Tuesday, 14 April 2009 08:19
By Sally Deneen
PostGlobe
It just got a tad easier for Seattle residents to recycle, but the companies that handle all that used paper, glass and plastic after it's shipped from Seattle aren't thrilled with the change.
The new system, which went into effect March 30, allows residential customers to throw all of their recyclables into a single can or bin. It's being advertised as "better recycling," but industry officials say this single-stream method leads to contamination of recyclables -- which they claim was already a problem here -- making it harder to turn discards into new products.
Even under the old system, in which residents placed glass in a separate bin, industry officials say they would end up finding paper bales containing broken glass, flattened milk jugs and the like. Mills such as Blue Heron in Oregon and NORPAC in Longview, Wash., said they had stopped buying recyclables from the Seattle area because paper bales were too contaminated for their standards.
Some glass “would get into our process and basically shut it down, and also damage our equipment prior to shutting down,” says Jay Simmons, de-ink process engineer at North Pacific Paper Corporation (NORPAC).
“We were never for people moving to single stream,” says Simmons. “We understand all of the reasons for doing that from a collection standpoint. From our viewpoint, it has done nothing but damaged our economics. Even though we have had to go along with the program, it’s not something we supported.”
But city recycling officials say the newly adopted system will be an improvement because it will make it easier for more people to recycle a wider variety of stuff in a way that is more cost-effective. It’s also better for recycling haulers who can speedily pick up one container per stop, and residents whose goal is to get rid of discards easily.
“We hope our customers will continue to be as happy about our decision as they have been,” says George Sidles, recycling manager for Seattle Public Utilities. “I don’t see a big downside.”
The truth is, it's too early to tell how Seattle’s new recycling system is going.
Nippon Paper Industries USA in Port Angeles continues to buy recycled materials collected in Seattle by Allied Waste, the recycling company that contracts with Seattle and other area jurisdictions. But Nippon says it discovered an 18 percent contamination rate of the paper bales it buys from Allied. That means 18 percent of what it buys isn’t paper – instead it's soda jugs and other stuff that it must send to a landfill.
Nippon officials say the company paid $900,000 last year to send that waste by train to Oregon to be dumped in a landfill. It paid about another $900,000 to buy more discarded paper to make up for the paper it expected to get in the first place.
“We’re basically paying Seattle’s garbage costs,” says Harold Norlund, mill manager at Nippon, whose annual sales stand at $130 million. “That’s right off your bottom line. We shouldn’t be getting any of that. That would be profit for us, versus breaking even. We’re a small company.”
Norlund is quick to say he’s not blaming Allied (whose general manager, Pete Keller, declined to comment on Nippon or particular clients). Norlund says Allied’s recyclables are cleaner than some competitors he no longer buys from. Some newspaper bales supplied by one competitor contained so much glass that, when squeezed by a forklift, it made a crunching sound.
“I think it’s a society issue,” Norlund says. “We’re a U.S. company. We’re doing our part. We just see society moving in a different direction, where recycling is not that important… That’s the disappointing part.”
Let’s stipulate that Seattle’s recycling program is considered one of the nation’s best and most comprehensive.
At issue is how exactly Seattleites -- or Americans generally -- should recycle if the goal is to make sure cast-offs are turned into new versions of their old selves, such as cardboard made from cardboard and glass made from glass.
Frugal, green old-timers may recall schlepping tied-up newspapers and bagged-up aluminum cans to a salvage yard, where they got cash for their pre-separated materials, back before curbside recycling debuted. On the upside, recyclables stayed separated. On the downside, not so many people went to the trouble to motor to the salvage yard.
Within the last decade, Seattleites were separating recyclables into three curbside bins – one for newspapers, another for glass, still another for cans.
Richard Gertman, whose California company is called Environmental Planning Consultants, said he was involved in starting the three-bin program in Seattle around 1989, and he acknowledges its downsides.
“A bin full of glass gets fairly heavy,” he says, as does a bin of wet newspapers. It takes a hauler a fair amount of time to collect them.
