I recently completed a training program about recycling conducted by the county Solid Waste District.  The purpose of the training is to prepare citizen volunteers to provide accurate information about recycling at community events or other functions.

Of course, when thinking about recycling, everybody has the same question: “Is this bottle recyclable?”

And, sadly, the correct answer is, “it depends.”

What does it depend on?  Primarily, where you live, and what arrangements your local community has with recycling facilities to dispose of the recyclables that they collect.  Even more sadly, the answer will change from time to time as the market for recyclables changes.  What was recyclable last year (or last week) might not be recyclable today. What’s recyclable in your town might not be recyclable in the next town down the road.

So, there’s that.

But I did learn a lot.  Here are ten things about recycling that you might not know.

1. Recycling is not the answer. Compared to reuse and reduction – the other R’s from the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle mantra – recycling is wildly inefficient. It is costly, complicated, and too often not done. We would be far better off if manufacturers and retailers designed their products and packaging with ultimate disposal in mind and if consumers considered the cost of disposal when purchasing a product. And while recycling is not the answer, until we get better at reducing and reusing, it will be much better than not recycling.
2. Recycling is labor intensive and expensive. Tossing an empty bottle into a recycling bin isn’t the end of the recycling process, it is the beginning. That bin is going to be emptied and sorted – partly by machine, partly by hand – at a Material Recovery Facility (MRF) that is noisy, dirty, and dangerous.  Employees operate forklifts, balers, sorters, and other powerful industrial machinery to pull out recyclable materials.  And somewhere in the process is a line of workers hand sorting the contents of the emptied bins as they roll by on a conveyor belt.  The work is physically demanding, perilous, and doesn’t pay very well.
3. Single Stream recycling is poor policy. To make the process easier for consumers and to reduce the cost of picking up materials, many communities have adopted single-stream recycling, in which all recyclables are collected in a single container. This shifts the burden of sorting from the consumer to the recycling facility, increasing their costs and greatly increasing the chances that material will be unusable because it is contaminated. The general manager of a recycling company called single stream collecting, “The worst thing that ever happened to this industry, ever.”
4. Recycling is constantly changing. Because recycling is a market-based solution, it is constantly changing in response to market forces. Supply and demand rules recycling, as it rules every other industry.  As supply and demand fluctuate, the type of materials that can be recycled change. Right now, the loss of the Chinese market for recyclables is wreaking havoc on the recycling industry.
5. Contamination is a significant problem. Contaminated materials are impossible to reuse. The level of contamination in U.S. recycling exports was largely responsible for China’s decision to stop accepting U.S. material. In many cases contaminants have to be removed by hand, slowing the process and increasing recycling costs. Once contaminated, few items or loads can be decontaminated. Contamination damages recycling machinery and endangers recycling facility workers.
6. Failure at the start of the recycling process cannot be redeemed later. Material that is contaminated or mislabeled at the start of the process will never be recycled. It will probably go straight to a landfill.
7. Almost everything we make is recyclable. But we only recycle items that can be recycled profitably. Electronic items are routinely disassembled and their parts re-used. There is even a term for this process: De-manufacturing. Virtually every manufactured item could be de-manufactured. But most manufactured items are not because their component parts are not valuable enough to make the process profitable.
8. Economics drives recycling. No surprise here, but it is still worth noting that every step of the recycling process is evaluated on its economic merits. Factors that determine whether or not a particular item is recycled include the overall strength of the U.S. economy, the existence of a market for the material, the cost of collecting, the cost of sorting, the cost of equipment to prepare the material, the cost of decontaminating the material, and the cost of transporting. For many materials, only local markets work, as the cost of transportation renders more distant markets unprofitable. In the words of a recycling facility manager, “Like everything else, recycling is driven by money.”
9. Education is vital. Most people will do the right thing, if they know what it is, and most people think recycling is the right thing to do. Unfortunately, recycling rules change frequently and are not the same from place to place, so public education must be followed by re-education and more re-education.
10. Recycling is a process. When you toss a plastic bottle into a recycling bin, you are part of the process. The rest of the process includes hundreds or thousands of people making decisions about product design, marketing, packaging, disposing, collecting, sorting, baling, selling, and re-using.

The bottom line is that when we throw something away, there is no ‘away.’

 “We don’t throw it away, we throw it around.” – Diane Bickett, Executive Director of the Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District

December 15, 2018