Diversion Tactics

By Aline Reynolds

I've always wondered what happens to the empty milk cartons, wine bottles, and aluminum cans I toss into my home recycling bin. How are our discards separated and upcycled for new merchandise? How much time does it all take, and what, or who, is involved?

I became all the more curious about the recycling process after becoming an environmental urban planner. Plus, I recently lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a progressive city brimming with eco-minded people who actively recycle.

In 2014, Americans generated some 258 million tons of trash — and recycled or composted 34.6 percent of it, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. That's up from 28.5 percent in 2000 and 16 percent a decade before that, thanks in part to the nearly 10,000 curbside recycling programs in the U.S. (As of press time, the Trump administration's proposed budget includes a 30 percent cut to EPA funding. Waste minimization and recycling programs are reportedly on the chopping block.)

We're doing better, but there's still a lot of work to be done. At least 10 municipalities around the U.S. are developing specific waste reduction initiatives — ambitious, eco-conscious programs intended to reduce solid waste generation to zero, or close to it, by a target year. In 2015, Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges pledged a 50 percent recycling and composting rate by 2020, and an 80 percent rate by 2030.

Some cities are taking their sanitation goals a notch further to promise a waste diversion rate — the proportion of solid discards that is recycled or composted — of 100 percent. San Diego is aiming for a 75 percent diversion rate by 2020, 90 percent by 2035, and 100 percent by 2040. Austin, Texas, has established the same target year for community-wide "zero waste," following the near achievement of its ambitious waste diversion goal of 50 percent in 2015 (they missed it by just eight percent).

Casella-Boston employs about 50 quality-control workers to manually remove waste material — like plastic bags — that can't be recycled. They manage to eliminate about 60 percent of the bags each month. Photo by Aline Reynolds.

How does it all work?

In Cambridge, the Department of Public Works arranges two-hour visits to a mammoth processing center operated by a Northeast U.S. resources management company, Casella Waste Systems, every three or four months. There, on an austere industrial lot a half-mile from Boston's bustling Sullivan Square, a system of specialized technology and quality- control workers sort through 90,000 pounds of discards from 50 Greater Boston communities every hour.

I toured the facility last April, joining two dozen Cambridge-area residents on a walk through the processing center, along narrow catwalks and stairs flanked by conveyor belts humming along with their cargo.

For starters, front-end loaders — man-powered tractors with large, yellow buckets — dump an average of 1.7 million pounds of discards daily onto the floor of the building, forming towering piles. The mountain of items is steadily fed into a huge metal hopper. Then, the processing machines begin to do their magic. Motorized metal and rubber discs attached to circular steel shafts screen and separate the materials by composition and size. About a dozen separate screenings take place in the center's two buildings, says our tour guide Mike Crowell, Casella-Boston's operations manager.

"In the first series," Crowell explained, "you have cardboard separation," which is directed by spinning metal discs. All other materials fall through gaps between other metal discs for the next round of separation. Next, larger objects — including milk cartons and laundry detergent bottles — fall through another set of bigger openings. All glass objects are then broken into pieces and sent through smaller openings between yet another series of discs. Rubber discs with finger-like extensions proceed to separate the remaining smaller objects, sorting the paper products from the plastics and the aluminum.

Multispectral imaging, a technology in which optical cameras identify and sort objects by their chemical makeup, is used in some of the screenings — particularly for the sorting of plastics, which have a range of chemical compositions. The machines separate the number ones from the number twos, and so on before sending them onto three separate tracks. (Plastics marked three through seven all go together).

The system, while efficient, is not entirely foolproof, Crowell says. On the first pass, the optical sorters are 90 percent effective, on average. Quality-control workers manually gather the remaining items that were either improperly screened or that fell through cracks in the machinery and dodged the screenings altogether. After separation, the objects are baled by material, then sold to about 20 different companies worldwide that have purchasing agreements with Casella.

The process starts all over again at 6 a.m. the next day, after maintenance workers clean the equipment during overnight shifts. The center operates 16 hours a day, five days a week, throughout the year — resulting in between 400 and 500 million pounds of recyclables processed annually. That makes Casella's Boston facility one of the largest-capacity recycling centers in North America.

The plastics and glass dilemma

Malleable plastic is a high-maintenance recyclable, it turns out. Every month, Casella's maintenance workers must remove from the conveyor belts about 160,000 pounds of plastic that they visually spot. But another 120,000 or so pounds of plastic bags and film wrap around the spinning metal and rubber discs in the system, gumming up the works. If left unattended, this can cause a temporary shutdown, so workers must clean the equipment every four hours or so, Crowell says.

