By John Dorschner
One of the top recycling experts in America has two pieces of good news for those of us who want to help the planet:
(1) Prices of
most recyclables, which had been devastated by the Chinese withdrawal several
years ago, have rebounded during the pandemic. That’s important because it
gives recycling companies more of an incentive to find ways to get material.
(2) Technologies
to improve single-stream recycling are soaring ahead that can greatly benefit
the sometimes sloppy system that dominates most of North America.
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| Chaz Miller |
RECYCLING IS LIKE A CAKE
Miller suggests that we think of curbside recycling economics as a cake:
“Fifty-five to 65 percent of what people put out for
curbside is paper,” he said, meaning all its variants, including cardboard.
“Right now, that has a very substantial value. Then there the other two
valuables – PET [plastic] bottles mostly and aluminum.”
In terms of weight, “paper is the basic substance of
the cake. Aluminum and PET are the icing on the cake.”
To put it in perspective, he said, consider that old
cardboard boxes [OCC in industry-talk) are now getting about $150 a ton in the
Southeast, with residential mixed paper [which is what comes out of Miami area
recycling plants] getting about $106 a ton.
PET meanwhile is about 37 cents a pound, and aluminum
is $1.24 a pound. Miller notes that the industry measures paper by the ton,
whereas other recyclables are generally by the pound. At those rates, plastic
bottles would be $740 a ton and aluminum $2480 a ton – dwarfing the value of
paper.
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| Cardboard and other paper before the sorting process at Waste Connections recycling facility near Miami International Airport. Photo by John Dorschner |
For a long time, China bolstered prices in recycling.
Huge cargo ships had brought goods to America and then, rather than return
empty, they filled with recyclables. According to United Nations Comtrade data,
China imported 42 percent of global plastic and 40 percent of waste paper until
about five years ago.
Then China announced it was getting too much
contaminated material. It said it no longer wanted to be the “world’s garbage
dump.” In 2018, the country reduced its recycling imports dramatically. Prices
plummeted.
Some observers thought that China was hitting back at
the United States in the midst of the Trump trade war bruhaha. “It’s utter
nonsense that we were shipping garbage to China,” Miller said.
"CHINA: CONVENIENT ANSWER TO INCONVENIENT QUESTION"
Still, some experts used the China change as a wakeup call. “China was the convenient answer to an inconvenient question,” wrote Antonis Mavropoulos, president of the International Solid Waste Association. “For the recycling industry, the question was, and still is, how to find end-users for a continuously increasing stream of recyclable materials.
"The difficulty is that, as we have learnt, the more the
recyclables we collect the less their purity and the worse their quality.
China, as the global hub for recyclable materials, provided an easy answer for
some time," Mavropoulos said.
“For at least two decades, it was receiving
recyclables, especially plastics, with high impurities. Most of the recyclables
that were shipped to China were not suitable for other regional and local
end-users, in USA, EU and Australia due to their low-quality. However, this was
a win-win situation. The western world was able build high recycling rates,
ignoring the quality problems involved, and China received cheap, low-end
materials that were further processed or used as a cheap fuel, with vast
environmental impacts in both cases. China’s ban brings us back to reality.”
The solution, Mavropoulos wrote in a blog, is to
target “high-quality recyclables. This does not always mean higher recycling
rates, although in many cases this is definitely part of the job. In some
cases, it means that we should work hard to ‘purify’ further the existing
recycling activities to make them more viable…. It will take us a transit
period of 2-4 years, but there is no doubt that sooner or later, there will be
a way to deal with the problem with minimum environmental impacts.”
What he meant was that consumers needed to recycle smarter and provide less contaminated material.
Indeed, there was a four-year
transit period, but not exactly in the way that Mavropoulos envisioned.
PRICES DOUBLING
This month, RecyclingMarkets.net reported how prices
continued to surge, with PET containers
(#1 plastic bottles) up 24 percent and aluminum cans up 25 percent over the
month before. Recycled plastic bottles are now selling for three times what
they were a year ago. Aluminum has doubled in the past year. Mixed paper has
more than doubled in the past year. Cardboard has gone from $82 to $134 a ton
in the past year, the website reported.
The pandemic is responsible for quite a bit of the
increases, Miller said. People were ordering more online, which meant more cardboard
– and more need for recycled cardboard. Also, the pandemic interrupted supply
chains, making some materials more difficult to get, sending the prices up.
Meanwhile, recycling companies are more interested in
investing in equipment that will result in higher-quality recyclables.
Miller pointed to a Winnipeg, Canada, state-of-the
art recycling processing center that he visited. “The technology to clean up
recyclables just keeps evolving. It’s stunning the changes in the last decade. Optical
sorters are very important.”
These sorters can distinguish different materials and
send them off to separate bins. Robotic arms now can select items of different
sizes and sort them. “And particularly artificial intelligence,” operating
machines that learn to distinguish between materials. In another five years,
there may be far more advances, Miller said he was told.
“You’re never going to totally replace people,” Miller said, but as systems evolve, workers will be used “for more sophisticated, more highly skilled jobs.”
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| The Winnipeg state-of-the-art recycling plant can sort plastics that facilities in South Florida can't. Photo from City of Winnipeg website |
The Winnipeg facility has seven optical sorters (Some
U.S. facilities often have just one or two.) The equipment, made by
Canada-based MachineX, isn’t cheap. Each sorter can run more than $500,000, but
the automated system allows the city to be much more accurate in separating
materials – and handling more types of plastic than many U.S. centers, such as
food containers, plastic tubs and types of rigid plastic that are not recycled
in South Florida processing cetners.
The Winnipeg facility boasts an “advanced glass
separation system,” but Miller says that glass remains a challenge in most
places. In the Miami area, for example, recycled glass is transported almost
200 miles to a plant in Sarasota.
“Glass is more difficult because it breaks,” Miller
said. “And it comes in three colors -- green and brown and clear.” They’re more
valuable separated by color, but in many single-stream systems they get mixed
together, making them worth considerably less.
What’s more, the basic materials of glass “are common
and relatively inexpensive,” meaning there’s not much difference in the cost of
new material versus recycled. “Optical sorters to separate glass keeping
better, but glass is always going to be a problem,” Miller said.
GERMANS, SWISS AND JAPANESE DO IT BETTER
Some other countries are more exacting than America
in recycling. The Japanese village where residents separate materials into
30-some bins is an outlier, Miller said, but he recalled that Tokyo requires
material separated into three bins.
“The Germans
and the Swiss and the Japanese have a very strong recycling ethic,” with strict
requirements. In Germany, for example, you have to put your bin out at a
certain time and retrieve it by a certain time. “You can’t leave it out all
day.” And if neighbors see violations, they report them.
“That would never fly in America,” Miller said. Many
Americans bristle anytime government require them to something.
Still, some U.S. places do dual stream. “I happen to
live in one of them,” Miller said. Montgomery County, Maryland, a Washington
suburb, separates paper products from other material “That gives you very clean
paper,” because it doesn’t get contaminated by the moisture and food particles
often found in other materials.” New York City also uses dual stream.
“It costs a little more,” Miller said, because the
collection trucks must have two receptacles, but it delivers improved quality. Still,
the trade-off is that “you get a little higher participation off with single-stream.”
The simpler the process, the more people are likely to use it.
Miller is adamant that we can do better. As he told
Waste360.com, “We had a lot of crap in the recycling bin because people are in
a hurry. They didn't take the time to do it…. I wish I could say that the
public has gotten better recycling over the last 50 years. In terms of
quantity, absolutely. In terms of quality, there are still issues.”
For more on the specific do’s and don’ts of recycling,
see my post HERE.
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