Arizona cities are actually trashing things you think you're recycling

Megan Janetsky | The Republic | azcentral.com

On any given day, 620 tons of paper, bottles, cans, cardboard and recycled goods fly over conveyor belts and through chutes in Phoenix’s processing plants.

The recyclables that once sat in bright blue bins lining neighborhood streets are sorted by workers wearing hard hats and plastic gloves, eventually to be sold to China and other world markets.

But China, the largest consumer of recyclables in the world, announced last year that it would impose stringent new rules on the recycled goods it purchases as a part of an anti-pollution campaign.

As China continues cracking down on imports of “foreign garbage” through its new sanitation standards, those conveyor belts in Phoenix and around Arizona have slowed.

And Arizona cities are beginning to grapple with the question: Where is our recycling going to go?

Near-impossible standards

In past months, China has banned 24 kinds of solid waste, including unsorted paper, certain textile materials and low-grade polyethylene terephthalate often used in plastic bottles.

For the goods it still accepts, it has set contamination standards that many waste managers consider nearly impossible to meet.

Each "bale" of goods can only be 0.5 percent contaminated, so a stray plastic bag or a greasy pizza box can disqualify an entire load of recycling.

“The recycling centers – either in Europe or the United States, certainly not in Phoenix – were not designed to process the contamination level China is now requiring,” said Joe Giudice, Phoenix's assistant Public Works director.

City governments and waste-management companies in Western states, especially the Pacific Northwest, have entered various levels of crisis as they consider the 66 million tons of materials American recycle each year.

Those unable to meet China's new standards have struggled to find new markets to sell their recycling. In the most extreme situations, cities have been forced to send their recyclables to landfills.

After the blue bin: Where do your recyclables go? (1) Take a look inside the city of Phoenix's recycling facility to see how hundreds of tons of recyclable material get sorted every day.

Forced to send recycling to landfills

Before the “ban” went into effect, cities depended heavily on China to buy their mixed papers and many of their recycled plastics.

Larger cities have been able to narrowly skate by the standards, either by being meticulous with their processing or collaborating with larger companies like Republic Services or Waste Management, which have more capacity to divert trade globally.

Even then, Republic Services, which works with Phoenix recycling, has diverted more than 2,000 tons of paper to landfills, after sending little to none of it the year before.

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Smaller markets such as Flagstaff don't have those options, said Dylan Lenzen, Flagstaff's zero-waste coordinator, "because we're on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere."

The city has been forced to send many of its recyclables to landfills.

“Basically, anything that is not a bottle, jug or jar is not going to be recyclable anymore because they just can't find a market for those materials to be sold into,” Lenzen said.

Flagstaff announced in May that it would no longer accept seven kids of plastics its waste management company previously sold to China.

“Flagstaff is not alone,” the city wrote in the announcement on its Facebook page. “Many other communities around the country have been forced to remove items from their acceptable materials list or send significant amounts of formerly recyclable materials to the landfill.”

In recent years, more and more contaminated recyclables – greasy pizza boxes and food-covered containers – and non-recyclable materials — plastic bags and dirty diapers – have made it into recycling bins. In one recent case, workers at a Waste Management facility in Surprise found a 6-foot live python coming down the line as they sorted.

Before the crackdown, China would still buy those contaminated recyclables. The gradual rise in contamination levels prompted the country to announce it would only accept materials that were 0.5 percent impure.

“Part of the story of why China is making these decisions to not accept a lot of these recyclable materials is because we have gotten really good as a country and as a community here in Flagstaff of throwing things in the recycling bin that are non-recyclable,” Lenzen said.

Even a small percentage shift in contamination levels could, and did, throw off the entire system of recycling.

Struggling to compete

While smaller cities such as Flagstaff without the resources to meet the new standards have been hit the hardest, recycling programs statewide have struggled with the new status quo.

“Basically, if a couple of plastic bags make it into a bale of cardboard, that might get rejected because it’s over the contamination specification,” Giudice, of Phoenix, said. “Now, no one will buy that entire bale of cardboard.”

Phoenix, which runs processing plants with Republic Services, one of the largest waste managers in the country, is one of the few cities that has been able to meet China’s contamination standards.

But not without a cost.

Revenue from recyclables, which the city uses to fund its program, has fallen by a third because of the ban, according to city officials. The market hit the hardest for most Valley cities was mixed papers.

Phoenix's two processing plants have had to slow down their systems by sometimes half speed. They pay more workers to sift through boxes, magazines and envelopes to pick out the stray plastic bag, string of lights and contaminated paper that may make it through the elaborate system of belts.

Those added costs are paired with less of a worldwide demand for certain recyclables as waste managers internationally try to sell their goods to other markets like Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore.

The average price of cardboard in the Southwest, for instance, has fallen in value from $165 a ton in June 2017 to $80 in June 2018. A ton of recycled newspaper has gone from $80 in July 2017 to $25 in June 2018.

Those goods once made up about 20 percent of the revenue for Valley waste managers, according to Pete Keller, vice president recycling and sustainability for Republic Services.

“That's obviously putting strain on the business,” Keller said. “If changes don't come, it puts the entire business at risk, the entire notion of recycling.”

'Using it as an opportunity'

While cities are being hit financially and sustainably, eyes are focused on the future as cities continue to evaluate the full impact of the restrictions.

Shannon Reed, a spokeswoman for Tempe, said adjusting “has not been easy,” but they haven’t seen what the long-term effects will look like quite yet. Tempe works with the company Waste Management, which said it has have diverted most of the city's goods to other domestic and global buyers.

“The ban is only six months in effect. So as far as finances go, it would seem the ban is going to have a negative impact, but we don’t know for sure yet because we don’t have the year-to-year comparisons," Reed said.

Statewide, recycling programs are taking a step back to reassess how they handle recycling. From Glendale to Phoenix, some plants are discussing updating their facilities with new technology to remain competitive.

Cities like Flagstaff, that have been hit the hardest, are trying to educate the public about what needs to happen if the services are to continue.

Waste managers and cities are asking residents to stick to the basics and keep their recyclables clean.

“We're using it as an opportunity to tell the story about recycling and about what the core purpose of it really is: to make sure the things that can get recycled, like aluminum cans, tin cans, clean paper, can make it to an end market in its highest quality form and be utilized over and over again," Lenzen, of Flagstaff, said.

What you can do:

Recycle clean bottles, cans, paper and cardboard.

Keep food and liquid out of recycle bins.

Don’t recycle plastic bags or any materials in bags.

If you are unsure if a good is recyclable, search your city’s recycling standards.

Learn more and access educational materials at: https://recycleoftenrecycleright.com/

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