Sidles of Seattle Public Utilities recalls that when he worked on a truck for a disposal company years ago, he’d put pre-separated aluminum cans in one hopper, color-separated glass in another, and mixed waste in yet another.
That keeps recyclables cleaner. To achieve negligible contamination, he says, Seattleites probably would need to separate stuff into multiple bins.
“But, you’d lose a huge amount of time en route, and cost is important. Those costs come back to the ratepayer,” Sidles says.
“So you’re working that tension between product quality and convenience and collection costs.”
The three-bin system changed to the two-bin system you’re likely familiar with – a bin for glass, a big cart for everything else – until the city finally followed the footsteps of many cities nationally and debuted the single-can system recently. Favored by haulers and cities looking to boost recycling-participation rates, it’s considered the wave of the future. It allows a wider array of discards, including clean aluminum foil and plastic plant pots, to be tossed into one bin. (Get details at http://is.gd/s5A7. The new system also gives residents a separate bin for their food waste, combined with their traditional yard waste, for composting.)
There’s an economic push-pull: With single-stream recycling, a city can collect more material and do it more cheaply. But the processing costs are somewhat greater and per-ton revenues are slightly less, says Jerry Powell, editor of Resource Recycling, an Oregon-based trade publication. It’s tougher on domestic companies that want to turn recyclables into new products.
Plastics processors also report high levels of contamination, especially from glass, in single-stream bales they receive from other cities, Powell says.
Glass-container makers hate single-stream, Powell adds. First, it “always” results in mixed-color glass, which is expensive to mechanically sort into the three colors (green, amber and clear). Second, the mixed glass commonly contains high levels of contaminants such as Pyrex glassware and stones. “Many container plants refuse to accept glass directly from single-stream systems and they only buy from intermediate processors,” Powell says.
"A single-stream decision can be one of the worst decisions you make, or it can be a sound decision,” Powell says. “It all depends in how single-stream service is operated locally."
Sidles says he knows most domestic mills don't much like single-stream recycling but they have the prerogative to reject loads and he expects good results.
He points to the city’s contract with Allied, whose web site describes its Seattle facility as the largest recycling facility on the West Coast. The contract anticipates issues raised by domestic mills and takes steps to address them. Of all the communities that contract with Allied, Seattle’s contract is “most involved,” says Keller of Allied.
For example, the contract says Allied “shall process recyclables in such a manner that at least 50 percent of the processed newspaper shall be sold as newsprint bales…, 50 percent of received cardboard shall be sold as cardboard bales (OCC), 50 percent of received HDPE and PET plastic shall be sold as HDPE and PET bales, and 50 percent of received glass shall be sold as glass” for recycling into glass.
The 50 percent requirements simply reflect minimums, explained Keller, who indicated his facility’s performance exceeds that.
Susan Kinsella, executive director of Conservatree, a San Francisco-based critic of single-stream processing, says that rings true to her. The paper industry says over 70 percent of newspaper and corrugated cardboard are getting collected for recycling, she says, “so I would suspect higher numbers.”
The contract also requires Allied to minimize junk in the recycling bales it sells. Outright garbage -- like garden hoses and tennis shoes tossed into recyclables by consumers – must form less than 1 to 2 percent by weight of Allied’s outgoing bales. Wrong recyclables – such as cardboard in newspaper bales -- must compose less than 5 percent to 8 percent of baled material.
“City staff shall be provided access to the Contractor’s Processing Facilities at any time for the purposes of periodically monitoring the facilities’ performance under this section,” the contract states. “Monitoring may include, but not be limited to, breaking selected bales and measuring” contaminants.
Sidles says the contamination rate is the same as what his agency would require if Seattle kept the old system of putting glass in one container and everything else in the other. So the single-stream route comes out ahead, cost-wise, from his view.
What’s more, Keller of Allied says recent upgrades at his recycling plant allow him to sell 96 percent of what comes in from Seattle residents (up from about 90 percent previously). And some portion of that is shipped to Asia, where it can be sorted by hand. So his facility itself actually ships only 4 percent of its stuff to a landfill.
In the end, it seems counter-intuitive that green Seattle would change to a recycling system that domestic paper mills and others say may end up sending more recyclables to distant landfills.
