California shouldn’t throw away recycling opportunity
The international recycling market was thrown into turmoil in January when China officially banned foreign imports of most common types of recycling. Since then, many of the products that the United States has shipped overseas for decades — including up to half of all mixed paper, plastics and metals — have been piling up in temporary storage areas and landfills in the United States, like the 290 tons of recyclables Sacramento County dumped into a landfill last month.
This lack of a final destination for many recycled products could be a harbinger of environmental doom — or a golden opportunity. In fact, the ban could provide California with some economic, environmental and social opportunities if businesses and policymakers work to improve our recycling capacity at home.
Domestic companies have traditionally been noncompetitive with Chinese prices for most types of recycling, but the new ban could facilitate a breakthrough for entrepreneurs and businesses. California sent 62 percent of all its recycling exports to China last year. American waste shipped to China in 2017 was worth more than $5 billion.
“Over the past 20 years, West Coast processing capacity has diminished as overseas markets offered better recycling prices than domestic markets, in part due to more lenient environmental regulations overseas than West Coast regulations,” San Jose’s director of environmental services, Kerrie Romanow, wrote in a letter to the City Council.
One quintessentially Californian example of what wastebased entrepreneurship could look like is MBA Polymers. Founded by Stanford University alum Mike Biddle, MBA Polymers is an international recycling powerhouse that was born in the Bay Area and grew rapidly due to its innovative technologies for processing many types of recycled plastics into usable forms.
Yet Biddle lamented in 2014 that operating his company was economically infeasible. Unlike the European and Asian countries where the business has flourished, California’s recycling is simply too contaminated with nonrecyclable items to be valuable for companies like MBA Polymers.
Their business model of above-ground mining, or refining and selling recycled goods to manufacturers, may be more viable in California with China’s strict new rules, especially if government and entrepreneurs work together to ensure a better quality waste stream. Businesses and localities can look to CalRecycle’s loan and grant programs designed to encourage exactly this sort of innovation.
Tackling the recycling issue domestically is also the more socially responsible decision.
China’s rationale for the ban was the high environmental and health risks that people, including children, were exposed to when receiving and sorting our recycling because of its contamination with hazardous waste. Processing more recycling here would reduce the need for manufacturers to create new plastics. This progress toward a closed-loop economy, in which manufacturers build new products with reused materials, would be a powerful tool for reaching California’s climate goals.
Hoping that other countries like India or Vietnam will fill the gap left by China may seem like the easiest solution. But waiting to ship our waste to a different destination squanders the opportunity for improvements and innovations at home. Worse, waiting for other countries to build enough capacity so we can continue with the status quo risks leaving customers in an extended transitory period, with no clear end in sight for what will happen to their recycling.
“What we have before us are some breathtaking opportunities disguised as insoluble problems,” said John Gardener, former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. California engineers, entrepreneurs and policymakers would be wise to not waste the opportunity presented by the recycling crisis facing our state.