Do you throw boxes that haven’t been broken down into your recycling bin? Do you sometimes throw in items that you know can’t be recycled? Do you toss a lot of glass into your recycle bin?
I know I’ve done each of these things in moments of weakness, especially since I received my big 95-gallon blue bin from Latham Home Sanitation a year or so ago.
It’s probably old news to you that the recycling industry isn’t in great shape in this country. Though once profitable, recycling has become a “money-sucking enterprise”, according to the Washington Post. While recycling used to be a profitable business for cities like Decatur, we now pay more and more each year to recycle stuff.
And apparently, things aren’t getting any better.
The Post article details many of the larger issues causing problems for the recycling industry, little things such as a slowing economy, falling oil prices and a stronger dollar have all made recycling more expensive.
There’s not much we can individually do to help out in these areas, but there’s one trend we could all help reverse: We’re becoming worse at recycling. And if you have a big bin for recycling, you – like me – you are likely part of the problem.
Not having to sort your recyclables is a nice luxury and over the years has convinced many folks to take the extra time and separate trash from recyclables. A full 91% of Decatur residents reported recycling in the 2014 Citizen Survey. That’s a pretty good figure!
But as with most things in life, with the good also comes the bad.
As the WaPo article points out, glass is already a questionable recyclable commodity. It has little value to recyclers and a lot of it gets broken in transit. Mixed with other recyclables, broken glass leads to contamination of other items and makes them um, un-recyclable. And contamination in recent years has spread well beyond glass, thanks to our adoption of that big blue bin.
We now are much more likely to throw away intact cardboard boxes filled with styrofoam instead of breaking them down and removing the styrofoam. The big bin also seems to beckon us to experiment with throwing out rubber, metal or plastic items that aren’t recyclable: like “garden hoses, clothes hangers, shopping bags, shoes, Christmas lights.” according to WaPo.
There’s much else that’s working against the recycling industry, but let’s get to the key question: what can we do?
Here are a few rules I’m going to try to be better about following:
- Get the garbage out of the recycling bin.
- Take a minute and read through the city’s list of allowable recyclable items and don’t “recycle” anything that’s not on the list.
- Break down cardboard boxes and don’t ever put styrofoam in the recycling.
- Remove broken glass from the recycling bin before parking it at the curb.
- Don’t ever put plastic bags in the recycling. Apparently it causes major problems at the recycling facilities.
- Sort whenever you can.
Bigger picture, it’s probably worthwhile for the city to consider our composting options. According to this WaPo article, organic material rotting in landfills is now the third largest producer of methane gas. If we can commit to separating organic matter from our trash, it could potentially have a larger impact on the environment than recycling cans or bottles.
So there you have it! Recycling isn’t magic. It’s a real and struggling industry that needs our help if its going to survive. So let’s get sorting!
I feel certain that when I moved into my house about 3 years ago styrofoam was on the allowed list. Has that been changed or did I read it wrong?
OH ok just double-checked. You can recycle styrofoam that has the recycle symbol on it. Not peanuts (guilty of that one though.)
Is that still on there? Even if it’s allowed, it’s really not a good item to place in recycling. Lumpintheroad wrote this a while back in a comment…
On a related note, this is why polystyrene foam (i.e., Styrofoam) is so insidious and impractical to recycle: You need massive amounts of it to be worth anything, but by its very nature a little bit of it by weight takes up a lot of volume and you can’t break it down or compress it easily enough to densify enough of it into a valuable portion.
So confused.
I thought plastic bags were ok if they had the symbol. I use those to help with the sorting.
The city provided this clarification via the Focus back in 2013…
Decatur’s recycling partner is a single-stream provider, so there’s no need to separate your recyclables. However, they have provided some clarification about a handful of items that cannot be accepted. Dry cleaning bags, newspaper wraps, Styrofoam and disposable cups (like Solo cups or those from Starbucks) cannot be recycled, and have to be treated as trash. Plastic grocery bags are also unacceptable, but you can recycle those at Publix or Kroger: both have recycling receptacles near their entrances.
Also, if you’re curious – like I was – about the Publix plastic bag recycling, here’s what the Florida Times Union reports happens to plastic grocery bags recycled at their store locations…
According to Dwaine Stevens, media and community relations manager for Publix in North Florida, Southeast Georgia and Southeast South Carolina: “The plastic bags we collect at the stores are sent to one of our eight recycle/return centers, depending on the store location.
“The recycler melts the plastics and makes various products out of it. Please know that Publix has been recycling plastics and paper for more than three decades, which is an important component of our sustainability strategy social responsibility.”
The problem doesn’t seem to be that plastic bags aren’t recyclable. They just don’t play friendly with single-stream recycling.
