Getting real about recycling

It doesn't always work, but still we should double down, not quit

Just some of the “contaminated” material picked out of a town recycling bin, jeopardizing “recycling.” And this is not including glass.

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We dutifully separate bottles, plastics, paper, cardboard and tin, piling them in kitchen corners.

We lug them to the dump – sorry, transfer station – or set them on curbs in blue totes.

We hope in a small way we are part of a solution, knowing we are part of a big problem.

But the nagging question remains:

Is the stuff we “recycle” going anywhere different, doing any good?

There is a persistent undercurrent belief that the answer is No, that the exercise is a feel-good, politically-correct charade.

Is that true, or a Cape version of an urban myth?

I wish I could say there’s no basis for cynicism, that recycling works like a champ.

It doesn’t.

Then again, neither is recycling a fake front. International politics and domestic market forces, misunderstandings, laziness and sloppiness impact effectiveness, but our sincere attempts to do the right thing do help – a chunk of the time.

If anything, we should be doubling down, not buying into conspiracy theories about enviros and multi-national fiascoes.

So get out your mask and snorkel, take a breath, because we’re about to take a deep dive into the humongous mosh pit that is Cape Cod recycling.

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Not the most positive way to kick this off, but here’s a partial list of things most of us assume can be recycled, try to recycle, but no:

• Paper towels.

• Any shredded paper.

• Those ever-present thin plastic bags – at least not in big bins, though maybe at some drop-offs in supermarkets.

• Any plastic that is black (sorting machines can’t see it).

• A pizza box that has a stale slice or two still in it, or even too much cheese and grease.

• All glass other than bottles, for example windows, glass that holds candles (that’s tempered), lightbulbs, mirrors.

• A jar of spaghetti sauce that sat in the fridge too long with red sauce hardened at the bottom (with or without green mold).

• Shampoo and Gatorade bottles that aren’t empty — most anything that isn’t empty.

• Toothpaste tubes.

• Garden hoses.

• How about a bowling ball? Nope.

Including any of this in recycling isn’t just a waste of time and effort. These things “contaminate.” That means they can cause an entire load to get rejected.

Before 2018 this wasn’t true. China had been taking 80 percent or more of anything and everything this nation wanted to “recycle,” but often half or more couldn’t be salvaged. The result, says Kari Parcell, who lives and breathes recycling in her job at Barnstable County, is that “China turned into a trash hole,” huge mounds and swaths of our solid waste fouling land and sea.

China responded by lowering its acceptable threshold of “contaminated” material in the mix to one-half of one percent, an impossible standard. Suddenly there was nowhere to go, creating “a massive slowdown globally,” Kari recalls. Dumping nations had little choice but to pay even more to burn or bury everything, while trying to tighten and clean up.

We did improve, not to the Chinese standard but enough so other countries saw a profitable opportunity and stepped into the trash-taking business – Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Korea, the Philippines. When contamination levels got down to something like three to five percent, China returned too.

So a buying market resurrected, though still sporadic. That was fortuitous:

COVID created a huge increase in trash. Bored people hanging out at home cleaned out garages and renovated bathrooms. Restaurant take-out exploded, creating mountains of plastic utensils and paper plates. Every living person was wearing a mask that had to be replaced every few days.

This tilted the economic balance even more toward companies and countries willing to wade into recycling. Meanwhile, local transfer stations struggled to keep up, paying higher fees, trying to educate the public.

So understand, says Kari Parcell, that when we put cardboard, plastics, glass, and tin into bins and crates, whether separated or in a “single stream,” it goes to a “MURF,” a Materials Recovery Facility, sorted and hopefully accepted. Compacted bales emerge.

Those “post-consumer” materials are indeed sold to create new products and reduce the need for raw resources – though not always. It depends on demand at that moment. There’s only one recyclable that always has a market; metal.

For the rest, contamination looms. Take a town recycling bin:

If someone throws in half a pizza stuck to a cardboard box, or a bunch of paper towels, the whole bin won’t be rejected. If three people a week do that, still no problem. But if it’s a few dozen, with some black or rigid plastic thrown in, danger.

Now take a single household putting a blue tote on the sidewalk for pickup. If that container has half a pizza in it, some crumpled black plastic or half a roll of paper towel, the entire tote might get rejected -- off to the incinerator, or landfill.

That’s where about 85,000 tons from the Cape and Islands goes every year, says Parcell, and that’s just municipal trash, not including what commercial haulers lug from hotels, restaurants, schools, hospitals. Summer numbers are much higher than winter, but on average that’s 3.2 million pounds of residential garbage a week. The charge to towns to get rid of that is about $7 million in “tipping fees”; garbage gets hauled by truck and train, tipped onto a huge cement slab, sorted, burned or buried.

This is the reality behind household recycling effort. But guess what? People who understand the big picture turn focus on byproducts apart from mounds of plastic, glass, cardboard, and tin. Here’s where they go:

Organics, construction and demo — especially organics.

NEXT: Where we could make a really big impact if we got our recycling act together. Is Yarmouth our hope?

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