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China Bans Import of the West's Plastics
China Bans Import of the West's Plastics
Jan. 11, 2018
In 2017, China announce that it planned to impose "new standards" on the waste that was imported there. These new standards have been in full effect for a year and the impact is global. Though this is a worldwide crisis situation, it is time for the Renewable Energy industry to step up to the plate with solutions to alleviate the problematic storage of the materials previously recycled. (Read more at link below)
China Bans Import of the West's Plastics
China Bans Import of the West's Plastics
China Bans Import of the West's Plastics
China's decision to end import of plastic waste will end up in millions of tonnes of displaced plastic rubbish.
China's decision to stop accepting plastic waste from other countries is causing plastic to stockpile around the globe, and wealthy countries must find a way to slow the accumulation of one of the most ubiquitous materials on the planet, a group of scientists said on Wednesday.
The report titled: 'The Chinese import ban and its impact on global plastic waste trade', sought to quantify the effect of China's policy on the worldwide trade in plastic waste, and found that an estimated of 111 million metric tonnes of plastic waste will be displaced by 2030. (Read more at link below)
Recycling In the Dumps
China Bans Import of the West's Plastics
Recycling In the Dumps
Market Forces Put America’s Recycling Industry in the Dumps
BY MARY ESCH Associated Press Sunday, October 14, 2018
America’s recycling industry is in the dumps.
A crash in the global market for recyclables is forcing communities to make hard choices about whether they can afford to keep recycling or should simply send all those bottles, cans and plastic containers to the landfill.
Mountains of paper have piled up at sorting centers, worthless. Cities and towns that once made money on recyclables are instead paying high fees to processing plants to take them. Some financially strapped recycling processors have shut down entirely, leaving municipalities with no choice but to dump or incinerate their recyclables.
As cost skyrocket, more cities stop recycling – WSJ
by Michael Corkery
March 16, 2019
Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country.
Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. And last month, officials in the central Florida city of Deltona faced the reality that, despite their best efforts to recycle, their curbside program was not working and suspended it.
Those are just three of the hundreds of towns and cities across the country that have canceled recycling programs, limited the types of material they accepted or agreed to huge price increases.
“We are in a crisis moment in the recycling movement right now,” said Fiona Ma, the treasurer of California, where recycling costs have increased in some cities.
Prompting this nationwide reckoning is China, which until January 2018 had been a big buyer of recyclable material collected in the United States. That stopped when Chinese officials determined that too much trash was mixed in with recyclable materials like cardboard and certain plastics. After that, Thailand and India started to accept more imported scrap, but even they are imposing new restrictions.
The turmoil in the global scrap markets began affecting American communities last year, and the problems have only deepened.
With fewer buyers, recycling companies are recouping their lost profits by charging cities more, in some cases four times what they charged last year.
Amid the soaring costs, cities and towns are making hard choices about whether to raise taxes, cut other municipal services or abandon an effort that took hold during the environmental movement of the 1970s.
“Recycling has been dysfunctional for a long time,” said Mitch Hedlund, executive director of Recycle Across America, a nonprofit organization that pushes for more standardized labels on recycling bins to help people better sort material. “But not many people really noticed when China was our dumping ground.”
Perhaps counterintuitively, the big winners appear to be the nation’s largest recyclers, like Waste Management and Republic Services, which are also large trash collectors and landfill owners.
Recycling had been one of the least lucrative parts of their business, trailing hauling and landfills. Analysts say many waste companies had historically viewed recycling as a “loss leader,” offering the service largely to win over a municipality’s garbage business.
That equation is starting to change. While there remains a viable market in the United States for scrap like soda bottles and cardboard, it is not large enough to soak up all of the plastics and paper that Americans try to recycle. The recycling companies say they cannot depend on selling used plastic and paper at prices that cover their processing costs, so they are asking municipalities to pay significantly more for their recycling services. Some companies are also charging customers additional “contamination” fees for recycled material that is mixed in with trash.
The higher recycling fees, analysts say, will help bolster the largest companies’ already booming businesses. Waste Management reported strong operating profits in 2018, while Republic reported increased revenue driven by its waste business.
Most of the industry’s landfill increases were driven by economic growth: The more Americans consume, the more garbage they generate. But at least some of the higher volume were recyclables that could not be sold and repurposed, analysts say.
