Dear Sara,
Stand firm in your recycling advocacy. I’ve got some facts for your friends. While it is true there have been verified reports of some companies landfilling recyclables, that is absolutely not the case here in Boulder County, where most haulers are bringing their materials to your county-owned facility operated by Eco-Cycle. As a non-profit recycling organization, Eco-Cycle’s primary source of income is from the sale of recyclable materials. Unlike some of those companies accused of landfilling recyclables, we don’t make money from trash. Anything that gets thrown away costs us.
In fact, we market 100 percent of the recyclable materials people send us. Two percent of incoming materials are landfilled (one of the lowest landfill rates of any recycling center in the country), but that’s the non-recyclable stuff we didn’t ask for that has no recycling market, such as non-recyclable plastics, ceramic cups and our personal favorites: a blow-up “Casper the Ghost” punching bag, a legless ceramic garden gnome and what we can only guess was a failed attempt at a papier-mache volcano replica.
Our goal is to get that 2 percent down to nothing, and you can help us do that by giving us only what we ask for. Those who recycle things they wish WERE recyclable and hope we’ll find a place for them are actually hurting the program and increasing our costs.
Of course the other reason you won’t see landfilled materials from our program is because we’re a mission-driven organization—we do it for love, not for money. Every material landfilled represents a failure for the environment, so we invest revenue from the sale of materials that are valuable (like card board and aluminum) into the subsidization of materials that are not (like plastics and cereal boxes). We also fund extensive educational programs to generate clean, well-sorted recyclables. And it works. We have some of the most valuable materials in the country.
So where does it all go, and what does it become?
Glass becomes Coors beer bottles. Luckily, we’re down the road from a great buyer. Paper becomes paper, it’s our bread and butter. There is a great demand at paper mills for recycled fiber to make all grades of new paper, from card board boxes to fine writing paper. In fact, there are now mills that make only 100 percent recycled paper—a huge boom for the recycling industry.
Aluminum is always a valuable material. Most aluminum cans contain recycled aluminum because it is much more energy- and resource-efficient for the industry to use reclaimed aluminum. A recycled aluminum can will end up back on the store shelf within six weeks after being recycled. Other metals, such as steel cans or scrap metals, have always had steady markets as well. Almost all metal in the United States now has recycled content in it.
Plastic milk jugs and pop bottles have fairly steady markets. The plastic fibers are used in a range of applications including carpet, clothing, auto parts, tennis balls, park benches and sometimes even new bottles and jugs. One issue for plastics is that we don’t have any local markets, which is why it’s hard for us to recycle more types. Local market development for these materials would make a big difference in terms of what we’re able to collect.
Paper from paper milk and juice cartons is high quality stuff used in many paper fiber applications, but processing is expensive so the market price is low. It’s one of those items we subsidize. If none of those arguments works, tell your friends it takes 30 percent less energy to recycle than it does to come up with reasons why you shouldn’t. (OK, I made that part up.)
