We love to recycle, but it’s not doing any good
Californians dutifully load up their recycling bins and feel good about themselves. They’re helping the environment and being good citizens.
But their glow might turn to gloom if they realized that much of the stuff is headed to a landfill.
That’s because there’s no longer a recycling market for a lot of the paper, cardboard, plastic and other junk that’s left curbside.
Moreover, people are tossing garbage into those blue bins that they shouldn’t be. It just gums up the process.
“People are engaged in wish recycling,” says Mark Oldfield, public affairs director at CalRecycle, which runs the state’s recycling program.
“It’s amazing what people put in recycling bins,” Oldfield continues. Pizza boxes blotched with cheese, plastic wrap, shredded paper, unclean jars and bottles, broken glass, envelopes with plastic windows.
Recyclers these days don’t want items with mixed material such as paper and plastic, or cardboard and tape. It doesn’t pay to tear the stuff apart. Off to the landfill.
Moreover, what used to be California’s — and the world’s — largest overseas market for recyclables recently shut its door.
In January, China began barring “contaminated” material it once accepted. And it’s contaminated if it’s a half of 1 percent impure.
Eric Potashner, a government relations official for Recology, a curbside hauler that sorts Bay Area trash for recycling, says, “There’s no market
for a lot of stuff in the blue bin. What we can’t recycle we take to a landfill.”
“A year ago,” Potashner says, “we were getting $100 a ton for newsprint. Now we’re getting an average $5. Revenue has fallen off the cliff.”
Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste, an advocacy group, says: “China’s not the bad guy. To the Chinese credit … they don’t want kids and families sorting through mixed paper and plastic. They want to hire factory workers, not people doing the dirty work.”
Another recycling problem for California is the popular beverage container recycling program started 32 years ago.
Under it, people can ostensibly cart used bottles and cans to a recycling center and collect the nickel apiece they deposited when buying the beverage.
But the program isn’t generating enough money to make recycling pay. Scrap value has dropped — especially for plastic. With low oil prices, it’s cheaper to make bottles from new plastic than recycled.
Nearly 1,000 recycling centers
have closed in the last two years, about 40 percent, leaving many consumers with no place to redeem their nickels.
California’s once-proud recycling program “is teetering on the edge,” says state Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda. It was hit hard in 2016 when the state cut back on fees it paid to recyclers.
Glazer has a modest bill that would return fees to their 2015 level. A bill by Sen. Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont, would require all beverage containers sold in California to contain a minimum amount of recycled material. Gov. Jerry Brown, in his new state budget, shifted $15 million in bottle bill money to incentives for processing and purchasing recycled plastic.
Taxpayers will need to pay more for sustainable recycling, and we’ve got to stop dumping useless, filthy crud in blue bins.
It’s either that or spend more money for ugly landfills.