How much of what you recycle
ends up at the dump?
By
Do you cross the street to put your soda can in the recycling bin or avidly pluck plastics and paper from your neighbor’s trash cans? The current state of recycling in the United States may surprise you.
It’s in trouble for many reasons, including two
straightforward ones. Most programs dump everything together — and
consumers are confused about what goes into their recycling bins.
Single-stream recycling, first developed in the 1990s, offers
the allure that everything can be recycled without duplicating efforts to
handle paper, plastic, glass, and metal refuse. Creating a
single blue bin where people can toss all kinds of recyclable items did
away with the need to separate your bottles from your cans from your
newspapers.
When your commingled recyclables arrive at the facility, they travel along conveyor belts where someone
manually pre-sorts them. Then the stuff goes through a series of screens that
separate items by weight and shape, and strong magnets mechanically sort the
steel and aluminum products.
Nearly two-thirds of U.S. communities that recycle used
this approach by 2010.
The single-stream system sounds great, but it’s not perfect. The
biggest problem is that contamination can occur at your home or workplace,
in your curbside bin, at the sorting facility, or on the way there.
For example, glass bottles can break and sully plastic and paper bales with broken shards, making them unfit for turning into new recycled products. And when paper is co-mingled with plastic food containers, it can be ruined with lingering food and beverage residues.
These contaminated recyclables, unfortunately, often end up in
landfills — or else they’re bought by countries with
a lower standard for materials being recycled. In 2014, nearly 40 percent of
paper items that were put into the recycling stream — which otherwise would
have been great for making more sustainable paper products here in the United
States — went overseas.
If you’ve ever wondered about the fate of your discarded
recyclables, you may want to yell “Why even bother?”
But don’t trash your blue bin. Here’s how you can stop wasting
your recycling efforts.
First, don’t “wish-cycle.”
Lumping together old garden hoses, plastic shopping bags, and
old sneakers with newspapers and plastic milk jugs won’t get that junk reincarnated
as yogurt containers.
It just increases the cost of the entire recycling process by
making it harder to haul and sort everything, because workers will be taking
your wish-cycled items to a different destination — a trash incinerator or
landfill. Learn your local recycling rules and follow them.
Second, don’t grab that bag.
Putting your recyclables into a bag to carry them out to the
recycling bin might seem logical, but every bag has to be ripped open at the
sorting facility — a time-consuming process that holds up the sorting line.
This time crunch is sometimes “solved” along the way by tossing the bags of
recyclables into the trash pile.
Instead, try collecting and carrying your recyclables out to the
bin in a container or box, and reuse it every week.
Finally, play the sorting game.
See if your city has special collection points for electronics
or specific plastic containers to ensure they end up in the right place. Some
cities even collect paper separately to protect it from contamination. Castoffs
unfit for curbside collection might be perfect for a recycling drop-off at a
nearby grocery or supply store. Check Earth911.com to
discover what can be recycled where.
Recycling is an important service to our society — and our
planet. If U.S. recycling levels can rise to a 75 percent participation rate,
that would equal the environmental benefit of removing 50 million cars from the
road each year and could generate 1.5 million new green jobs.
All it would take to turn things around and keep more of our
trash out of the dump is a handful of new recycling habits.
Beth Porter
directs Green America’s Better Paper Project. GreenAmerica.org. Distributed
by OtherWords.org