Where To Put Plastic That Recycling Doesn't Want?

 By John Dorschner

You want to know how much plastic does NOT get recycled?

My esteemed spouse, super-recycler Kathy Martin, offers a graphic explanation – this photo of a black plastic bag filled with stuff that should be recycled, but isn’t.

Eventually, she found a company that would accept it. For a hefty cost and a heftier dose of uncertainty. More on that in a bit. 

The background: Earlier this year, I did a series of articles about the do’s and don’t’s of recycling, based on a visit to a Miami recycling center. A key lesson: A LOT of plastic, even if it has a good recycling number, gets rejected by our recycling stations.

That includes the pictured clam-shell Nellie’s egg carton, which is a primo PET 1.

Experts explain that the single-stream automated systems that recycles most of America (including Miami Shores and Miami-Dade) is set up only for certain shapes of plastic – mostly narrow-necked bottles labeled No. 1 and No. 2. Virtually all other plastic goes to landfill.

If you put unwanted materials in your recycling bins, it just gums up the recycling system and makes matters worse.

 For details, see: https://miamiwebnews.blogspot.com/p/the-real-dos-and-donts-of-recycling.html

Nationwide, only 5 percent of the 40 million or so metric tons of plastic we use each year in this country end up in recycling, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

For roughly three months after my reports, Kathy set the rejects aside in a large plastic bag. She was determined to find a place that would recycle the stuff.

And she did: TerraCycle, a company that offers to take virtually any plastic and get it recycled.

                     TERRACYCLE: Hope for Hopeless Plastic

Such dedication comes with a cost: Its smallest container costs $199, according to the website. That box measures 11 inches wide, 11 inches deep and 20 inches wide. To be fair, that includes mailing costs. You order a box, load it up and send it off. TerraCycle takes care of it from there.

I guessed that Kathy’s bag of plastic rejects would require maybe six or so of those boxes (assuming that we crushed the bulky clam-shell containers). That would work out to roughly $1200 for a three-month supply. Pretty darn expensive.

Months ago, I asked one of the country’s top recycling experts, Chaz Miller, what he thought of the TerraCycle. He had been head of a major recycling trade association and was recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Recycling Coalition.

                WHY PAY WHAT TERRACYCLE ASKS?

Miller’s response: “I don’t know why anyone would pay what TerraCycle is asking nor do I know if their claims have been audited.”

I researched TerraCycle and didn’t come up with much. So, being mostly retired, I just let the matter sit. But as the holidays approached, with sons coming for a visit, Kathy cleaned up the house – and (with considerable sadness) wanted to put the big black bag of plastic in the garbage.

I looked again at TerraCycle -- and came across an astonishing story by Leslie Kaufman in Bloomberg News. To see what happens to stuff sent off in boxes, she put traceable tags on three items, including “a wrapper for an individual serving of Turkish dried apricots.”

She learned that the bulk of TerraCycle’s business was not selling boxes to individuals but by gaining corporate clients like Walmart that wanted to do the right thing. That’s how TerraCycle gain $71 million revenue the previous year, according to its financial reports.


Kaufman discovered that a European documentary film crew had already tracked 20 TerraCycle bales of plastic it claimed to be recycling in the United Kingdom. Trackers showed the bales went to Bulgaria. TerraCycle said a third-party processor “put the bales on the wrong truck.”

One of Kaufman’s trackers ended up in a recycling facility used by TerraCycle. It sat there for four months, then went silent.

For months, the apricot wrapper and a baby-food pouch sat in an Illinois warehouse used by the recycler. Then suddenly both moved. The baby-food pouch “went across town to a trash transfer station, then stopped.” The wrapper moved 60 miles to a landfill in Pontiac, Ill.

The reporter jumped on a plane to see what had happened. She found that in both cases the trackers were buried in mounds of garbage and inaccessible. Going to the warehouse, she confronted the manager: “He adamantly denies anything went to landfill.” He suggests the “trackers must have been pulled out by a magnet on their sorting lines that separate metals from plastics.”

                                           RAISING MORE QUESTIONS

Kaufman writes: “Yet, like so much in the plastics recycling world, the explanation only raises more questions.” She visited the warehouse and saw no magnets pulling off metals. “And even if the tags were lifted by magnet, why didn’t they go to metal recycling instead of the landfill?”

The head of TerraCycle has another explanation: “Gerber doesn’t pay to recycle any metal because it’s not part of the product. It would be assumed that any metal found in the baby food pouches was an accidental contaminant” and would have been thrown in the trash.

 Kaufman goes on: “This explanation also doesn’t track for me because metal, unlike plastic, has an actual resale market, so it would make more sense if [the recycler] was going to go to the trouble of pulling it out to resell it…. I realize at this point that the answer will never be definitive.”

And there it goes. Pay $199 for a small box with no certainty about where the product ends up?

I put the big bag of plastics in the alley for the garbage truck.

Maybe someday we’ll find a better way of dealing with plastic – perhaps by using less of it.

Kaufman’s full story can be found here: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-terracycle-tom-szaky/

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