5 Things I Learned at the Recycling Tour

So what is recyclable and what’s not? As I looked around the room and noted informational posters, I realized that it’s not an arbitrary decision made by the city government. It has to do with what the market will buy. One ton of metal could be sold for about $1,700. The price of plastic fluctuates with the price of oil. If the price of oil is low then the manufacturer may choose to buy oil to create new plastic products, but if the price of oil is high buying recyclable plastics become attractive. So the demand for used plastic and the price of oil have an inverse relationship. Right now, one pound of rigid plastic (like plastic buckets and cheap lawn furniture) will fetch  four-cents. Same with paper. One ton of used paper will be sold between $72 and $84 or $0.4 per pound. The sales price for used paper and plastic seem hardly worth the effort. But the reason to recycle is not financial. The motivation is driven by the need to divert waste from the landfill as this coastal landfill site has a limited capacity.

Metal bale

Plastic bale

Paper bale

Another way to look at recycling is the willingness and ability of manufacturers to take consumer waste into their manufacturing process. To make this feasible, an infrastructure to collect, sort, and market recyclable waste must be in place. What makes recycling work in my city is the presence of facilities in the Bay Area that use these materials to make their products, and that there is demand for them (such as bottles used by wineries in Northern California). I realized that this infrastructure and end products determine what is accepted as recyclable material in our community. I’ve often wondered why some cities don't offer curbside recycling service, but now I see that collecting recyclables from the blue bins is just first step in the recycling process. Without the investment in sorting, transporting, processing infrastructure, and demand from manufacturers recycling is not feasible. 

What the Resource Recovery Facility does is the first step in the recycling process. The post-consumer recyclable materials are brought into the facility to be sorted and baled. The sorting machinery separates the metals, glass, plastic, and paper into different areas. Human intervention removes non-recyclable and contaminated items from the work stream. The conveyor belt moves fast. Trained eyes and split-second decision of the workers keep the flow moving. The better job we do in placing items in the blue recycling bin at home, the less intervention is needed at the recycling site.

Machinery jams every so often because of tangling items and small bits. There is nothing like seeing the line stop to sear an impression. I’ll make sure I won’t throw garden hose (tangling non-recyclable item) or tiny bottle caps (things that cause jamming) into the recycling bin. At the end of the tour, I appreciated the wisdom of the phrase, “When in doubt, throw it out.”

Garden hoses (tangles) can cause problems

Sorting machinery

If I look upstream from the activities at the Resource Recovery Facility, I see opportunities for making a difference. If I have a mixed material item like the can of coffee beans from Trader Joe’s, I can choose to separate the metal from paper and put it in the blue recycling bin or throw the entire can in the trash. Better yet, I can choose to buy coffee in bulk at the grocery store and avoid deconstructing the coffee packaging. Bringing my own jar and re-using it continuously avoids recycling the coffee packaging all together!

We can choose to be a conscious consumer when an opportunity presents itself. Maybe not buying something impulsively (like a cool kitchen gadget or yet another intriguing book) is another opportunity to be a conscious consumer. How would you make your personal trade-off decisions to be a conscious consumer?

Coffee can in its entirety is not recyclable

Separate paper and metal to recycle