Is Recycling Dead? MassDEP says “No”

By George Stubbs, Co-Chair, Zero Waste Melrose

On April 9, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) conducted a webinar aiming to answer a question that we at Zero Waste Melrose have been trying to answer for many months now: Is recycling dead? The subtitle of the webinar was “Spoiler Alert--the answer is ‘no’.” We agree. What follows is a summary of the webinar presentation.

Brooke Nash, municipal waste reduction branch chief at MassDEP, led off with a recap of what’s led us to where we are today. For about two years now, she began, we’ve been hearing and reading an almost weekly drumbeat of media reports warning us of recycling’s demise: recycling is doomed, recyclables are all going to the landfill (or the incinerator), China’s to blame, etc. The tidbits of truth in these narratives are swamped in a tide of gloom that, recycling proponents and program managers fear, will prompt the public to give up on recycling. They shouldn’t, Nash urged.

It’s an understatement to say that the recycling market is facing challenges, but some of these are of our own making, Nash suggested. An appropriate beginning to the story takes us back to the early 2000s, when China began taking steps that would make it the “heart” of the global waste business. Specifically, China invested in modern pulp and paper production capacity, including the capacity to process recycled paper, which would be needed to ship products globally--products that the developed world was demanding at hypersonic levels. Meanwhile, Nash reported, U.S. recycling mills were turning into dinosaurs through lack of vision and investment. So U.S.-generated waste paper was shipped off to China in large volumes, along with other recyclables.

But something was wrong. In 2013, China fired a warning shot to the U.S. and the rest of the developed world: what you’re sending us contains too much contamination--that is, non-paper materials that are hard to separate or that harm the quality of the finished product. According to Nash, U.S. recyclers have admitted that they had become complacent and sloppy, and the public did as well. The phenomenon of “wish-cycling” emerged. People didn’t want to put many categories of items in the trash. These items ought to be recycled, many of us thought, so into the bin they went, whether they belonged there or not. 

Recycling program managers are confronting wish-cycling to this day; it’s well-intentioned, but it’s causing problems.

In 2017, China said “enough.” It established stringent standards for contamination--as tough as 0.5%, a standard that no U.S. recycler could meet. The standards went into effect in late 2018, and turmoil in the U.S. recycling market ensued.

As Nash reported during the webinar, the nine materials recycling facilities (MRFs) operating in Massachusetts had to react quickly. They hired more people to sort materials, they slowed down the conveyor belts so that increased sorting could be done safely, and they took steps to educate the public about what may and what shouldn’t go into their curbside bins.

Meanwhile, other countries, many of them in Southeast Asia, try to pick up the slack from China’s reduced demand for recyclables. But “then the other shoe drops,” said Nash. These other countries started to follow China’s lead on contamination.

And so here we are--in a bind, if we listen to the mainstream press.

If we look past the media headlines and read what the recycling industry is reporting, we’ll find that the North American recycling industry is responding positively, albeit slowly and fitfully. There has been a recent surge in domestic capacity to recycle paper and other recyclables (we covered some of this development in a recent blog). Citing recent research by the Northeast Recycling Council (NERC), Nash’s presentation provided the following headlines from earlier this year:

“Domestic plastics recycling capacity is expanding”

“NERC: Recycled paper capacity increasing at 17 North American mills”

“Pratt to build more US recycled fiber mills”

This is all long overdue, Nash declared. “It’s time to stop exporting dirty material and clean up our recycling act.” 

We at Zero Waste Melrose couldn’t agree more. Our country prides itself as the land of innovation--so let’s innovate, in an area that has substantial potential to build a healthy economy, by turning waste materials into resources. If we can ride out the current storm and keep putting recyclable materials in our curbside bins--the right materials--recycling can come back stronger than ever. In the meantime, take comfort in the fact that, if you do recycle right, the materials you put in the bin will be going where we all want them to go.