Some municipal leaders say they are growing wary of companies that control virtually every aspect of the waste and recycling system.
“Are these contamination rates truly high, or is it about benefiting their corporate interest?” asked Mike Ryan, the mayor of Sunrise, Fla. “We can’t afford to have inspectors constantly looking over their shoulders.”
Sunrise's mayor, Mike Ryan, said of the shift to energy-generating incineration: "It’s not what most people think of as recycling, but it is better than the alternative. "Credit Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
Sunrise's mayor, Mike Ryan, said of the shift to energy-generating incineration: "It’s not what most people think of as recycling, but it is better than the alternative. "Credit Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
Unable to afford the higher costs, Sunrise decided to burn its recycling in a facility that turns waste into energy rather than send it to a landfill.
“It’s not what most people think of as recycling, but it is better than the alternative,” Mr. Ryan said.
For cities like Philadelphia, recycling had long been a point of pride. Over the last decade, Philadelphia went from having one of the lowest recycling rates among big cities to one of the best.
When China was buying cardboard and plastics, recycling made money for the city some years. But last year, Philadelphia was hit with an “outrageously high” price increase, a city spokeswoman said in a statement.
The city came up with what it says will be a temporary solution. It identified the neighborhoods with the most contamination in its recycling bins and started sending their material to an incinerator in nearby Chester, Pa. The rest still send their material to a recycling facility.
The incinerator converts the waste to energy, which can be sold back to the electrical grid, said Carlton Williams, Philadelphia’s streets commissioner. But that has done little to alleviate many residents’ environmental angst and concerns about increased air pollution in Chester.
“Residents say, ‘You are taking all our recycling efforts, and you are burning it?’” Mr. Williams said. “They hear the word ‘burn’ and they think it is an environmental disaster.”
City officials are working to negotiate a more affordable contract that would restore recycling to all of Philadelphia this year.
In Deltona, higher costs were not the only factor behind the decision last month to stop recycling. Even if the city agreed to pay the additional $25,000 a month that its recycling company was charging, there was no assurance that all the plastic containers and junk mail would be turned into something new, Mayor Heidi Herzberg said.
“We all did recycling because it was easy, but the reality is that not much was actually being recycled,” Ms. Herzberg said.
The troubles with recycling have amplified calls for limiting waste at its source. Measures like banning plastic bags and straws, long pushed by environmental groups, are gaining traction more widely.
The waste-to-energy facility in Davie, Fla. Like Sunrise, Philadelphia is using an incinerator, but for the recycling from only about half its residents. Credit Scott McIntyre for The New York Times.
The waste-to-energy facility in Davie, Fla. Like Sunrise, Philadelphia is using an incinerator, but for the recycling from only about half its residents. Credit Scott McIntyre for The New York Times.
This month, a lobbying group for Connecticut municipalities, citing the chaos in local recycling programs, urged the governor to focus on restricting plastic bags, straws and packaging.
“The sooner we accept the economic impracticality of recycling, the sooner we can make serious progress on addressing the plastic pollution problem,” said Jan Dell, an engineer who leads Last Beach Cleanup. It’s an advocacy group that works with investors and nonprofits to reduce plastic pollution.
Some large waste producers are still going through the motions of recycling, no matter how futile.
Across Memphis, large commercial enterprises have had to stop recycling for now because of contamination problems. But the airport is keeping its recycling bins in place to preserve “the culture” of recycling among passengers and employees, a spokesman said.
“We want to ensure that we are able to have a seamless transition if and when single-stream recycling returns to the Memphis area,” the spokesman, Glen Thomas, said in an email.
Michael Corkery is a business reporter who covers the retail industry and its impact on consumers, workers and the economy. He joined The Times in 2014 and was previously a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and the Providence Journal. @mcorkery5
A version of this article appears in print on March 17, 2019, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: As Costs Surge, Cities’ Recycling Becomes Refuse. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
On line article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/business/local-recycling-costs.html
Landfill Manager’s Notebook: Recycling— It’s Time to Grow Up
by Neal Bolton
June 5, 2018
In our industry, we are all familiar with the phrase “integrated waste management”—a term that is generally understood to include the full spectrum of collections, processing, diversion, transfer, and disposal. In this particular column, I’d like to touch on the topic of diversion— that’s right, recycling.