Glass, which often makes up 15 to 25 percent of single-stream recycling collections, causes the processing facilities plenty of headaches, too. It's difficult to process because the material needs to be properly cleaned using special air technology in order to be suitable for pickup. And unlike other recyclable materials, glass is a low-value commodity among manufacturers. Rather than sell the material, as with the other processed recyclables, Casella is charged a costly $36 per ton to dispose of the stuff — the supply of glass far outstrips the demand for it.

"There is too much glass out there: it's a national problem," Crowell says. "There are only so many [companies] that can take glass and process it and distribute it. And just like us, they have to put in their money and time to process all the glass that they receive."

Luckily, Casella does all this sorting so that residents don't have to. In 2008, the company switched from dual-stream to single-stream (trademarked by Casella as "Zero-Sort") recycling, which allows residents to toss all recyclables into one home bin. An estimated 82 percent of U.S. cities that offer curbside recycling service have single-stream collection, according to a joint study by the EPA and the Recycling Partnership called the 2016 State of Curbside Report.

Cambridge, along with Chicago, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis, use single-stream recycling. Most high-performing recycling programs in the U.S. have single-stream collections, according to State of Curbside. Proponents for this system argue that it makes for easy, efficient, and low-effort recycling. The dual-stream system — which less than 20 percent of municipalities still use, including New York City; Portland, Oregon; and Berkeley, California — requires residents to maintain two different home recycling streams: one for mixed paper and another for containers made of glass, plastic, and metal.

Portland has an interesting hybrid system, whereby residents are asked to toss all paper, plastic, and metal into one residential curbside bin — and glass, which is taken to a separate recycling facility, into a different bin. This helps to avoid the cross-contamination that can otherwise take place between glass and the rest of the recyclables.

The Big Apple is behind the recycling curve

Last year, Cambridge boasted a 37 percent curbside waste diversion rate. It's considered a model city for recycling — although it has a long way to go to reach San Francisco. The City by the Bay boasts an 80 percent diversion rate. (See sidebar below.)

By comparison, New York City — my current home, which is widely reported to generate more trash than any other city on the planet — is significantly behind the curve, with a curbside diversion rate of just 17 percent last year. One-third of the 3.3 million tons of New York City waste that was amassed, transported, and disposed into landfills in 2013 consisted of items that should have been recycled, according to the city's 2013 Curbside Waste Characterization Study.

Fortunately, New York is committed to an ambitious 100 percent waste diversion rate by 2030, in part by switching to single-stream curbside recycling by 2020. Last year, the New York City Housing Authority — the U.S.'s largest public housing authority, with about 176,000 dwelling units — achieved its goal of reaching full compliance with the city's recycling law. According to the regulations, all building owners and managers are required to provide designated recycling bins to enable curbside recycling. Additionally, buildings must apprise their residents of the city's mandatory residential recycling law through signage and education.

Author Aline Reynolds stands amid bales of processed aluminum, which is ready to be sold to a purchasing company. Photo courtesy Aline Reynolds.

Boarding the recycling bandwagon

Despite U.S. cities' efforts, North Americans continue to generate more municipal solid waste per person than any other population worldwide: 4.4 pounds each day, nearly 70 percent more than the global per capita average of 2.6 pounds. With upwards of 325 million people, that amounts to about 1.4 billion pounds of daily trash in the U.S. And when it comes to recycling, we're lagging behind other developed countries, including Germany, which boasts a 47 percent municipal recycling rate, and Slovenia, which recycles about 49 percent of its municipal discards, according to the European Commission, the European Union's executive arm.

To catch up, we should start at the beginning of the cycle: collection. A number of municipal and legislative tools are available to local governments to encourage residential recycling. States and counties should set goals to reach near 100 percent "automatic collection," such that all (or most) households of a given area automatically receive recycling pick-up services; cities should pass local ordinances that require recycling be provided with trash services. Nearly half of the U.S. population lacks automatic collection, according to the 2016 State of Curbside Report. That's a glaring impediment to a higher national recycling rate.

Local governments should also invest in programs that offer residents and haulers tangible incentives to recycle. The "pay-as-you-throw" program, proven to be a success in more than 6,000 U.S. communities, charges residents varying trash collection rates based on the amount they throw away. This pricing system — contrasted with traditional fixed-fee pricing — can result in an eight to 13 percent increase in waste diversion rates, according to a study released by the Solid Waste Association of North America.

