In the summer of 2017, China announced that it would no longer serve as the world’s landfill.

For decades, the country accepted vast amounts of recyclable materials from the U.S. and elsewhere to be processed and reused, regardless of how much unusable material was being included in the shipments.

But a policy change that severely slashed the amount of scrap that China takes in has sent shockwaves through the global recycling market, and New Jersey is no exception.

Recycling contamination — everything tossed into a recycling bin that cannot actually be recycled — is at the heart of this issue.

Encouraged by the lax Chinese market, recycling programs around the Garden State and across the U.S. moved in the mid-2000s to single-stream recycling — a method in which all recyclables are put in the same bin, no sorting required, according to Steven Rinaldi, a research scientist in the state’s Bureau of Energy and Sustainability.

Rinaldi said this shift seemed to inspire a wave of “wishful recycling” for the average person. More and more people were putting things in the recycling without checking to see if the stuff could, in fact, be recycled: plastic grocery store bags, shredded paper, greasy pizza boxes and myriad other contaminators.

In 2017, the Chinese government announced that it would drastically restrict the amount of contaminated recyclables the country would import.

“To protect China’s environmental interests and people’s health, we urgently adjust the imported solid wastes list, and forbid the import of solid wastes that are highly polluted,” China wrote in a memo to the World Trade Organization at the time.

The new policy became effective in January 2018, and it immediately shifted procedure throughout the recycling industry. Recycling collectors found the market for the materials they gathered was now drastically restricted.

China had been the largest destination for recyclables for 25 years, according to a National Geographic report, due in large part to its leniency, but now that leniency was gone — only loads of properly sorted recyclables were acceptable to be sold, whether in China, the U.S. or elsewhere.

In response, there has been statewide push in New Jersey to get people to take more care in sorting their recyclables. Wishful recycling, Rinaldi said, “messes up the whole recycling system completely.”

The actual rules of recycling can be confusing for the average New Jerseyan. State law leaves it to each of the Garden State’s 21 counties to establish their own recycling programs and decide what material they will accept.

In January 2018, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection launched its Recycle Coach app as a new tool to help people recycle correctly. The app is free, can be downloaded from the App Store or Google Play, and has information on recycling programs in more than 200 municipalities across 19 New Jersey counties.

Some things, though, are universal no-no’s for New Jersey recyclers. Plastic shopping bags from supermarkets, for example, only serve to clog up machines at recycling facilities; if you want to get rid of your bags, you should return them to the store they came from.

Marie Kruzan, the executive director of the Association of New Jersey Recyclers, stressed the importance of teaching people how to recycle properly.

“We’ve got to clean up the material," Kruzan said. "You’re never going to be able to recycle material and make new material with dirty material.”

Last May, the NJDEP sent a letter to mayor’s across the state urging them to step up enforcement of local recycling rules to combat recycling contamination.

In that letter, the state held up Fair Lawn as an example of how municipalities to get residents to change their behavior and be better recyclers. The Bergen County borough has adopted strict policies for recycling enforcement, according to borough recycling coordinator Ron Lottermann.

“I’ve been with Fair Lawn recycling since 1987," Lottermann said. "This has been the biggest change that has affected the industry in my time here.”

Lottermann led a crackdown on poorly sorted recycling in Fair Lawn following the warning. In May and June last year, Lottermann and a seasonal employee patrolled the borough looking for recycling boroughs that obviously had recycling contamination. In those two months, Lottermann said he handed out nearly 1,500 warning notices.

“We need to get the residents out of this mentality of wishful recycling,” Lottermann said. “You’re not helping anybody by throwing away plastics that I can’t take. You’re hurting it more than you’re helping.”

This is a major adjustment period for the recycling industry, and it is not totally clear how the issue is playing out across New Jersey. A better picture will emerge as municipal recycling contracts expire and new contracts are negotiated.

In Fair Lawn, Lottermann warned that the borough, which currently sells its recycling to Waste Management, could end up paying the company $25 to $100 per ton for recycling, depending on the material. Fair Lawn collected 12,176 tons of recycling in 2018 according to Lottermann.

Recycling facilities around the Garden State are making adjustments in wake of the Chinese policy. Ocean County, for example, has invested in new machinery to better sort recycling at its Northern Regional Recycling Center in Lakewood, according to Ocean County Freeholder Gary Quinn.

Still, New Jersey has fared better than other parts of the country were were more reliant on China to take their recycling. A recent New York Times story highlighted the severity of the problems in the Northwest, which were far more reliant on Chinese buyers for their recyclables.

“These are dark days for recycling, no doubt about it. It’s a very tough time," Rinaldi said. "But we’re in a period where the markets have to adjust to a new reality. This has happened before and it will happen again.”

Michael Sol Warren may be reached at mwarren@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MSolDub. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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