When it comes to recycling, Americans are happy to pitch in, perhaps to an overzealous fault. The industry terms this propensity “aspirational” recycling — to throw into your bins random items that seem as if they should be recyclable. Denver’s head of solid waste management, Charlotte Pitt, says among the pieces that have made it into her city’s collection carts are an engine block, horseshoes, a garden hose and t-shirts. Given to peeking in recycling bins at train stations and airports during his business travels, Biderman has seen horrors including a bowling ball and dirty diapers. The irony is that his same informal inspections turn up generous heaps of aluminum cans, plastic bottles and paper that have been tossed in the general garbage instead of the proper receptacles.

David Biderman, CEO of the Solid Waste Association of North America, routinely checks bins on his travels to see how compliant folks are with their recycling.

Third, the recycling business must prepare itself more effectively for rollercoaster market conditions. The industry’s fortunes, after all, are anchored to the boom-and-bust cycles of commodity markets — in this case, recycled paper, plastic and glass — with up and down swings in supplies, demand and ultimately pricing. And a number of recent economic events have triggered troughs. In 2000, it was the Asian contagion financial crisis. In the early 2010s, when oil prices plunged during the fracking boom, so did the cost of making new plastic, as manufacturers moved away from using recycled feedstock

Seldman says the current price swoon has exposed inefficient business models for some recyclables such as glass. At issue, he says, are the contracts the garbage hauling industry has struck with cities — contracts that sometimes stipulate that recyclables have to be transported at an additional cost to a facility servicing a broader area. The upshot? With that additional cost, recycling glass and some other products become simply unviable.

There are positives in sight. Groups are coaching cities on ways to reach more residents with clearer messages. Efforts are underway to cut contamination in recycling streams. And finally, there may be an incentive now for municipalities to keep the processing of recyclables local.

The (Recycling) Medium Is the Message

Messaging and education are twin solutions to boost the amount of material that’s correctly recycled. This effort is hampered by no centralized, coordinated effort on the part of a government agency such as the EPA. One example, according to Waste Dive, an online publication that tracks the industry, is the lack of an industry consensus on just how to measure the success of recycling efforts: Private collection companies and municipal waste services departments still struggle over whether the best metric to track the amount of recyclable material diverted out of nationwide trash flows should be raw tonnage recycled, or the net effect to greenhouse gasses, the latter based on inputs such as participation rates and recycling collections calculated with a formula to estimate CO2 offsets. The argument is that even if hypothetical, the greenhouse-gas numbers might shed more light on the environmental value of each facet of a municipal program — and provide a meaningful public-relations yardstick to boot.

In such a data-analysis vacuum, nonprofits take up the slack. Recycle Across America has pushed for standardized labels for bins nationwide and boasts a case study across Rhode Island that helped to bring contamination rates down 20 percent. And the Recycling Partnership this week launched its program to help cities measure the full impact of recycling efforts, including a greenhouse gas calculator on the organization’s website. The nonprofit is backed by private-sector funding partners, including companies who rely on paper and plastic packaging such as Amazon, Starbucks, Target and International Paper. Marshall says the group handed out grants totaling $40 million last year, primarily targeting collection efforts where he says communities spend the majority of recycling funds. In four years leading up to 2017, for instance, it provided funding to purchase 182,000 curbside carts and helped 583 communities.

Starting in 2016, the Recycling Partnership reached out to municipal garbage and public works managers across the country to understand what was at the root of persistent contamination problems. Three cities provided interesting case studies. Recycling programs in Chicago and Atlanta turned up high percentages of the wrong type of trash. Denver, meanwhile, had low contamination levels, but needed to step up participation to boost the city’s recycling rate of 18 percent. “We had some big, dynamic ideas, so we decided to partner with all three cities at the same time,” says Marshall.

The nonprofit contacted public works or sanitation departments in all three cities to propose a series of exploratory interventions that Marshall characterized as “tactical messaging” — a campaign anchored to one specific message for each city. In Atlanta, the primary focus was simple: too many residents were putting recyclables in plastic garbage bags, which polluted collections. The campaign slogan became, “Don’t bag your recyclables.” In Chicago, the message was: “Don’t put plastic wrap in your recycling cart.” Denver’s effort, meanwhile, encouraged residents to recycle more aluminum beverage cans.

