Some Towns Are Trashing Their Costly, Inefficient Recycling Programs

[Muda69]

http://reason.com/blog/2019/03/06/recycling-expensive-trash-landfill

Quote

Should that empty soda bottle go in the recycling bin or the trash can? Increasingly, it doesn't really matter.

A large portion of America's plastic and paper waste used to go from our recycling bins to China, where it was refashioned into everything from shoes to bags to new plastic products. But since the end of 2017, China has restricted how much foreign trash—er, recycling—it buys, including cutting off purchases of waste paper products, like all the junk mail that goes directly from your mailbox to the recycling bin.

As a result, The Atlantic reported Tuesday, some American cities and towns are sending all those recyclables directly to the landfill.

In Franklin, New Hampshire, for example, a curbside recycling program that launched in 2010 was able to break-even when the town was selling used paper, metals, and plastics for about $6 per ton. Now, the town is being charged $125 per ton to recycle that stuff. Instead of asking residents to pay much higher prices to recycle or cutting other city services in order to be able to afford the recycling program, city officials have decided instead to send those recyclables to an incinerator. Towns in Idaho, New York, Virginia, and elsewhere have had to make similar choices in recent months, The Atlantic reports, as environmental signaling has come at a steeper price.

Some places are stockpiling their recyclables in the hopes that things will turn around—in other words, in the hopes that China will start buying more American refuse again—but the sudden shift in the market has less to do with China than it does with the American fascination with recycling. Even as municipal recycling programs became almost ubiquitous in America over the past few decades, the underlying infrastructure remained economically and environmentally flawed.

"Recycling has been relentlessly promoted as a goal in and of itself: an unalloyed public good and private virtue that is indoctrinated in students from kindergarten through college. As a result, otherwise well-informed and educated people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits," wrote John Tierney in a must-read 2015 op-ed for The New York Timesthat predicted many of the problems facing the municipalities highlighted in The Atlantic's story—including the slumping demand for recycled goods brought on by lower oil prices and cheaper manufacturing processes.

In fact, Tierney predicted many of those same problems all the way back in 1996, when he authored a longer takedownof the American recycling regime for The New York Times Magazine. In that piece, he argued that "recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources."

Meanwhile, it remains far cheaper to simply bury the trash. As Tierney noted in that 1996 piece, all the trash generated by Americans for the next 1,000 years will fit into less than 1 percent of the land currently used for grazing animals. Modern methods of landfilling mitigate environmental hazards and allow the land to be reused for parks, grazing animals, or building baseball and tennis stadiums.

Which isn't to say that all recycling is bad or that it should never be done. There are cost-effective ways to reuse some common goods, like paper, under some circumstances. But Tierney's view—and the reality now facing some American cities with expensive recycling programs—is that the benefits of recycling have been overstated for years and the costs never clearly understood.

...

Like most other civic issues, recycling programs should be judged by their costs and benefits. That means an honest assessment of the costs and benefits, one that leaves out the social signaling of environmentalism and the feel-good effects of putting an empty Coke bottle in a plastic bin that's painted blue instead of black. There is no need to recycle all the things all the time, and the market seems to be sending towns and cities a powerful signal about the benefits of calling trash, trash.

Agreed.  Some municipalities would better serve their taxpayers citizens if they eliminated their recycling programs, they cost too much money.

 

[Impartial_Observer]

When it comes to recycling, anything other than metals are pretty much a waste of time/money. Aluminum cans are the gold standard in recycling. Some plastics hold a little value, paper is/has/will always be a complete waste of time/money/energy. Composting paper wastes makes a lot more sense. 

[gonzoron]

4 minutes ago, Impartial_Observer said:

When it comes to recycling, anything other than metals are pretty much a waste of time/money. Aluminum cans are the gold standard in recycling. Some plastics hold a little value, paper is/has/will always be a complete waste of time/money/energy. Composting paper wastes makes a lot more sense. 

Box makers have been recycling paper since before recycling was cool. It’s not a waste of money or time for them.

[gonzoron]

In addition, the company I work for recycles plastic (polyester) and it save them a ton of money. 

Recycling these items may not be lucrative for individuals, but it is cost effective for manufacturing by helping keep costs lower in addition to environmental benefits.

Edited March 7, 2019 by gonzoron

[foxbat]

1 hour ago, gonzoron said:

In addition, the company I work for recycles plastic (polyester) and it save them a ton of money. 

Recycling these items may not be lucrative for individuals, but it is cost effective for manufacturing by helping keep costs lower in addition to environmental benefits.

I know that Lafayette had reported that they save around $200,000 in tipping fees at landfills. 

Subaru went zero-landfill a while ago and has saved some $13 million or so in doing so.  Sometimes things that don't seem to make sense on the surface end up being some big-ticket items in the end.  An employee came up with the idea of shipping polystyrene packaging back to the supplier.  It seemed an odd idea because the shipper was overseas and it didn't seem like there was any savings at all that could be recognized.  Instead of just nixing it, they did the analysis and found that, if the packaging was re-used at least four times.  They've tracked some packaging re-use now at 26 times and have saved $1 million from that idea.  More info on their success appears in the following link.

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2018/07/27/indiana-subaru-plant-hasnt-taken-out-trash-14-years-saves-12-million-lafayette-landfill/825735002/

[Impartial_Observer]

2 hours ago, gonzoron said:

Box makers have been recycling paper since before recycling was cool. It’s not a waste of money or time for them.

Are they recycling or reusing? 

Since the article focused mainly on the consumer level, that's what my comments were aimed at.  Industrial applications can and obviously do have some benefits. 

