How many of us have placed something in the recycling bin because we saw a small triangle and thought, “I’m doing my part,” but never thought about what happens after that?
After being sorted at a materials recovery facility, many recyclables get exported to China.
China’s new National Sword policy, which put a ban on certain foreign plastics being imported, is causing many cities to question whether recycling is still feasible.
Due to the new policy, China will accept only recyclables that have a 0.5% contaminant rate.
Since the average contamination rate is around 25%, one in four items placed in a recycling container is not recyclable, according to disposal company Waste Management.
“We really need people to put their recyclables in the recycle container, clean, dry and emptied, then they’ll get recycled,” said Joe Giudice, the City of Phoenix’s assistant Public Works director.
In Phoenix, approximately 30% of the recycling substream is contaminant items, according to the City of Phoenix 2017-18 Residential Waste Characterization Study.
Many cities in Arizona, like Surprise and Casa Grande, have stopped recycling. Other cities, like Glendale, are cutting back on recycling due to the National Sword implementation.
Arizona is not alone in this trend. Cities across the U.S. are trying to figure out what to do with their recyclable material due to the policy.
“We’re not getting as much revenue as we used to get (from recycling), so there’s the issue of how do you make up that revenue difference,” Giudice said. “That’s the issue a lot of cities are facing. If you talk about Surprise for example … now they have this decision they have to make.”
To help keep the contamination rate low, Phoenix has invested $4.5 million to upgrade the North Gateway Transfer Station, according to an AZCentral article.
One example upgrade includes optical sorting, which uses infrared and optical visioning as well as bursts of air to help sort the plastic so that it’s not just relying on people to do it.
“The reason we make these capital investments into the recycling facilities is actually to reduce the cost (of recycling for residents),” Giudice said. “Some of this technology will help some of the labor cost associated with operating the facility, improve the quality of the material so we could sell it at a higher value.”
The city has five closed landfills, which contain over 1,000 acres of land that can’t be used for anything because of the garbage buried there.
With growing concerns over landfill capacity, the city began Reimagine Phoenix, an initiative to increase the diversion rate of the city’s waste from landfill to 40% by 2020. Four months away from 2020, the rate is 36%.
But even throwing clean, dry and empty plastic items in the bin doesn’t mean that they get recycled.
If the plastic falls into the a category of low-value plastics like food containers and grocery bags, or is three inches or smaller, it may not get recycled depending on the city it is disposed in.
Many cities do not recycle these small plastics. Because U.S. systems are not placed to make economic use of it, it goes to a landfill, according to Garret Schwartz, Co-Founder and CEO of Resinate Remanufacturing, a local remanufacturing company that collects plastic waste and reprocesses it into products.
“You can make a lot of things out of recycled plastic. The problem is finding something that can scale in volume and that is the right economic value,” Schwartz said.
The company takes used pharmacy bottles, some of which fall into the category of commonly landfill-bound items, from a local dispensary and makes planters out of them.
Schwartz said he has found success in this because it’s economically worthwhile for both parties.
“We’re not just turning it into flakes and trying to sell giant bags of flakes to someone who’s going to make it into pellets or … selling big bales of mist, dirty, contaminated, label-written plastic to someone who’s going to sort it and palletize it,” he said. “We are turning it into consumer products that are valuable at any scale.”
Because of growing concern over plastics being dumped in the ocean, many people are starting to look at whether businesses are becoming more environmentally friendly.
“It shouldn’t feel normal to go to a grocery store and buy a bottle of water, and put that bottle of water in a plastic bag and not think about what’s going on there,” Schwartz said. “We don’t need to shame everyone who buys a bottle of water necessarily, but at least start by not putting it in a plastic bag if it’s a single item.”
Local First Arizona, a nonprofit that advocates for a strong local business community, launched a green business program for local businesses that are looking to implement sustainable practices into their business model.
In order to become green-certified, the businesses have to meet standards of water conservation, energy consumption, transportation alternatives and waste diversion, according to Jake Swanson, a business sustainability coordinator for Local First Arizona.
“We have a mandatory policy where you have to recycle or compost or do everything that you possibly can with the current services in your area,” Swanson said. “Those are basics for the expected standards, but there’s ones like ‘don’t use plastic bags’ or ‘none of your straws can be plastic.'”
Contact the reporter at Jpbeltra@asu.edu.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly named Garret Schwartz as Garret Schwatz.
