Recycling got a lot easier — maybe too easy as it turns out — for about 100,000 households in Oakland County earlier this year with the arrival of what is know as single-stream recycling.

Big carts on wheels distributed to residents meant they no longer had to separate paper, plastic cardboard and other materials. Everything just gets dumped into the roomy new carts, picked up and then sorted by workers at the recycling center.

“We recycle far more now because it’s just so much easier,” said Berkley resident Brigitta Burguess, the mother of boys ages 1 and 3.

“It doesn’t take much time anymore,” Burguess said. “It’s really a lifestyle choice now.”

But as recycling has become a cinch for more and more Americans, it has created a new problem. More people are tossing in more stuff they hope will get recycled — things like old electrical wiring and greasy pizza boxes. The intentions may be good, but it can contaminate the whole load, which can then end up in landfill.

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Carts and contamination are just one piece in a rush of change that has dumped recycling into crisis mode. Recycling is about to get expensive, experts say. And the more households that screw up, the more it’s going to cost every American with anything to throw away.

This huge, sudden shift in the economics of recycling has prompted conservative commentators to renew old tirades, calling recycling "an environmental scam" in the July 14 issue of The American Thinker blog; and a waste of time and money "designed by green zealots" in Breitbart News on July 23.

In Oakland County, the introduction of the single-stream carts by nonprofit waste authority SOCRRA led to communities doubling and even tripling their tonnages of recycling across the area —12 cities in a swath from Ferndale, Hazel Park and Oak Park, at the Detroit border, north to Troy, Birmingham and Beverly Hills.

“That’s exactly what we hoped would happen,” said Jeff McKeen, general manager of the waste authority based in Royal Oak.

To handle the bigger flow, SOCRRA cut the ribbon in April on an $8-million recycling plant, using the single-stream process. Dropping the old way — which handled multiple streams, after everything was first sorted by truck drivers at curbside — the new single-stream system in Troy takes everything up one fast-moving conveyor belt, past 30 hourly workers. Clad in respirators against a storm of dust, they spend their days frantically yanking off the line a torrent of improper trash that the plant can’t handle.

Inevitably, some gets through, contaminating SOCRRA’s outgoing bales of plastic, paper and cardboard.

“It’s an education challenge. We try to tell people on our website what not to put in their cart,” McKeen said.

He surveyed recycling rejects piled around his warehouse — garden hose, antenna wire and electric cords, auto parts, window blinds, scrap metal, coat hangers, Styrofoam anything, old cassette tapes and mounds of plastic bags. Even dented kitchen pots and pans, once welcome in recycling bins, are verboten. Inside the new machinery, metal items bang and clank to cause damage and more contamination — like tossing the proverbial wrench into the works.

Contamination isn’t just a local problem. It’s causing mountains of waste to back up on docks, in warehouses and inside tractor-trailers, in a chain reaction that actually began far across the Pacific Ocean.

Blame China

According to recycling industry magazines, the backups began in China — once the world’s biggest processor of solid waste. China has increasingly objected to contaminated shiploads of American paper and plastic, just as recycling plants switched to single-stream. That has had politically conservative websites chortling about liberals who cherish recycling being flummoxed by, of all people, Communist czars of industry.

Last fall, China declared outright bans on some categories of U.S. scrap paper and plastic, unless the incoming shiploads were pristine. Most weren't, and tonnages sank. Then on Aug. 23, amid an escalating trade war with the U.S., China slapped a 25 percent tariff on the trickle it was still accepting of American scrap cardboard, scrap plastic and various "recovered metals," according to Resource Recovery, an online recycling trade journal.

All of that, coupled with a multiyear slide in the world prices for scrap materials, has not only put many of Detroit's illegal midnight scrappers out of business, it's making revenues crater for waste handlers like SOCRRA. Put another way, the cost of recycling is growing faster than the swelling loads of milk jugs, yogurt tubs, magazines and old newspapers that people toss into their big, new recycling carts.

In a perfect storm, there's always something else. Contamination not only slices the value of recycling, it can ruin machinery, said Lucas Dean, supervisor of SOCRRA’s 9-month-old single-stream plant. Holding up handfuls of potentially damaging trash, Dean implored an imaginary audience: “Please don’t put this in your cart. Bring it to our drop-off center. We can get good money for a lot of it, as long as it’s clean. We even sell your plastic bags.”

But in Dean's single-stream conveyor flow, plastic bags just hurt the quality. Other no-nos? "Look at that — a bowling ball! That's gonna break our equipment!" he shouted, over the din of machinery.

And batteries sneak into the single stream. Recently, a lithium one whose chemical innards were squeezed out by machinery ignited a small fire, Dean said.

A larger fire blazed this summer at Michigan’s largest recycling plant, in Southfield. That suspect also was a lithium battery. The plant, also single stream, is run by RRRASOC — the Resource Recovery and Recycling Authority of Southwest Oakland County.

Along with recycling methods, batteries have changed. The easiest solution is to keep them all out of recycling plants, said Mike Csapo, general manager of RRRASOC. There's a lot more he'd like to keep out. But he's not getting much help from the nation's package designers, eager to be politically correct with consumers.