Publix takes foam trays (like the ones used to package meat) and foam egg cartons. I’ve never been clear whether they take foam cups, like the ones from various fast food franchises–does anyone know?
I’ve had a similar question about styrofoam. On the website, it says no styrofoam. On the pdf linked to from the website, it says no styrofoam without a recycling logo. I actually contacted the city a while back to get clarification on that, and never received a response.
Also, the post states that sorting recycling is best, however the collection vehicles are single stream, so I don’t know what good it would do to sort at the household level.
Though they’ve had all the best intentions, recycling programs have given people the false impression that they can continue to consume with reckless abandon, and if they’ll just recycle, they’re saving the environment! We have to stop and think about the fact that there are only so many products that can be made from recycled waste, and the impact of creating the consumables in the first place is not mitigated by the fact that you can recycle it on the flip side.
Love the shout-out to composting. I heard an interview with a landfill manager once who said that he could manage the landfill far better and with less environmental impact without organic or biodegradable materials present. We employ the services of Compost Wheels (www.compostwheels.com) to pick up our kitchen and food waste on a regular schedule, and return awesome compost to us for our garden. Would love to see a deal worked out with the city to scale this kind of offering.
Agree about sorting. So we sort and then Latham puts everything in their garbage (sorry, recycling) truck. What good is there in sorting at the house hold level?
+1
It may surprise many of you to learn that when it comes to composting, the waste industry can be a bit two-faced. Publicly they support it, and in many parts of the country where there are high-density populations or regulations mandating residential and commercial separation of organic waste (San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, etc.), they have active composting operations. It’s a greenwashing staple in their annual reports. But in a much greater portion of the country and in legislatures around the country, they actively fight to overturn organics diversion. Georgia itself recently had its yard waste landfill ban overturned thanks to heavy lobbying by the solid waste industry.
Why might they do this, you ask? Because Waste Management (the 800-lb. gorilla of the U.S. waste and recycling industry) and the other big industry players have spent millions of dollars investing in landfill-gas-to-energy (LFGTE) technology. Landfills are already required by law to capture and treat methane. That being the case, many went the extra mile and installed (expensive) plants to convert that captured methane into clean natural gas. It’s a pretty sweet deal: charge tipping fees for the (heavy, because it’s mostly water) organic waste coming in, and get paid for the natural gas going out. And it’s much cheaper to dump yard and food waste in a landfill than it is to run separate trucks to divert it to separate composting facilities and process it as compost.
The catch? These systems only work when they have degrading organic waste in the landfill to power them. So they don’t want that material to get composted, even though, from an environmental perspective, that’s the far better outcome.
Frustrated yet?
Do you know of any industry statistics that discuss how much natural gas is produced landfill(s)? I’m sure it varies by size, geography/environmental conditions at the site, etc., but anything that might help compare to volumes produced by wells would be very interesting.
Check out the US Energy Information Administration’s website. Lots of useful data on US energy production by fuel source. Landfill gas makes up a very small fraction of total energy production – about 0.5% in 2014. Far less than natural gas from hydraulic fracturing and other more conventional methods. Of course, the real benefit from landfill gas combustion is the avoided release of methane, which has a far higher GHG impact than CO2.
Another good resource is the Environmental Research and Education Foundation (EREF). They focus specifically on research related to solid waste, recycling and composting. Do be aware that somet of their funding comes from the waste industry, but they are an independent organization and I worked closely with them during my time covering the industry and generally trust their data.
Excellent point for sure. They used to teach the hierarchy as “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” meaning recycling was the least helpful of the three, but now it just seems like that’s a catch phrase on a bumper sticker.
The three R’s, in that order, are absolutely the best way to approach waste. Nothing will change that. But just because the waste companies espouse that doesn’t mean they’re actually following it themselves. Understandably, they’re going to do what’s easiest and what’s most profitable, and in most of this country, that is far and away landfill disposal.
CHaRM over by the Zoo takes Styrofoam, but not peanuts. They recommend taking those to UPS or a packaging center. They take just about everything, and most of what they don’t take they offer suggestions of where you can take them.
http://livethrive.org/charm
Most Publix stores have plastic bag recycling bins.
Single stream recyclers will tell you they take and sort everything, but there are a few items they throw away. Plastic film (grocery bags, newspaper wrap, dry cleaners bags) are all recyclable at Publix and Kroger. Tin foil is not recyclable. Some of the juice box containers that have a heavy plastic coating can’t be recycled. Glass has no value and simply adds weight, but no city wants to tell you to stop recycling them because they are so common and the discontinuning would confuse customers. Styrofoam is a disaster. Fortunately Amazon and other shippers are increasingly using inflated plastic film. CHARM is the only place I’ve heard that accepts styrofoam.
