By John Dorschner
Miamiwebnews.com
Many recycling experts’ advice is to Keep It Simple.
“When in doubt, throw it out,” says Dawn McCormick,
spokeswoman for Waste Management's massive Reuter Recycling Center in far
western Broward.
If that plastic toy or those Christmas lights can be
recycled, it helps the environment, right?
Except they can’t, and they lead to “contamination,”
which means they can get mixed with good recyclables, causing a bunch of stuff
to be sent to the dump. A 2020 Miami-Dade survey showed that 48.8 percent of
recycling was “contaminated” and was sent to landfill.
“Wish recycling,” says McCormack, can lead to
contaminating good stuff.
As another recycling pro puts it: “If you take three
cups of chicken soup, and you mix in one cup of chicken shit, what have you
got? Four cups of chicken shit.”
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| Waste Management's advice list keeps it simple. |
For the conscientious, plastic can create problems.
While many residents are eager to recycle all the
plastic they can to save the oceans and the rest of the planet, most experts
say that the recyclable numbers on plastic should be ignored. Single-stream
recycling, which is what we have in South Florida and most places in the
country, accepts mostly small-neck plastic bottles – water bottles, beverage
containers, milk jugs, detergent containers and shampoo bottles.
“Numbers on plastics are no longer useful indicators
of recyclability,” says the Miami-Dade recycling website. “Miami-Dade County
recycles plastic bottle containers regardless of the number listed.”
The plastic numbering system
is “confusing, which is why we don’t use it in our public information,” says
Jeanmarie Massa, recycling manager for Miami-Dade County. “It is my
understanding that even the Plastics Council has issues with the numbering system.
For plastic items, bottles are the most recyclable plastic item
regardless of the number on the bottom. This means there is always a market for
plastic bottles.
“When you add other plastic containers -- yogurt
cups, food containers (clam shells) plastic utensils, etc., you increase the
number of items on the sorting line that must be sorted making the sorting line
less efficient and the sale of the other items may not cover the cost of
sorting them or there may be no market at all.”
To understand the “sorting line,” see my story, available
HERE.
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| Waste Connections instruction sheet. Its center near State Road 112 and NW 37th Avenue serves residents of Miami, Miami Beach and Miami Shores. |
The other big recycling problem is glass: It’s less than worthless. The closest company that will take recycled glass from South Florida is in Sarasota, 230 miles from Miami. Waste Management and Waste Connections, two major South Florida recyclers, truck glass to Sarasota’s Strategic Materials, which charges to accept the glass, in contrast to other recycled materials, where the haulers receive at least some compensation.
“Glass costs more to the environment than it is
worth,” says John Heinemann of Waste Connections. Trucks burn plenty of gas carrying
that glass – creating carbon gases that heat the atmosphere.
It’d be better for the environment if glass were just
tossed in the dump, but when most cities suggest that, they get howls of
protest, and so they allow glass back in the bins, and wine drinkers can feel
good.
Isn’t there a better solution? A friend of mine suggested,
“Well, they should build a glass processing plant closer to Miami.”
NO ONE WANTS GLASS
That’s not the American way. Governments contract with
private companies to process recycling, and those companies find other
companies to take the bales of material, generally getting paid for the
material. No South Florida private company sees any profit in processing glass.
Complicating matters, single-stream recycling centers
are rarely identical, and each can have slightly different requirements. It’s
best to check the website of the city or county that handles your recycling.
The Miami-Dade recycling WEBSITE is the
most detailed of local dos-and-don’ts lists. Its rules generally hold true for
all South Florida recycling (with small exceptions, to be discussed in a bit):
Miami-Dade emphasizes THE SIMPLE 5, Paper products,
cardboard, cans, cartons and bottles.
Stuff to leave out:
Generally all electronic waste (computer monitors, say), medical waste,
construction materials, yard clippings and Styrofoam.
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| A big no-no for all recycling centers: Material in plastic garbage bags. The plastic gums up single-stream systems. The Waste Connections center shuts down several times a day to remove the plastic "wrapables" clogging the gears. |
Among the biggest no-nos: Anything that can tangle the conveyer belt process, including plastic garbage bags and any other loose plastic. Strings of Christmas lights are a big headache. They often show up in recycling (“they’re glass, right?”) at the beginning of the holiday season (last year’s lights no long work) or at the end of the season (they stopped working). They tangle up gears and other parts of the process – shutting down everything until workers wrestle them out of the system.
After listing the basics, the Miami-Dade website offers
plenty of specifics, with A-Z listings you can click on.
I was
particularly interested in plastic, because in our household, my
super-conscientious spouse wants to recycle all the plastic she can.
'DON'T OVERTHINK PLASTIC'
Looking under plastic, the Miami-Dade site says these
items should NOT be put in your recycling: “plastic
bags, cups, utensils and plates, clamshell containers, polystyrene (foam)
products, egg cartons and trays, margarine and butter tubs, yogurt cups,
plastic hangers.”
To keep it
simple, most city websites, such as Miami’s, limit plastic to small-mouthed
plastic bottles.
Miami Beach adds
this insightful note: “Plastics are known to negatively impact the environment
if not disposed or recycled properly. When looking to recycling plastics, don’t
over think it. Just worry about recycling plastic bottles with narrow tops.
… When in doubt –throw it out.”
There are differences between processing centers. Waste
Connections’ Miami’s site bales No. 1 and No. 2 plastics – that’s basically
water/soda bottles and detergent/shampoo/milk jugs. Heinemann says it doesn’t
matter what the shape of the plastic is. To make it easier for residents, Waste
Connection’s instruction sheet for South Florida simply shows six kinds of
plastic bottles.
For Waste Management, the system accepts small neck
bottles regardless of recycling number. McCormack says clamshell food
containers – the kind you often see from supermarkets or Uber Eats – don’t work
with the Reuter system.
Another difference: Poly-coated milk and juice
cartons – technically known as aseptic containers – get recycled by Waste
Management. They don’t at Waste Connections.
Staffers at Waste Connections recycling site say that
pizza boxes are acceptable cardboard if they don’t have food particles/grease
inside. Virtually all city and county sites, however, say a solid no to pizza
boxes, because so many are greasy.
THREE QUESTIONABLE ITEMS
When I visited the Waste Connections site, I brought
along three items that my hyper-conscientious wife wanted to know about.
One was a
small plastic top for a sauce container we got with an Uber Eats meal. It was
labeled a No. 1 plastic, but a staffer said it was too small and light and
would get bounced into a reject pile before getting into a plastics bin.
Another item was a clamshell food container that was
labeled a No. 1 plastic. One staffer said that might be able to make it through
the process.
The third item was a chicken broth container. Its
outside was a coated paper. Inside was a metal-foil liner. It was labeled with
a recycling symbol, and so my wife was hopeful.
Heinemann shook his head. The paper was coated with
plastic, meaning it wasn’t acceptable mixed paper, and someone would have to go
to a lot of trouble to strip out the foil to make the metal recyclable. “Too
much labor to do it,” Heinemann said.
The best solution, of course, is look for
alternatives, such as this one offered by the Miami-Dade website: “Consider
purchasing 5-gallon water jugs for your home or office and use washable
containers instead of plastic water bottles. This will save you money and help
the environment.”
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