“You can look at so many items, at least any food container, and find that logo with the three arrows,” Csapo said. It's an internationally accepted symbol for "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle," designed in 1970 by a college student for a contest held by Container Corp. of America, according to online histories of recycling.

"To the consumer, that means you can recycle. But that particular item might not work in our system,” Csapo said. To be sure, consumers must check their hometown's or waste handler's website, he said.

It still helps the planet

Despite the new problems in recycling, it's still a no-brainer for the Earth, Csapo said.

Last year, RRRASOC communities recycled 37 percent of their residential waste, higher than the national average of 35 percent and well over Michigan's overall 15 percent. Based on industry standards, the system saved 127,000 trees by recycling paper and cardboard, 169 billion BTUs of energy that would've been required to make new plastic and paper from virgin raw materials, reduced air pollution by 19,000 tons of carbon equivalent, and more.

A new study at the national level, produced for the plastic industry, showed that greenhouse gases — blamed for climate change — could be cut by about half "if a food and drink packaging manufacturer ditches virgin plastic" in favor of recycled plastic pellets in making new containers, according to an Aug. 21 webinar held by the Association of Plastic Recyclers, a U.S. trade group.

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Yet, such abstract aid to the Earth's atmosphere is hard to explain when local costs soar. On metro Detroit's east side, the recycling tab is sure to rise when mega-trash hauler Green For Life, known as GFL, inks a new contract with four of the Grosse Pointes and Harper Woods, said Shane Reeside, city manager of Grosse Pointe Farms.

"We're anticipating a significant increase in our recycling costs when we rebid our contract early next year," Reeside said.

One way or another, that increase will be passed on to residents. GFL also handles recycling for Detroit and scores of other communities in southeast Michigan, including Grosse Pointe Woods, where residents received new recycling carts in March, says the company's website.

Just as recycling carts proliferate and Michigan heads toward recycling targets set years ago by Gov. Rick Snyder, the economics have flipped — from cost saving to money losing, said Kerrin O’Brien, executive director of the Michigan Recycling Coalition.

China used to accept a 10 percent or higher contamination rate, when that country accepted roughly half of the entire world's recycled waste, O'Brien said.

"Now it's down to a fraction of a percent" — almost impossible to reach, she said. And Americans' new style of 'toss it all in the cart' isn't helping, with contamination rates for single-stream plants estimated at 20 percent to 30 percent, according to industry experts.

"Single-stream was designed to lower costs, allowing very quick pickups of a lot at once. But when you pick up everything together and smash it, you're changing the shape and the dynamics of trying to separate that later," O'Brien said.

What's the average recycler to do? One way to counter China’s blockade is to lay off mindless, wishful recycling. Reducing our contamination not only might get China, someday, to reopen its market; more likely, it's going to improve chances that American investors will develop our own markets and plants to "repurpose" our used paper, plastic and cardboard, O'Brien said.

For Michiganders, the prospect of seeing fees rise faster than piles of garbage in a trash-haulers’ strike could have at least a partial solution in Lansing. That’s where a bill awaits action that would increase the tax on each ton of trash going into Michigan landfills, including the ever-increasing tonnages coming into Michigan from Canada, O'Brien said.

It’s favored by members of both parties and Snyder, and it just might slip through this fall in the Legislature, she said.

Trash tax could help

After years of landfill lobbyists blocking the idea, and with recycling at a crisis point, the bill would raise Michigan's tax on solid-waste — from a mere 36 cents a ton to $2.50, said its sponsor, state Rep. Mike Nofs, R-Battle Creek. (Ohio charges $4.75 per ton; the average charged by other states in the Great Lakes region is $4.44.)

While most of the money raised would go to fund crucial environmental cleanups, including the recently discovered water pollutant called PFAS, Nofs' bill would send some of that money to boost recycling efforts across the state, helping to find ways Michigan could use more of its recycling scrap instead of trying to ship it overseas, he said.

"Other people call it the tipping fee bill — what I call the Pure Michigan bill," said the chuckling Nofs last week. Instead of Michigan borrowing $400 million to clean up pollution sites, "I say, why not pay as you go?"

Nofs' bill would generate $75 million a year through a tax on each ton of trash, he said. The tax would apply to all trash coming to Michigan landfills from Canada and other states, a shocking 25 percent of the total last year, according to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.

Nofs said his conservative Republican colleagues, hearing of his proposal to raise a tax, blanched at first: "They said, 'What the heck are you doing?' I said, 'Just listen before you decide.' "

Yet, the tipping fee almost sounds like it's part of recycling's perfect storm. Critics say it would be one more thing driving up the cost of trash disposal, while returning only a modest windfall to recycling efforts — about $16 million a year, spread across the entire state.

Bottom line? No matter how the new bill fares, Michiganders — and most Americans — will soon be spending more to recycle. About all that most of us can do is to get smarter about what we recycle.

That means, odd as it sounds, some of us should recycle less.

Contact: blaitner@freepress.com. Free Press staff writer Keith Matheny contributed to this report.