Recycling Is Broken:
Most of us think of recycling as a service our city provides, but in reality it’s a business. There are no national laws governing the industry, which is frequently financed by municipalities. Many cities, like Philly, work with private contractors to collect recyclables and get them sorted and cleaned at material recovery facilities. From there, the paper, cardboard, plastic, glass, and aluminum are sold as commodities to various manufacturers.
All told, U.S. recyclers process about 61 million metric tons of material a year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Until recently, China was a huge buyer, taking in about 16 million tons of American scrap commodities in 2016, including 60 percent of U.S. waste-paper exports. That all changed last year, when the country started rolling out strict import bans as part of a national campaign to combat pollution. In January 2018, China banned importing 24 foreign materials including mixed paper and post-consumer plastic. Two months later, it tightened its contamination thresholds for recyclable paper products not covered by the ban, including corrugated cardboard, to 0.5 percent.
The effect on the U.S. recycling business was, as one industry expert put it, like an “earthquake.” Mixed paper and plastic exports to China plunged more than 90 percent between January 2017 and January 2018, according to data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. International Trade Commission. As the industry scrambled to find new buyers, prices went through the floor. Anne Germain, Vice President of Technical and Regulatory Affairs at the National Waste and Recycling Association, an industry trade group, told me that mixed paper went from selling for about $100 a ton to a high of about $3 a ton.
For products that weren’t outright banned, China’s new 0.5 percent contamination standard posed a daunting challenge. Today, the average U.S. recyclable load is about 25 percent contaminated. To make their commodities saleable, material recovery facilities started hiring more “pickers” and buying more equipment to remove items that shouldn’t be in the recycling, in addition to slowing down their processing lines.
“If you slow down the line, your entire throughput is gonna go down,” Germain said. “So you’re gonna process fewer tons of material. You’re getting less money [and] your costs are going up.”
Because they enjoy lower shipping costs, coastal regions were more dependent on China for their recycling, and that’s where the impacts of the new policies were felt first. But as New Yorkers and Californians scrambled to find new buyers for bales of plastic scrap and cardboard, including the domestic recyclers favored by middle America, “it became a bidding war” to get manufacturers to take inventory, Germain said. “Eventually, the whole country was impacted.”
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