Step one was to spread the word with mailings, social media posts and printed tags attached directly to recycling carts. Recycling Partnership directors, meanwhile, conducted seminars and training sessions in each of the three cities to teach employees — garbage route drivers in Chicago and public works employees in Atlanta and Denver — how to track collections on the ground, going as far as opening cart lids and taking note of what was turning up.

That observe-and-record system was put to the test over the next eight recycling collections. In Chicago, for instance, drivers tagged carts filled with trash that was not in line with recycling guidelines. In Denver and Atlanta, teams of city employees snooped in bins before garbage collectors arrived. Their mission: Affix tags where they saw violations — this was not only a message to sanitation employees to skip a specific bin, but a way to bring residents up to speed on the rules.

At the same time, the Recycling Partnership recommends graduated soft reprimands (instead of fines) for households or residents who dump unacceptable garbage in recycling receptacles. Violators who toss sheetrock, plastic bags or garbage in recycling carts get a warning — a tag to make it clear why their container was refused. Two violations can result in a resident’s cart being confiscated.

The Partnership says the work is delivering tangible results. In Chicago, efforts reached 630,000 households and garnered 2.7 million social media views. Most importantly, the city reported a 32 percent drop in recycling contamination rates. The Atlanta drive registered a 62 percent drop in erroneously bagged recyclables, and close to a 60 percent drop in contamination overall.

In Denver, Getting More Residents On Board

Denver’s Pitt says the city’s work with the Recycling Partnership is paying off. She points to the city’s climbing recycling rate as evidence, a figure she estimates has risen approximately five percentage points to its current level between 23 and 24 percent.

A representative from Denver's solid waste management team inspects and tags some recycling bins for non-compliance.

Denver turned to the nonprofit for help as it rolled out plans to expand recycling efforts. Beginning in 2005, the city switched to a single-stream program to collect newspaper, cans, bottles and some plastics in a single cart per household. The catch was that residents had to call in to request a bin to regularly set out for collection. That resulted in 40 percent of city opting into recycling efforts — a low number of committed participants who nevertheless seemed to stick to guidelines, as evidenced by an exemplary contamination rate that remains just under 10 percent, according to Pitt.

Two years ago, Denver began delivering carts to every home that had yet to formally sign on. While the original plan was to distribute the carts over a five-year period, the city is far ahead of schedule and will hand out a final 178,000 this coming month.

Pitt’s department signed on for a pilot with the Recycling Partnership in 2017, starting with a direct-mail campaign and informational tags on trash carts that explained the program and just what types of refuse could be recycled. Four members of Denver’s solid waste department’s education team joined forces with artists and the nonprofit’s marketing experts. Ads were put on the city’s fleet of 120 collection trucks, while the campaign took a dive into social media, including Facebook and Twitter. “It was a joint effort,” says Pitt, “We checked to see if the message would resonate and the advice we received was to keep things simple.”

Follow-up included briefing sanitation department drivers who covered recycling routes on what cart contents belonged, and what should be turned down. Trucks were equipped with video cameras to monitor what was included. Drivers were asked to stay in radio contact with the public works department’s customer service department and team supervisors were charged with either knocking on doors and speaking to residents about blatant problems or making notes in a database to address the problem by tagging a cart or removing it.

Pitt reports that the impact on Denver of the global recycling market upheaval was relatively muted. The city has a contract with a local processor, Alpine Waste & Recycling, which takes in collections, sorts them and then sells what passes muster. Alpine invested $5 million in upgrades to its sorting abilities in the Denver plant, which has helped to keep the entire process local and eliminate prohibitive transportation costs. The city makes up roughly a fourth of Alpine’s business, estimates Pitt.

Denver keeps tabs on contamination a couple of ways. Pitt says her department conducts random sampling of collections and works with a consultant to conduct an analysis of the city’s waste stream. Alpine, at the same time, audits loads and alerts Pitt’s group if collections from some routes are particularly contaminated. That signals the public works department to step up cart tagging and other outreach efforts.

Tackling the Contamination Conundrum

Contamination levels, nevertheless, remain a sore spot for recycling efforts nationwide, a problem that China’s new standards have only magnified. Denver’s current contract with Alpine, for instance, gives the processor the right to refuse loads with an estimated 25 percent contamination level. In Norfolk, Virginia, TFC Recycling, an MRF, opted out of its city contract in August 2018, citing an inability to fully process much of what it collected.