Edited March 7, 2019 by Impartial_Observer

[gonzoron]

35 minutes ago, Impartial_Observer said:

Are they recycling or reusing? 

Since the article focused mainly on the consumer level, that's what my comments were aimed at.  Industrial applications can and obviously do have some benefits. 

Both. There is a paper mill in Hartford City that’s gets some of theirs from NYC’s trash. When boxes are made, the trim gets baled, Sent to the mills where it is ground up and recycled.

I think they get some of NYC’s rats also. They’re huge over there.

The Hartford City mill uses all recycle, no fresh pulp.

[swordfish]

Wholesale recycling makes sense, but individual recycling appears to cost more than it's worth.

Found it interesting when at lunch I was watching the trash truck emptying the recycle bins in the recycle area at the park.  He was putting all the bins (the ones we have to separate the plastic, cardboard, paper, etc. into each container and for goodness sake - don't mix them) into the same container.  I was stunned.  We have to take care to keep the items separate, yet he was putting them into the same truck before heading over to the processing plant.  Which led to my question - Why am I separating this stuff if you aren't?

[gonzoron]

2 hours ago, swordfish said:

appears to cost more than it's worth

That's what the dinosaurs said right before they melted the glaciers.

[swordfish]

19 minutes ago, gonzoron said:

That's what the dinosaurs said right before they melted the glaciers.

Ahhh - Dinosaur Farts.......Now it makes sense......

[foxbat]

2 hours ago, swordfish said:

Wholesale recycling makes sense, but individual recycling appears to cost more than it's worth.

Found it interesting when at lunch I was watching the trash truck emptying the recycle bins in the recycle area at the park.  He was putting all the bins (the ones we have to separate the plastic, cardboard, paper, etc. into each container and for goodness sake - don't mix them) into the same container.  I was stunned.  We have to take care to keep the items separate, yet he was putting them into the same truck before heading over to the processing plant.  Which led to my question - Why am I separating this stuff if you aren't?

Probably depends on who the processor is and, my guess would be that processors have changed while the policy hasn't.  At one time Lafayette used to only process certain items, then they moved to processing a bunch more and pretty much went to no-sort recycling.  I suspect that what ended up happening is that they changed processors or the processor determined that they'd eat the cost of doing the sorting at their center to encourage more recycling volume ... especially with the expanded categories.  Might be a good question to ask your local government/utility as it might be more effective/efficient if the separating isn't really needed or the trucks that are doing those pickups and mixing them might actually be violating policy.  In either case, something better hopefully comes from the inquiry.

[swordfish]

10 minutes ago, foxbat said:

Probably depends on who the processor is and, my guess would be that processors have changed while the policy hasn't.  At one time Lafayette used to only process certain items, then they moved to processing a bunch more and pretty much went to no-sort recycling.  I suspect that what ended up happening is that they changed processors or the processor determined that they'd eat the cost of doing the sorting at their center to encourage more recycling volume ... especially with the expanded categories.  Might be a good question to ask your local government/utility as it might be more effective/efficient if the separating isn't really needed or the trucks that are doing those pickups and mixing them might actually be violating policy.  In either case, something better hopefully comes from the inquiry.

I have a friend/neighbor that is employed at the County landfill.  He described pretty much what you said, they sort it onsite versus at the point of pickup.  In other words, I don't feel bad if all of my recycling winds up in the cardboard dumpster because it was raining and I didn't want to walk all the way down to the plastics or glass areas. 

[Muda69]

11 minutes ago, swordfish said:

I have a friend/neighbor that is employed at the County landfill.  He described pretty much what you said, they sort it onsite versus at the point of pickup.  In other words, I don't feel bad if all of my recycling winds up in the cardboard dumpster because it was raining and I didn't want to walk all the way down to the plastics or glass areas. 

This is how the City of Frankfort handles their recycling program.  But they don't even do curbside pick up of recyclables in a plastic tub anymore, they have to be in a plastic trash bag.  

 

[foxbat]

6 minutes ago, swordfish said:

I have a friend/neighbor that is employed at the County landfill.  He described pretty much what you said, they sort it onsite versus at the point of pickup.  In other words, I don't feel bad if all of my recycling winds up in the cardboard dumpster because it was raining and I didn't want to walk all the way down to the plastics or glass areas. 

It'd probably be better, in that case, for the city/municipality to just have the populace not worry about the sorting part.  Studies that I've seen indicate that single-stream tends to increase participation rates although sometimes at the expense of end-recovery.  If however, the pickup guys are, in essence, single-streaming the stuff that homeowners are actually separating, then that loss is already factored into the equation.  It would seem that letting homeowners single-stream, instead of burdening them with the Sisyphean task of sorting, would generate more participation ... as well as less burden/hurdles on homeowners.

[foxbat]

Lafayette moved from tubs, to a trash container item, those big black trash containers, for recycling.  These containers are larger than the trash containers that the city provides to residents.  As such, it doesn't require a different processing for the containers as the trucks are already situated for picking up the large black containers.  I haven't confirmed it, but I suspect that the reason that the recycles container is bigger than trash is that it "encourages" homeowners to "utilize" the additional capacity of the recycles container, thus shifting the total bulk of the household outputs.  I've not had a chance to look into this, but I know that before the big containers, we easily filled one bin with recyclables and had asked the city for an additional two bins to be able recycle more weekly.  Even then, we got to a point with bins full that we were tossing recyclables at the end of the week in with the trash or keeping a separate box that we could put in next week's collection.  The new black containers easily hold more than three tubs/bins worth of recyclables and we end up filling it every week.  I'm kind of interested in seeing what Lafayette has seen in terms of average household increase in recyclable volume since putting in the new containers and moving away from bins.