“Our expectation is that they are selling it to mills and facilities that are handling it in an environmentally appropriate way,” Ranta said. “Brokers have relationships with those mills overseas and would report back to us. In the time I’ve been here — 18 years — I haven’t come across instances in which facilities or mills are not handling material in an environmentally appropriate way. … The customer has to trust that the city of Vancouver, Clark County and other cities in the area have vetted us as a contractor and trust that we’re doing the best we can with materials we collect.”
Transparency lacking
Just because plastic is exported doesn’t mean it won’t be properly recycled, especially now that so many countries are cracking down. But in our current system, we just can’t be sure. Waste haulers sell the bales of plastic to other businesses, and both parties generally keep the transactions confidential.
“Little information is available about where these commodities are sent or what portion is ultimately recycled into new products and packaging,” according to the state’s review of plastic recycling. “When information is provided, there is no independent verification of the claims made.”
Although the Department of Ecology doesn’t have the authority to regulate the commodities transactions and verify the final disposition of plastics packaging, it should clarify reporting requirements and better collect the data, the state review recommends.
Recycling-minded consumers crave greater transparency.
Hazel Dell resident Patty Page has been active in the recycling movement since its infancy, when she lived in Portland and helped with efforts there.
You Can Help
What can you do about the plastic problem?
• When you make purchases, don’t rely on a label that says the packaging is recyclable. Lighter packaging, regardless of whether it’s recyclable, is generally a better choice for the environment, said David Allaway, a nationally recognized expert on recycling policy who works for Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality.
• Make sure what you put in your curbside bin is actually accepted. (There’s an app for that: RecycleRight.) Then make sure that what you toss in there is empty, clean and dry.
“It’s OK to throw things away sometimes,” said Alli Kingfisher, plastics policy specialist for the Washington Department of Ecology. “Not everything belongs in the bin.”
If your local jurisdiction doesn’t accept a type of plastic, she said, “it means they don’t have a market for it or it contaminates more valuable material.”
“Wishful recycling” or “wishcycling” (that is, putting things in the blue bin that aren’t recyclable but you wish they were) is what’s causing the system to collapse, Allaway said.
• Consider the impact of the entire product’s lifecycle when you buy.
“Ninety-nine percent of the carbon impact is a consequence of production; only 1 percent is the consequence of disposal,” Allaway said.
• Buy less.
“One thing that gets lost in the recycling discussion is the power of reducing materials used in the first place,” said Dan Leif, managing editor of Resource Recycling, a trade publication based in Portland. “If you can reduce the amount of packaging or materials that you’re buying and then have to move into the waste stream … if you can just not have that stuff in the first place, it’s going to have the most benefit to the environment.”
“Ever since then, when I learned about the reduce-reuse-recycle mantra, I’ve tried to do whatever I could to reduce my garbage footprint. There have been a lot of ups and downs,” Page said.
“I sympathize with people who try to do the right thing, because the rules keep changing. For most people, it seems really arbitrary. It has to do with the market, which goes up and down,” she said. “It gets convoluted because manufacturers do their best to justify the existence of plastics and pretend that they’re recyclable when they’re not, and they’re not taking responsibility.”
She has experience navigating all that complexity. For the past decade, she has helped coordinate a drop-off recycling program for specialty, noncurbside items at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Vancouver. The program went dormant during the pandemic, but in normal times, churchgoers could drop off materials on their way to services.
The church members also pool items for collection by Ridwell. The Seattle-based company charges customers a fee to pick up a small menu of items in Seattle, Denver and greater Portland that can’t go in the blue bin, like plastic bags. The company reports where the material is going, how it’s used and how much of it is too dirty to recycle and has to go to the landfill. The plastic bags, for example, go to Trex, which makes composite decking, and about 2.2 percent of the bags collected were contaminated, according to Ridwell.
Scaling up that level of transparency would be challenging. Curbside recycling handles far more materials, both in volume and type, in a fluctuating market and a fragmented system.
Recyclable vs. recycled
Plastics may all be marked with chasing arrows and a number from one to seven, but that doesn’t mean recycling them is actually viable. Waste Connections takes bottles (No. 1, also known as polyethylene terephthalate or PET), jugs (No. 2, aka high-density polyethylene or HDPE) and tubs (No. 5, aka polypropylene or PP). And even among those curbside-accepted items, demand varies.
Market demand for both PET and HDPE plastic is strong right now, as evidenced by rising prices for bales, said Dan Leif, managing editor of Resource Recycling, a trade publication based in Portland.
Turning the bales into usable plastic first requires separating out contamination, removing labels, cleaning the material and shredding it into flakes, Leif explained. Then those flakes are turned into pellets, which manufacturers use to make their products.
“There’s a lot that has to happen to take a plastic bottle or tub and turn it back into a material that can be used for manufacturing,” Leif said. “It’s a really technical process. That’s one of the issues in trying to increase plastic recycling rates. … You have to make sure there’s a market pull all through the processing and pre-manufacturing chain. You need that end-user demand”
As Kingfisher, the state policy analyst, put it, “We are very good at collecting the material. We’re not very good at having places for the material to go.”
That’s why the agency is spearheading a program to bolster recycling markets and processing in Washington. And why the state has set a goal that packaging sold here incorporates at least 20 percent post-consumer recycled content by 2025.
In addition, the state’s review of plastic recycling recommends the Legislature adopt a deposit return system for beverage containers (much like what Oregon has had for years), and require “extended producer responsibility” for all packaging and paper.
So far, only Maine and Oregon have passed producer-responsibility laws, and that was just this year. The laws aim to shift the burden from consumers to producers.
Oregon’s law requires companies selling packaging, paper products and food service ware in the state to join stewardship organizations by 2024 and then pay fees to support recycling programs and infrastructure in 2025.
The law also has a waste-reduction component, said David Allaway, a nationally recognized expert on recycling policy who works for Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality. Part of the fees collected would, say, pay for dishwashers at schools so students could get their lunches on durable trays instead of disposable ones.
When it reconvenes, the Washington Legislature will consider a producer responsibility bill introduced earlier this year.
Reduce, reuse
The state has set a goal that plastic packaging sold here is 100 percent recyclable, reusable or compostable by 2025, but Allaway warns that a focus on recycling is not enough to lessen environmental damage, let alone avert the catastrophic global change already underway.
No country has ever achieved a recycling rate of 90 percent, and even if it could, a study in Oregon suggests it would reduce the carbon footprint a mere 3 percent, Allaway said.
“Recycling is a necessary element for a sustainable future, but it’s just that it’s so inadequate, so insufficient,” Allaway said.
He worked on a study in Oregon that found that labels like “recyclable” or “compostable” in no way indicated a product was actually better for the environment.
“It is grossly unfair to expect consumers to be able to navigate thousands of purchasing decisions a year, especially when the only information they are given are these attributes, like ‘recyclable’ or ‘compostable.’ It’s all meaningless in terms of impact,” Allaway said. “The only way out of this morass is to stop blaming individual consumers and effect some systemic changes that, first of all, get high-impact materials out of commerce, and then make it really easy for consumers to do the right thing by making every choice a sustainable choice.”
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What really happens to plastics intended for recycling in Clark County? - The Columbian
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