Processing recycling collections that include the wrong things (such as plastic bags) cause a host of other problems as well. “The recycling facilities have to pay to get [contaminated waste] to a landfill, and there are operational costs associated with processing that material that’s costly,” says SWANA’s Biderman. “So, they’re using up some of their operational capacity to process material that’s not recyclable, and paying about $55 a ton to dispose of it in landfills.”

In this 2018 photo, workers clean consumer plastic shopping bags from the clogged rollers of a machine which separates paper, plastic and metal recyclable material, at a Westborough, Massachusetts, sorting facility. Unrecyclable plastic bags are a major source of contamination. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

One source of the problem lies in how many different bins the local sanitation department chooses to service. In the name of ease and simplicity, most cities – approximately 80 percent of recycling programs nationwide — now opt for single-stream collections, where residents deposit paper, plastic, and other materials into one bin or cart. During the past decade, in fact, many cities have migrated to single-stream rather than dual-stream collections (in dual-stream, typically participants are required to separate paper from plastics and metal).

The upside for single-stream is that it boosts volumes. The problem is that commingled contributions to single-stream programs lead to far higher contamination rates.

Education efforts such as those spurred by the Recycling Partnership help. But interestingly enough, the past year’s market turbulence may spur a new trend. Case in point: Last November, the Long Island communities of Brookhaven, Smithtown and Southold, New York (a combined population of 625,000) switched to a dual-stream collection.

That kind of approach puts the industry in a quandary, especially since MRF’s have spent hundreds of millions on scanning equipment and infrastructure to accommodate single-stream systems. “You generally don’t get as much material in dual-stream systems,” says Biderman. “Large companies will tell you that the single-stream ship has sailed. We can’t turn back the clock and strand that sort of investment.”

Taking Lighter Loads and Shorter Trips

ILSR’s Seldman says the past year’s shakeup also calls into question key cost assumptions built into the way many cities recycle. The current pricing squeeze shines a light on the price of working with Big Waste — large garbage collection companies such as Waste Management and Republic Services. One considerable cost is the transportation to move recyclables to centralized processing sites. Seldman estimates that can run $15 to $18 a ton, an amount that could tack on $450,000 or more a year for a city such as Washington, D.C.

Take Baltimore as another example, which pays $83 a ton for moving recyclables at a Waste Management facility, says Seldman. Washington, D.C., which he says uses the same location, pays $129 a ton, in addition to a $25 surcharge for glass. Based on that math, he says D.C. is being charged more than $40 a ton more — a considerable sum considering the 30,000 tons of recycling it has to move.

That added burden potentially puts cities in a bind when it comes to glass, arguably the heaviest recyclable commodity. Weak pricing and high costs have worked in tandem to discourage municipalities from collecting it. One answer to bring down transport costs and make a wider array of items such as glass viable, says Seldman, is to promote or sponsor more local MRF’s to enter the market with a lower cost basis.

Another solution that betters both contamination and participation is to employ unit pricing, or assessing a monthly fee for household disposal. A study of communities in Southern Maine performed by WasteZero, an environmental sustainability advocacy group, found that during 2017, communities with pay-as-you-throw collection models disposed of almost 45 percent less non-recyclable trash than others examined. What’s more, the pay-as-you throw group averaged a 33.1 percent recycling rate, compared to 20.4 percent in the other communities the study examined.

Seldman says there’s evidence that charging residents according to how much garbage they generate is one reason why cities such as Portland boast higher recovery rates — including recycling and the diversion of compost from waste streams — than Baltimore, Washington or Dallas, which are all under 20 percent, well below the nationwide average of 34 percent.

Though contamination and consumer education remain challenges, SWANA’s Biderman takes heart, especially in the aftermath of November’s EPA gathering, which presented an opportunity to headcount (and connect) stakeholders. “We’ve got communities talking to each other about common recycling problems, we’ve got stakeholders throughout the recycling supply chain working together to address the challenges posed by China’s waste restrictions, and we have increased investment in U.S. domestic recycling capacity — including both U.S. and Chinese companies purchasing paper mills and plastic processing facilities here,” he says. “That’s why I’m cautiously optimistic.”

Thanks to Aline Reynolds for contributing additional reporting to this story.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The original version of this article incorrectly described the U.S. recycling rate as having peaked 20 years ago, when it has effectively plateaued since 2010. It also misstated the number of tons of recycling that Washington, D.C., generates. We’ve corrected these figures.