If Janet Malloch, technical superintendent of Blue Heron Paper Company in Oregon City, had her way, Seattleites would recycle glass separately – that is, they’d go back to the future.
Seattle's new program advertises itself as "better recycling."
Malloch doesn't buy it.
“Not for us,” she says.
SIDEBAR:
ARE WE TOO LAZY TO RECYCLE RIGHT?
People in Kamikatsu, Japan, sort trash into 44 categories.
And the rules in Yokohama, Japan, likely would make Americans howl.
Example 1: To discard a metal razor blade, you must wrap the blade in thick paper and label it “blade” before placing it with other small metal recyclables.
Example 2: To ditch a broken umbrella, you must separate the cloth from the umbrella frame, then place the cloth with burnable garbage. Put the wire frame in with recyclable metals. (See: www.city.yokohama.jp/me/pcpb/foreign/dashikata/e.html)
Contrast that with Seattle, where the recycling regime changed in the past decade from requiring solid-waste items to be sort into three bins (glass, paper, cans) down to two bins (glass, other stuff). And now… one. Workers in Waste Management trucks unload those single carts and lumber on to the Allied Waste materials recycling facility.
Proposition: The true spirit of recycling is to view discards as commodities that will be turned into new products. It’s not just to keep stuff out of landfills. Recycling is not merely the act of dragging recyclables to the curb. Recycling actually isn’t accomplished until the discards actually are transformed into new products.
What makes Japan different?
Poor natural resources, limited space and a different culture, answers Jay Simmons, de-ink processor engineer at North Pacific Paper Corporation (NORPAC). He has visited a few areas in Japan and seen what is akin to coupons given to residents in exchange for clean recyclables. Residents can use the coupons at the store to buy products such as milk. If recyclables aren’t in the right condition, no coupons.
Different cultural norms explain why Japan has communities where garbage must be so thoroughly sorted, and neighbors will tell on you if you do it wrong, says Jerry Powell, editor of Resource Recycling. “In the United States, we don’t have that. I’m not saying it’s good or bad,” Powell says. “It’s the reality of it.”
Landfill fees are sky-high in Japan. “That’s going to drive behavior,” says Pete Keller, general manager of Allied Waste in Seattle. So, packaging is different in Japan. Retail is different. A lot of retail there is vending.
“It certainly isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison,” Keller says. “And they’re heavily dependent on incineration. They have a tendency to separate between combustible and non-combustible,” since their primary mode of disposal is incineration. That has environmental drawbacks of its own.
In the end, Simmons says: “Are we realistically going to go back to source separation at the household? No, it’s not going to happen.”
But, it’s also not realistic to think that the mishmash arriving at recycling centers can be totally separated back into clean distinct parts. “The technology is just not out there to separate the material out again [cleanly].”
No one we found was impolite enough to say Seattleites turned lazy. Let’s just hope that people in Yokohama don’t think our new motto is: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Only If It’s Convenient.”
SIDEBAR No. 2
WHY AREN’T ALL RECYCLABLES RECYCLED?
You might expect that when you drag your Seattle residential recycling cart out to the street, 100 percent of the stuff gets recycled. But that’s not the case.
First, the city of Seattle’s contract with the company that processes the city’s recyclables, Allied Waste, allows up to 7 percent of the stuff to end up in a landfill. Some of it (2 percent, the city figures) is due to consumer screw-ups or misunderstanding: trying to recycle things like soiled pizza boxes, prescription pill vials, bottle caps, garden hoses, tennis shoes, bowling balls (yes – really), none of which are recyclable. The rest is due to processing, such as missing some recyclables as they move down the conveyor belt at the Allied recycling facility.
Beyond that, more stuff gets dumped as garbage after bundled bales of paper – mistakenly interspersed with broken glass and plastic jugs – end up at domestic paper mills. Figures vary, but complaints are common among domestic processors.
See a photo of plastics and other wastes spilling out of paper mill machinery here: http://is.gd/sdAN. That photo is part of a “best practices manual” found here: http://www.conservatree.com/learn/SolidWaste/bestpractices.shtml
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