Fortunately for recycling advocates, Wisconsin law prohibits municipalities from eliminating their recycling services. This doesn’t mean, though, that local officials here aren’t subject to the same pressures that have led their counterparts in other parts of the country to either curtail or abandon their programs. Faced with declining demand from China and other market headwinds, recycling advocates are looking for ways to ensure recycling services remain in place for years far into the future.
The biggest change will probably have to come from the public. Opinion poll after opinion poll shows that the services remain popular, yet too often, people do things that cause more harm than good. One troublesome behavior is a lazy habit that industry officials have taken to calling “wish-cycling.” This refers to the act of tossing something into the recycling bin in the hopes that it can be recycled or, at the very least, that it will be sorted out by a line worker once it gets to a recycling center. Wish-cycling has been encouraged to some extent by the now common practice of single-stream recycling. With single-stream recycling, people no longer have to worry about sorting out recyclable materials into different categories and keeping them apart to be collected in separate containers.
The trouble is that non-recyclable contaminants are also being tossed in large numbers. Even when these sorts of things—plastic grocery bags, greasy pizza boxes, dirty diapers and the like—don’t render a batch completely undesirable to buyers of recyclable materials, they still have to be removed. The costs in time and money are both steep. Jennifer Semrau, waste reduction and diversion coordinator at the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, says plastic grocery bags are only the beginning of the problem.
Semrau explains that people have also been known to throw things like Christmas lights and extension cords in recycling bins. These sorts of things can not only get wrapped around processing equipment and bring the whole works to a stop but also endanger the line employees responsible for untangling the mess. “I know people are well-intentioned and are trying to recycle as much as possible,” Semrau says. “But it’s really not helpful.”
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Eliminating contamination is even more important at a time when the supply of recyclable materials far outstrips the demand. Buyers of these materials are now in a position to reject all but the cleanest batches.
The Chinese Connection
In early 2018, China—long the biggest buyer of recyclable materials from the U.S.—imposed new rules prohibiting the acceptance of any imported load that was more than 5% contaminated. The limit was far too strict for most batches from the U.S., where nearly one out of every four things tossed into a recycling bin doesn’t really belong there.
With demand choked off at its once-greatest source, the decline in prices for recyclable materials has been precipitous. Semrau says that recyclable paper was going for about $60 a ton a few years ago; now the same amount fetches only about $5. With their margins reduced, some recycling centers have taken to fining municipalities that bring in overly contaminated hauls. Others simply reject batches, sending them instead to landfills and undermining the point of recycling anything in the first place. Despite all this, Semrau says she has yet to hear from any city official who thinks the state’s mandatory recycling law imposes too great of a burden.
Samantha Longshore, resource recovery program manager for Milwaukee, says support for recycling remains strong, and that what’s perhaps most needed is a concerted public information campaign to help people better understand what things are, indeed, truly recyclable. Some officials would also like to try to prevent certain products from ending up in bins by imposing local controls, she adds.
Moving in this direction with the current Republican-controlled state Legislature might be difficult, however. Many cities throughout Wisconsin have started banning the sorts of plastic grocery bags that wreak havoc at recycling centers. But under former Republican Gov. Scott Walker, Wisconsin adopted a law in 2016 prohibiting such bans.
Public Demand is Strong
Despite all this, some municipalities have actually found ways to increase their services. Just north of Milwaukee, in the village of Whitefish Bay, local officials recently went from having recyclable materials picked up once a month to every other week. John Edelbeck, Whitefish Bay director of public works, says the change was made largely in response to public demand. With village residents having more and more material to recycle every year—the advent of next-day delivery from Amazon has been a big contributor to this trend—once-a-month collection was proving inadequate.
Still, the economics of recycling do not bode well. With China unlikely to change its stance on contamination, some are calling for a fundamental reconsideration of the goals behind recycling.
According to Meleesa Johnson—director of the Marathon County Solid Waste Department and president of Associated Recyclers of Wisconsin—the monetary value of recyclable materials has perhaps been oversold. No matter how strong the market, collecting these materials is always going to be an expensive enterprise. Trucks, in many cases, have to be bought and fueled up, and people have to be paid to drive them and to sort materials at recycling centers, which themselves aren’t cheap to operate.
When prices were strong, Johnson says, some recycling advocates had come to look at recycling as something that would not just be good for the environment but also become a moneymaker. “It was a noble message, but it was a stupid message,” she says. “The reality is that, just like all markets, the market for recyclables goes up and down based on demand.”
Given the market’s fitfulness, Johnson and others are saying now’s the time to return to basics and remember what recycling was meant to be about in the first place: protecting the environment by reducing the landfilling of waste. “And for that reason, we are working to change our message to make it about recycling right, and that quality control starts in every single household in the state,” Johnson concludes. “So, don’t wish-cycle. Don’t just put [anything] in the recycling bin.”
