A little over a year and a half ago my roommates and I set up a compost bin outside our apartment
for food scraps.
We were trying to divert as much waste as we could from the landfill.
And when we nestled that black compost roller in the corner of our yard, we thought we were
well on our way to eco-conscious bliss.
Our system was pretty simple.
All of our food waste went into the compost, all our plastics and glass got thrown into
the recycling bin, and everything else got sent to the trash.
It was great, except for one big problem.
We quickly discovered that the building’s recycling dumpster also happened to be our
trash bin.
Our landlord, and even the waste management company, claimed that we could commingle our
trash and recycling in the same dumpster and everything would get sorted at a factory,
which seemed very fishy.
So it got me thinking about how much of recycling actually gets recycled, and really when it
comes down to it, does recycling even lower a person’s environmental impact?
After some online investigation, I discovered that the recycling journey of something like
a plastic bottle is actually pretty long.
It begins with your last sip of water and might end halfway across the world in a recycling
plant in China.
And there are numerous steps in that process where the plastic bottle can easily go from
recycling to trash.
So let’s start at the beginning.
In the city of Chicago (which is where I live), recycling collectors come around every other
week to pick up the blue recycling bins, and they’ll often lift the lid and take a peek
inside.
If there is anything out of the ordinary, like a soccer ball or even a bunch of plastic
shopping bags, both of which can’t be recycled in Chicago, they send the whole bin to the
landfill.
That means just one big contaminant can divert a whole lot of recyclables, including our
brave plastic bottle, to the landfill.
If, however, the bottle makes it past that first hurdle, it makes its way to a sorting
center, used heavily in single-stream recycling programs like Chicago’s.
While single-stream programs often make it easier and more convenient to recycle at home,
it means more contaminants and more work on the processing end.
As Susan Collins of the Container Recycling Institute confirms, “what single-stream
wins in volume, it sacrifices in quality.”
And in the Chicago area, a private company called Waste Management does the majority
of this processing.
They sort 24,000 tons of recycled materials every month.
At the facility, a combination of high tech machines and human eyes sort through every
piece of recycling--pulling out what doesn’t belong, like plastics caked in food waste
or even more plastic bags, all of which gets sent to, you guessed it, the landfill.
According to the area director of recycling for Waste Management, 18-20%-- and sometimes
as high as 30%-- of recycled materials are contaminated and get sent to the trash, which
means that even in the processing phase, every year approximately 31,000 tons of materials
put in the recycling bins around Chicago end up getting thrown out.
But if that plastic bottle we’re following makes its way through this gauntlet of machines,
it’ll eventually get bundled, compressed and shipped to the highest bidder.
And in many cases, the highest bidder is a facility overseas.
The US exports one-third of its recycling and almost half of that goes to China.
But in 2018, Chinese recycling facilities started to refuse 24 kinds of our waste.
This now means that the fate of our recycling is unclear.
In some cases, like in Portland, Oregon, the bids for recyclable materials have become
so low that recycling facilities have turned away avid recyclers, with some customers reporting
that companies are telling them to throw all their recyclables in the trash.
Understanding this relatively complex process is important because when we recycle a plastic
bottle, its environmental impact isn’t neutralized.
Recycling still has fossil fuel emissions tied to.
Yes, the environmental costs associated with recycling are less than with extracting new
materials.
But that doesn’t mean that our current waste management system is the best it can be.
Plastic bottles can only be recycled a maximum of 7-9 times, but materials will still last
for 450 years.
Eventually, the plastic bottle you used will end up in a landfill.
Ultimately, recycling is a beneficial patch for a problem we’ve already created, but
it allows for our true unsustainable problem of overconsumption to continue on.
While it is important for companies and governments to create less environmentally intensive packaging
systems and waste systems, it would be foolish to wait around for that kind of systemic change.
So, recycling has to go hand in hand with a more serious interrogation of our consumption
habits.
While movements like Zero Waste might be a little too extreme for some, they do good
work at getting to the root of the problem.
For the average consumer, Heidi Bischof’s concept of Conscious Waste might provide better
guidance.
She focuses in on plastics, but her five R’s mantra can be applicable in many situations:
First “Reflect” on our current habits, then “Refuse” what we don’t need, “Reduce”
what we do need, “Reuse what we can’t refuse or reduce and lastly “Rethink”
recycling.
In a sense, that recycling bin we so often turn to should be approached as
a last resort.