By Dana Mears
Recycling is more than turning one product into another — recycling is also a market with buyers and sellers. It is about buying raw ingredients from a sustainable source to make another product. But the market doesn’t work without our support.
Stockpiles of plastics with no buyers have been splashed across the evening news recently, leaving people wondering about the recycling process. In reality, the closure to our material by recycling giants in China and other South Eastern Asian countries was long overdue. For decades, North America had been shipping food-covered mediocre quality plastics to China for recycling. Not only were we shipping low quality material a long distance, we were often sending them contaminated quantities of plastics and paper. The Town currently has a reliable recycling processor, and we continue to seek additional appropriate facilities to manage our blue carts.
Contamination in recyclables refers to two things: the cleanliness of the item and the proper sorting of those items. A jam-coated plastic jar will not be cleaned at the recycling facility; as the consumers of jam, it is our responsibility to scrape that jar thoroughly into the compost bin before placing it in recycling.
It’s also contamination when there are things in recycling bins that don’t belong, such as garden hoses or propane tanks. In those cases, sorting takes longer and becomes more expensive. When our blue carts are contaminated, no matter how, we lower the overall quality of the material and increase the cost for the service, making our product less desirable to manufacturers.
At recycling facilities, plastics are separated from other recyclables and get sorted according to the numbers stamped on the bottom or the texture of the plastic bags. These products are sorted because each number or type of plastic is made with different chemicals. That means they have different physical properties which impacts how they are treated and what they can be turned into.
Suppliers of recyclables — like municipalities — are working hard to find buyers closer to home. We must all work together to ensure that only legitimate items are placed in blue carts and that these items are clean, loose and dry to ensure that they can be recycled in this tough market. Contamination prevents even the most sought-after items from being sold to manufactures because they don’t want to buy dirty ingredients to make their new products.
Dana Mears is the Town of Cochrane's Environmental Educator and does work for both Waste and Recycling and Water/Wastewater.
