Reduce, reuse, retrain: As recycling market stumbles, waste authorities focus on customer behavior

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It took generations for households to embrace recycling and now that routine chore has created a mess, observers in Central Pennsylvania noted. They say the situation will get worse until they re-educate people who for years have been filling their recycling bins with a lot of the wrong materials.

“A majority of American consumers do not know how to recycle,” said Kathryn J. Sandoe, chief communications officer at the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority. “Recycling has been putting as much into a bin as they can fit but in reality a lot of it is trash.”

The main buyer of recyclables – China – has put its foot down, saying it will only take recyclable materials and not the world’s trash. That stance is throwing the whole market into chaos, Sandoe and others said.

“Until the beginning of this year, China was the largest buyer of U.S. recycled commodities,” Sandoe said. “However, not everything we sent to China was recyclable. China sorted out what they wanted, and the rest was trashed. But the volume of trash we’re talking about is millions of tons annually, compounded over numerous years.”

Concerned about China’s environment, leaders there instituted a strict policy to stop importing waste, she said.

In the U.S., when recycling was just getting a start, the idea was to make it as easy as possible, said Ellen O’Connor, manager of the community services division of the York County Solid Waste Authority. So organizers developed systems in which a household could place all its recyclables into one container – single-stream recycling – that would be picked up and then taken to a material recovery facility, or MRF.

Workers at the facility would then pick out materials that were not recyclable. The recyclables would then be bundled for shipment to buyers that would remake them into new materials, which is the true definition of recycling, O’Connor and Sandoe said.

Well-intentioned Americans thought they were doing a good deed by filling their containers with all sorts of plastics and papers that were, in fact, trash, O’Connor said. She and Sandoe called that dynamic “wishful recycling,” which has become an industry buzz phrase.

“In reality, this ‘wishful recycling’ is severely hurting the recycling industry,” Sandoe said.   

By some estimates, Sandoe said, as much as 40 percent of what was being put in curbside bins was trash. The MRFs would cut that down to about 5 percent before shipping. In November, China said it would reject shipments that were more than 0.5 percent contaminated.

“It’s important to clarify that China is not the crisis; but their recent actions have illuminated a long-standing issue within the U.S. recycling industry,” Sandoe said. “We’ve put too much of the wrong types of materials in the recycling bin.”

John Hambrose is a communications manager for Houston-based Waste Management Inc., which operates MRFs in Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the country. He pointed to reports from the Solid Waste Association of North America that show the changes have meant a dramatic decline in the amount of recyclables exported to China and that other countries also were rejecting shipments with too much contamination.

“We have seen a 50 percent reduction in commodity values in the past several months, while processing costs have increased,” according to a Waste Management newsletter from May. “Every community and every recycler is impacted.”

Penn Waste Inc., which is owned by GOP gubernatorial candidate Scott Wagner, runs an MRF in East Manchester Township, York County. The company has been warning customers about pressures that will lead to increased costs.

Efforts to reach a spokesperson for Penn Waste were unsuccessful. But a notice posted on its website discusses the worldwide challenges and notifies customers that it will begin charging a “sustainability fee” of 10 percent. The website also points out that recycling is mandated in Pennsylvania’s larger municipalities under Act 101 of 1988, which means that the company must provide the service to communities affected by the act.

Sandoe said the MRFs cannot be blamed. Because recycling is a government mandate, the extra costs have to be passed along.

“It is true that across the country, many MRFs and some haulers are facing a financial crisis because of this situation,” she said in an email. “And all across the country, the cost for single-stream processing is increasing — sometimes at significant rates. The impact to communities will vary, depending on how their program is implemented.”

In most situations, prices will increase as contracts with MRFs are renewed, which is playing out in Lancaster County, she added.

“We anticipate the increase to only mean a few bucks a year to each household,” she said. “And this will happen over the next several months.”

The biggest change will need to come at the curbside by re-educating people about what is trash and what is a recyclable. For example, plastic flower pots are not recyclable — and neither are plastic toys. But plastic water bottles and glass bottles are. She said the following four areas are the main ones people should focus on.

• Corrugated cardboard (like shipping boxes and clean pizza boxes)

• Plastic bottles and jugs

• Metal food and beverage cans

• Glass bottles and jars

As people determine what to recycle, they should consider:

• No materials other than listed

• All materials empty and rinsed

• No plastic bags

• Clean cardboard —no food contact — and flattened

That means don’t recycle that peanut butter jar unless you clean it out first. And those supermarket plastic bags should be kept out, as MRFs don’t process them and they tend to jam the machines that move the materials along, Sandoe said.

Sandoe and O’Connor pointed out that Lancaster and York counties, as well as the Harrisburg area, operate waste-to-energy plants that burn trash that can’t be recycled. So people can feel better about putting items into trash bins if they really aren’t sure whether it can be recycled.

“If there is a silver lining,” O’Connor said, “material that isn’t being recycled is at least being used to convert to energy.”