By Kai Sinclair
Imagine sitting in the board room of a powerful company and the board room table that you are seated at is resting upon a refurbished jet engine or perusing art at a modern museum to find that parts of a rusted bicycle had evolved into an elegant chandelier.
These occurrences are increasing as the recycling industry continues to grow. Between 1960 and 2013, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said the country’s rate of recycling increased from 6.4 percent to 34.3 percent, and continues to rise. The country recycled or composted 89 million of the year’s 258 million tons of solid waste in 2014, far exceeding the 15 million tons reported 24 years prior. The energy saved from recycling in 2014 alone there was enough to provide electricity to 30 million homes.
“There’s an interest from the public – people want to do the right thing with their stuff. There are a lot of people who don’t like to just throw things away,” Kelley Organek, Director of UpCycle Creative Reuse Center in Alexandria, Virginia, said.
With more citizens aware of and engaging in traditional waste recycling, industry leaders are looking to expand. From food composting, garment recycling, and upcycling – reusing to make items that are more valuable than the original ones - recycling is moving far beyond being green and towards being the driving force behind domestic economic and societal impacts.
How Recycling Works Today
The recycling process starts when everyday people participate in single-stream recycling by sorting recyclables, like soda bottles from other materials in the waste stream, like compostable materials.
That soda bottle is then collected by waste removal services and carted to a designated material recovery facility. These are specialized locations, different from waste management facilities that process trash.
The soda bottle and old printer paper that were placed together in a resident’s recycle bin must be separated from each other, as well as any other collected recyclables, in order to be sold with like materials to manufacturers. The better sorted the recycled materials are when they leave recycling plants, the more money it fetches on the market.
The collected waste is transferred to a conveyor belt where employees remove non-recyclables, like trash or plastic bags, from the stream. Any broken bits of glass or small pieces of debris often fall into containers to be taken, along with other non-recyclables, to landfills.
A series of magnets and tumblers remove aluminum containers and pieces of cardboard from the general stream. It then travels to more employees who remove any pieces of cardboard that managed to evade separation. Lighter weight paper is then removed from the remaining plastic containers.
When each material – aluminum, cardboard, light-weight paper, and plastics – reaches the end of its respective line, it is often packaged in bales for shipment to companies that purchase the recycled material to make new products.
Modern recycling contributes to environmental conservation by cutting back on the amount of new material needed to create new products according to Marjorie Griek, executive director of the National Recycling Coalition,
“You’re reducing the amount of energy it takes to go out and mine or extract that natural resource, bring it in, process it to a point where you can then make a product out of it,” Griek said. “You’ve cut that piece out and you save and reduce all the energy, plus you reduce all of the pollution associated with that – greenhouse gases, the damages to soil, and water and air.”
Economics of Recycling
Just as there is a cost associated with trash removal and processing, a similar fee is assigned to recycling services to cover the hauling and processing of the material. Annie White, manager of D.C. Public Works’ Office of Waste Diversion, said it costs Washington, D.C. $117.35 per ton to transport and process recycled waste (a bit higher than the market rate of $80 - $85) and $46.38 for trash.
Recycling has a third price which makes it even less expensive than trash collection: a rebate value. Since recycled materials are considered a commodity, they can be sold as raw material to manufacturers. There is a specific value that each jurisdiction gets back depending on the amount and type of recycled material they contribute.
“Every six months or so, [the material recovery facility] characterize[s] our stream based on what our composition is, and then based on the value of that stream, we get a rebate rate back,” White said. In the 2017 fiscal year, The District’s net rebate rate was $59.25 per ton, standard for similar municipalities. With rebate rates, many standard municipalities end up paying less for recycling services than for trash.
Traditionally, the costs of these services were funded by local taxes. This is still practiced in most towns and cities across the country; a few are adopting Pay-As-You-Throw Programs. These programs allow jurisdictions to bill residents monthly based on how much waste – retrash, recycling, and sometimes composting – they discard.
In Griek’s town in Colorado, she pays $11 per month for her 31-gallon trash bin and larger recycling and composting containers, while others pay more for larger trash containers.
The recycling industry has the power to stimulate community economies even further through job creation and wages. The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries worked with an independent economic firm to study the impact of the scrap recycling industry on the U.S. economy. The study, published last year, found that “people and firms that purchase, process and broker old materials to be manufactured into new products” created over 534,000 jobs in 2014, yielding a $116.97 billion economic impact.
The Future of Recycling
Considering technological advances, policy changes, and environmental awareness on the rise (environmental literacy was named a necessary skill for 21st century learners), those in the industry are excited to the see what’s the future holds for their growing field.
Griek sees a future where employees are no longer tasked with hand-sorting portions of the recycled waste stream.
“They’re training robots now with artificial intelligence to recognize different materials and sort them off of a moving line,” she said. While she admits the switch would leave little to no space for job creation in the sorting process, she’s seen it create an entirely new set of jobs.
““What we’ve seen in the couple facilities where they’ve been testing this, you’ve got people who are making and programming the robots, people servicing the robots, people who had been on the sort line are moving away from that and getting more engaged on the management level and doing other jobs in the facility.”
As traditional waste recycling grows, modernizes, and becomes an everyday staple in the lives of U.S. citizens, that leaves the door open for the lesser known and practiced composting and garment recycling.
Composting is the recycling of organic materials, like food scraps or fallen leaves, through a natural decomposition process. The resulting product is a nutrient-dense material that can be added to soil and used to grow new foods. As organic waste makes up 20 to 30 percent of the overall waste stream, composting would contribute greatly to the reduction of excess waste but is often the responsibility of citizens.
A growing list of cities, including Seattle, San Francisco, and soon Washington, D.C., are offering curb-side compost pickup. “There’s money put in the budget for 2023 to build a facility that would allow a program to roll out,” White said.
Another major contributor to the waste stream is clothing. The rise of “fast fashion” – clothing that is produced quickly and inexpensively in order to keep up with current trends – is leading to more unwanted clothes as the seasons change, thus creating more waste. According to the EPA, 25.5 billion pounds of usable textiles are thrown away each year, even though organizations and businesses like Goodwill offer donation programs.
Initiatives like ReThread DC aim to lessen that waste by helping those places promote their take-back programs, and in exchange those organizations will provide White’s office with data on the types and amounts of clothing they receive.
