Illustration by bortonia/istock
Recycling illustration
Like most Minnesotans, you probably like recycling, or, at the very least, the idea of recycling. And if you live in Minneapolis, St. Paul, or one of many other communities around the state, you may have noticed that this rite of modern-day environmentalism has gotten easier in recent years.
This, of course, follows the introduction of the single-sort recycling cart—those ubiquitous blue (or sometimes green) receptacles where you deposit your newspapers, food tins, glass bottles, and plastics, with no further sorting required. Just roll the load to the curb and you’re a virtuous citizen!
Given that people A) like to feel good about themselves, and B) are generally pretty lazy, the advent of the single-sort cart has dramatically boosted the amount of recyclables collected virtually everywhere it’s been tried. When Minneapolis launched its single-sort program in 2013, recycling rates went up by nearly a third.
So a big improvement, right? Yes. Maybe. No?
While single sort has delivered on its promise of making us more prolific recyclers, it has also made us sloppier recyclers. So much sloppier that the industry insiders have coined a term for it: “wish-cycling.” The expression refers to the practice of people throwing stuff into the single-sort cart that seems like it ought to be recycled but, in fact, doesn’t belong. And the rise of wish-cycling has created big problems at the material recovery facilities—or MRFs—where all those co-mingled recyclables are separated before being shipped off to various end-market buyers.
The problem? There are no end-market buyers for some things.
“We see tons of dirty diapers: hundreds a day. We see garden hoses. We see extension cords. We see animal parts,” says Bill Keegan, president of Dem-Con Companies, which processes about 95,000 tons of recyclables per year at its state-of-the-art MRF in Shakopee.
The 70,000-square-foot building, located adjacent to Dem-Con’s landfill, stands out as a marvel of industrial design. Built in 2013, it boasts an array of interconnected assembly lines that combine human workers, optical scanners, air compressors, and even a robot powered by artificial intelligence.
Of the many contaminants visible on the fast-moving conveyor belts, the single-use plastic grocery bag is one of the most conspicuous. These things seem to whiz by every five seconds.
Like the rest of the film-plastic market, grocery bags are virtually worthless. They also constitute a nuisance. Like garden hoses, Christmas lights, and other items that wind up in single-sort bins, grocery bags easily become tangled in the machinery at the MRFs. At Eureka Recycling’s MRF in Northeast (the destination for all the residential recyclables from Minneapolis and St. Paul), the lines shut down for an average of two hours a day, according to Eureka co-president Lynn Hoffman.
“Every time a plastic bag gets stuck, a worker has to climb inside with a box knife and cut it out,” Hoffman says.
And that highlights another problem with the single-sort carts. “When you had the bins, you could leave a note and tell the resident what they should do next time,” Hoffman says. Now those bad habits remain anonymous—“so it’s hard to educate people.”
But for MRFs, the biggest wish-cycling menace these days is the lithium-ion battery. Those rechargeable batteries, which power modern conveniences from cell phones to talking greeting cards, turn out to be explosive when crushed. Picture an MRF, where a lot of big, heavy machines crush things all the time. Then add mountains of mixed paper and other flammable materials. In this environment, a hasty decision to recycle an old cell phone often leads to disaster. Last summer, a Dem-Con transfer station in Blaine burned to the ground as a result of a battery-caused conflagration.
“It’s a huge problem in our industry and it’s endemic,” says Keegan, who chairs the Minnesota chapter of the National Waste and Recycling Association. “Nationwide, we’re losing about one facility a month from lithium battery fires.”
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Battery fires and equipment breakdowns, surprisingly, may not constitute the greatest problem with our sloppy recycling. A bigger concern? “Dirty” recyclables prove a lot less valuable than clean product.
In the American recycling industry, contamination, especially from food waste, poses a chronic issue. Earlier this year, China—long the principal foreign customer for American recyclables—ceased virtually all imports of “foreign garbage.” One reason the government cited: the high contamination rate in the plastics and mixed paper coming from the U.S. Put another way, that leftover cheese stuck to the outside of your pizza box can befoul an entire bale of mixed paper.
With the loss of its biggest overseas market, the recycling industry has undergone a seismic shift. The glut of recyclables, once intended for export, has crashed domestic and global commodity prices. Dem-Con’s Keegan cites mixed paper as a prime example. In August of 2017, he says, mixed paper would fetch $70 a ton; a year later, the asking price has slumped to negative $5 a ton. (Negative prices mean you’ve got to pay someone to haul the stuff away.)
In some states, such price collapses have redirected recyclables from China to domestic landfills or waste-to-energy plants. That hasn’t happened—yet—in Minnesota, says Wayne Gjerde, of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. In fact, under state law, recyclables can’t be landfilled without an explicit waiver from the MPCA commissioner.
Still, Gjerde concedes, some recyclers in the state have been forced to stockpile product, as they wait for conditions to improve. China’s policy shift hasn’t just affected prices; it has allowed domestic buyers of recyclables to be more selective.
“Everybody is trying to reduce their contamination as much as possible,” says Gjerde, who works on recycling market development at the MPCA. The new gold standard—a .5 percent contamination rate—means the product needs to be four times cleaner than in the past.
So wouldn’t it make sense to bail on single sort and go back to multiple bins?
“I would say probably not,” ventures Gjerde, who notes that the haulers have invested heavily in single sort. One benefit: Workers don’t get hurt as much handling the carts as they did with bins.
Dem-Con’s Keegan balances the increased contamination against the huge increase in recycling volume. And he comes down on the side of single sort, “especially when we can clean it up on the back end,” he adds.
Brita Sailer, the executive director of the Recycling Association of Minnesota, also doubts that single sort is going anywhere. That’s one reason the industry is so desperate to better educate people about what to recycle. For instance, not all glass can be recycled. Yes, your empty bottle of Yellow Tail Shiraz belongs in the cart. But no, the wine glass you broke while draining the aforementioned Yellow Tail doesn’t.
One problem, Sailer notes, is that different recycling programs accept different things, and that lack of uniformity confuses people. Hence the industry’s maxim: When in doubt, throw it out.
At Eureka, the brutal prices right now have hurt the company’s ability to carry out that education mission. Last year, Hoffman says, the nonprofit eliminated eight positions in the policy and outreach areas. “When you’re in the global commodities business, there are times of contraction,” Hoffman says. “But this is a fairly permanent downshift.”
Yet Hoffman thinks China’s refusal to act as America’s “dumping ground” may be forcing a worthwhile reckoning.
“The veil has really been pulled back on the impacts of our consumption,” she says.
The most effective place to divert our personal waste stream? Start with the shopping cart.