In Santa Clara, California, a differential pricing system discounts franchise fees for haulers with city-approved recycling programs. While area haulers are responsible for their own trash disposal costs, the companies are entitled to keep all revenue generated from the sale of recyclables (between $50 and $60 per ton, on average). These pricing programs can then generate surplus revenue for cities and towns that can help finance recycling and composting services.

Specific product regulations can also help diminish the overall amount of solid waste in our landfills. Cambridge's Bring Your Own Bag Ordinance, for example, prohibits stores from giving out plastic shopping bags, contributing to a 50 to 80 percent reduction in single-use bags at neighborhood grocery stores in the past year. Other cities have similar bag ordinances, and several states, including Oregon, Michigan, Maine, and Vermont, charge relatively high deposits for bottles and cans.

Most importantly, communities need to step up and play more active roles in encouraging higher recycling rates in their neighborhoods. Whatever national environmental legislation may come to pass, it is the community-focused grassroots efforts that are crucial in driving up recycling rates. Heightened citizen education and awareness is key: community members should have the opportunity to learn about best-practice recycling behavior through city-sponsored newsletters, advertisements, resident-targeted training, and community meetings. According to the 2016 State of Curbside Report, "There is a lack of consistency with how communities educate about curbside recycling programs, leading to confusion and frustration regarding understanding what is recyclable and where and how to find program information." It will take years of increased education and awareness, along with new government mandates and incentive programs, to get everyone on the waste diversion bandwagon.

Are you on board?

Aline Reynolds is an urban planner and journalist who currently resides in New York City.

Resources

Take a 360 tour of Casella's Rutland, Vermont, recycling facility: tinyurl.com/y7moeyxr

Getting to Zero Waste in San Francisco

Text and Illustration by Melanie Lambrick

In 2003, San Francisco resolved to divert all of its waste from landfills and incinerators by 2020. In less than a decade, it reached an 80 percent diversion rate.

Today, however, the city's waste rates are rising along with the population, and representatives from the San Francisco Department of the Environment acknowledge that it's unlikely the city will meet its 2020 goal. It's somewhat harder to measure progress now, since the state no longer collects waste diversion statistics, although recent program outcomes include 99 percent apartment building compliance and 97 percent small business compliance in 2014.

Getting to 80 Percent

The city is still pursuing its goal, and a wide-ranging series of Zero Waste legislative initiatives and programs are in place. Here are a few.

The Fantastic Three Container Program — 2003

The city issues a trio of composting, single-stream recycling and trash containers to citizens and businesses, charging at first only for trash to incentivize diversion (a minimal fee now applies to the other bins). An educational program including mutilingual door-to-door outreach accompanies it.

Food Service Waste Reduction Ordinance — 2006, extended 2016

The ordinance requires restaurants and food vendors to use compostable and recyclable food service ware, which now includes a ban on polystyrene food service packaging.

Plastic Bag Reduction Ordinance — 2007, extended 2012, 2013

The ordinance requires supermarkets and drugstores to use only compostable plastic, recyclable paper, or reusable bags. Later expansions apply the rule to restaurants, and make stores charge consumers for bags (10 cents per bag, although businesses retain the profits).

Construction and Demolition Debris Recovery Ordinance — 2006

The ordinance ensures that city-registered transporters take debris from construction and demolition sites to registered processing facilities for recovery.

Bottled Water Ordinance — 2014, extended 2016

The ordinance bans the sale or distribution of drinking water in plastic bottles smaller than 21 ounces on city property. Expansions prohibit the sale or distribution of water in any container smaller than one liter.

Today and Beyond

As San Francisco continues to pursue Zero Waste, the DOE is focusing on a few key areas.

Education and enforcement

Outreach is extending to social media and online content such as the Real Foodies Compost website, which provides a lush magazine-like online experience: realfoodiescompost.com.

And better enforcement of existing regulations is planned, alongside offering discounted reduced-capacity trash containers for residents.

Influencing consumer behavior

Waste production is on the rise, with factors such as the shift to online purchasing — which adds more packaging to household and business waste streams. Messaging about reducing consumption is now a priority.

Boosting producer responsibility

Holding producers accountable for the landfill-bound materials they make is difficult at the municipal level, but the city continues to advocate for state legislation. It is also considering fees on disposable items such as takeout coffee cups.

Melanie Lambrick is an illustrator, researcher, and writer in Montreal.