On the good side, DeKalb’s landfill recaptures methane gas and converts it to compressed natural gas. gradually it is replacing its fleet of garbage trucks and all will run on CCNG. DeKalb also sells gas to Georgia Power and AGL.
The poster on the city website lists aluminum foil as an acceptable item. I’ve always recycled it.
I’m not clear on the plastic or wax-coated cartons that are not allowed. Do milk cartons fall in to this category? It says ex. juice cartons, but in the pdf picture, an OJ carton seems to be allowable.
I thought I heard/read/divined somewhere that plastic bags were recyclable if you sort and put them all together, that it’s scattering them throughout the recycle bin that is a problem. So not true? Just collect them separately and bring them to Publix/Kroger?
Also, glass is not really recyclable? That shocks and depresses me. I thought it was the ultimate recyclable. What about states with bottle laws? What about all the children during World War II carefully scavenging for glass to collect for the war effort?
I’m worried. A complicated message on how to recycle properly is not going to promote recycling. Newspaper is still ok, right? Of course, our household is probably the last on earth to have actual newspaper to recycle….
Newspaper is OK if you keep it dry. Wet paper is not recyclable.
Your best bet for recycling plastic bags, if they have a recycling symbol (and the same number) is to gather them and drop at the grocery stores, as mentioned. But best bet of all is to avoid the issue entirely and use reusable shopping bags.
It’s not true that glass is not recyclable. It’s actually pretty easy to recycle when you have clean feedstocks. But it’s heavy, and not worth much, so there’s not a lot of incentive. And to get those clean feedstocks you have to source separate recyclables, which most people aren’t willing to do. Most of the glass recycled in the U.S. is processed by one of 4-5 regional glass recyclers around the country, unlike lighter recyclables, which, once separated and baled can be shipped anywhere in the country or the world for recycling.
Before China’s middle class boom, they bought the vast majority of our (non-glass) recyclables to manufacture into products to sell back to us. But now with a huge consumer culture in-country, they have their own recyclables and don’t need ours anymore — hence the crash in prices.
Completely agree with using reusable grocery bags. In fact, they could be sold to consumers much better than they are. The reduction in waste may be their most important feature but they have other features that are probably even more persuasive:
1. They hold a lot more which means less trips from your car to kitchen. I’m amazed by how much they can hold.
2. They are much stronger and less likely to tear. After a grueling trip to the grocery store, a ripped paper or plastic bag can just about put you over the edge. I’ve never had a recyclable bag rip.
I’m a cheerleader for reusable grocery bags but nonetheless our home is continually refilled with plastic bags from all sorts of sources. I’m pretty sure that they breed in my closets. Hence, the need to dispose of them responsibly. Meanwhile, we need to better sell the consumer on recyclable grocery bags. They need to become trendy somehow.
I do feel like we’ve come a long way on reusable bags in the last decade. I see way more people using them (even outside Decatur — the real litmus test), and unlike the old days when grocery clerks would give you the stink eye the moment you pulled them out, they don’t bat an eye now and in some cases even thank you.
This link says that grocery bags and marked styrofoam are ok. If they are not, Decatur needs to update its own information.
http://www.decaturga.com/home/showdocument?id=1888
The link to the Latham Recycling brochure on the City website also says plastic bags are OK and no sorting required. Lots of misinformation out there.
City of Decatur, you listening to this? Somebody needs to contact Latham and get them to clarify their requirements. People want to cooperate, but they need good information.
You could either a) write an email to David Junger or b) use the new smartphone app to comment.
I’ve emailed the city before about the mixed recycling messages on their site and received no response (and obviously, no solution).
Looks like we should contact [email protected] about an update?
Hold on a minute. I understand that the WaPo tells us there is a problem, but what does our city and recycling company say? Do they say that there’s a problem that we need to resolve here, or is this a solution in search of a problem?
https://fbcdn-video-o-a.akamaihd.net/hvideo-ak-xfa1/v/t42.1790-2/11739954_10153227323643089_1815779352_n.mp4?efg=eyJybHIiOjU2MSwicmxhIjo1MTIsInZlbmNvZGVfdGFnIjoicWZfNDI2d19jcmZfMjNfbWFpbl8zLjBfcDBoY19zZCJ9&rl=561&vabr=312&oh=7e516bc0e993bdd6c753599133cc1d54&oe=55DCF20A&__gda__=1440542619_be7de019a631a0f89158306bce2f15e0
If this ever gets out of moderation, watch it, it’s fascinating.
damnitalltohell, I can’t even throw away garbage correctly.
the struggle is real.
THE DECOMPOSITION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED
A couple of things that were true at one time:
1. GA has a state law that limits municipalities landfill deposits. Decatur instituted recycling in response. Most other cities ignored it.
2. Decatur pays the recycling company by the ton, so glass may not be valuable downstream , it is good for our recycler.