Yes, I know, most of you think of me as a landfill guy, but our industry is incredibly integrated and we all wear different hats. So even though I have been to over 500 landfills during my career as an operations and safety consultant, along the way I have also worked at hundreds of transfer stations, MRFs, organics facilities, and collection operations. Over those years, recycling awareness and recycling activities have become increasingly integrated into the waste industry.
Either by choice or circumstance, recycling has turned a corner—it has crossed the Rubicon.
The fact is, recycling is growing up.
For too long, too many recycling programs have been subsidized. Often, these programs didn’t generate enough revenue to be self-sufficient, so they pulled revenue into the system.
from landfill disposal fees, taxes, grants, or the general fund. In other cases, the extra cost of recycling was just folded into the disposal cost where it could essentially be hidden.
Because even though many people believe that recycling always makes money, it has not been politically correct to point out that some diversion programs may actually cost more than landfill disposal. Did I just say that?
Now before you send me an email or write a letter to the editor to call me out, please hear me out. I have seen many recycling programs that were self-sufficient, generated net revenue, and could stand on their own. These are what I would call mature, self-sufficient recycling programs. But let’s get real: many do not.
A significant number of recycling programs have only survived through financial subsidy, and if you don’t believe that’s true, you really haven’t been paying attention.
From the organics programs that create a great product yet have no viable market to the glass recycling programs that continue to extract glass while the piles keep growing—some recycling programs simply don’t cut the mustard.
And on a recent note—one category that is decidedly off-key is the mixed paper recyclables we had been sending overseas until finally someone pulled back the curtain and said “Hey, wait a minute, these are not recyclables! This is trash!”
But now, even as the valve closes on the massive pipeline of recycled mixed paper, we are forced to face another important truth: that the processing of certain waste materials is not necessarily recycling— sometimes it’s just processing.
I could manufacture blue, laminated widgets all day long but if I can’t sell them for enough money to cover my costs and generate some profit, I’m not in business, I’m just producing blue, laminated widgets.
But there is good news. A wake-up call can wake us up, and an honest correction can put us back on course. I believe this apparent crisis will get us beyond recycling simply for the sake of recycling. It will take us past regulatory diversion mandates that are applied regardless of a market’s ability to absorb or pay for them. In the end, the smart, innovative people in this industry will find ways to make it work.
Over the years, our team has worked on hundreds of projects that included some form of recycling. As far back as 1984, I was the project manager in the renovation of a large paper and cardboard recycling facility in California. Interestingly, in those days recycling was done only if it could generate positive revenue…if it was a real business. Then gradually, for some reason, recycling became a politicized game of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
Of course, there were—and still are—many recycling facilities that take their financial responsibilities very seriously. For example, while conducting a CORE Assessment of a recycling facility, we made some interesting discoveries (CORE is an acronym for Comprehensive Operational Review).
While conducting that CORE, we performed some detailed time-motion studies on all aspects of the MRF pickline. This was a dirty MRF that was attempting to divert every possible commodity in the waste stream, including cardboard, wood, green waste, and several types of paper and plastic, along with glass, ferrous and non-ferrous metal, and aluminum. You name it and they were going after it.
Interestingly though, the results of our CORE indicated that a significant amount of labor (i.e., money) was spent to divert a very insignificant quantity of recycled material. Insignificant, that is, in terms of both percent diversion and revenue.
By helping the MRF correlate the cost and benefit of extracting those recyclables, they were able to maintain a healthy recycling rate—while focusing on commodities that actually made money. What a concept, huh? Their results were dramatic.
By refocusing their effort on the right commodities—and ignoring the wrong ones—they were able to reduce their pickline labor costs by 35% while giving up only a 3% reduction in diversion tonnage. Think about it—would you take a 3% cut in pay if you could reduce your expenses by 35%?
Sure, these improvements all sound simple after the fact, but when you are looking at your operation, it can be difficult to know where to begin. After all, you are so familiar with your recycling operation—and with doing things the same old way—that everything looks normal, or at least it did.
But it’s a new day and a new game, and everything is on the table. You have a great opportunity to re-assess and redirect. In fact, this may be your best chance to implement a mature, self-sustaining diversion program. Let’s not miss the opportunity. 📷
Credit: Neal Bolton / Dirty MRF pickline