about 100 U.S. recycling processing facilities, says the cost of processing recyclables was once $85 a ton. Now the sorted loads collectively only bring in about $65 a ton. Instead of receiving a check for their recyclables, cities are now being asked to pay to have them taken away, said Brent Bell, the company’s vice president of recycling.
His company has found other markets for recycled materials, but they are in India and other South Asian nations where it can cost more to ship.
The problem, in large measure, surrounds how Americans recycle. City dwellers love the convenience of piling everything into a single bin. But the mixing creates sorting issues later. Amazon boxes are environmentally friendly and completely recyclable, but not if they become saturated with battery acid or Thanksgiving turkey gravy. Paper is fine to recycle, but not if it’s a grease-smeared pizza box.
Bins are also contaminated with junk that shouldn’t be there at all, like spent garden hoses, broken-down lawn chairs, dead car batteries or the industry’s top bugaboo,plastic grocery bags. Waste Management said the overall contamination rate of recycled materials is about 25 percent.