As the recycling environment continues to change, municipalities across the U.S. are modifying their recycling initiatives – by decreasing, increasing, or changing their processes based on commodity pricing and consumer behavior.     According to Brett Stevens, global vice president, material sales and procurement at Terra Cycle, one of the main instigators causing the change in municipalities’ recycling program is commodity pricing on items such as plastic, clear glass and uncoated cardboard. These prices have been low for quite some time – mostly because the reprocessors and/or end-users of those materials have issues with product contamination.   “As packaging construction has gotten more complicated, the contamination levels in recycling streams have gone up,” Stevens said. “This has a ripple effect on the remainder of the supply chain and the end-markets for these materials suffer as a result. At a certain point, it stops making economic sense to sort out and process certain streams that were collected for recycling because the value retrieved on the back end does not cover the costs on the front end. “   Some municipalities, such as those in the state of Michigan, are ramping up their recycling programs. So why the discrepancy? As Stevens explained, some municipalities are using grant money or private funds to act as a subsidy to municipal recycling programs. This allows economic factors described above to have less of an impact on the operation, and allows for these recycling programs to continue as-is or even scale up in some capacity.   “Any changes to recycling programs are implemented to improve quality and consistency of the streams, improve the economics associated with performing sortation and processing work, or increase the possibility of a viable end market,” Stevens said.   Evolving Strategies   The City of Sierra Vista, Arizona ceased its mixed recyclables curbside collection on July 1, 2019 and started a staffed drop-off facility, which accepts recyclable materials from anyone, not just city residents. The facility is open six days a week, for six hours. Here, avid recyclers can drop off mixed or presorted glass, plastics #1 and #2, aluminum and steel cans, and corrugated cardboard, where staff and Department of Corrections Workers sort the recyclables into separate bins. The city also moved its glass recycling drop-off bins to the same location, so now they have a “one stop drop” facility for accepted recyclable materials.   “We offer a recycling service because it is the right thing to do from an environmental standpoint,” said Judy Hector, marketing and communications manager with the city of Sierra Vista, Arizona. “The buyer we work with can provide documentation that materials we provide to them are actually being recycled instead of dumped in a landfill.”   As Hector explained, Sierra Vista provides residential and commercial curbside trash collection, which is taken to a transfer station owned by Cochise County. The city pays a tipping fee to the county. The waste is then transferred to the county owned landfill.   “Before we started the curbside collection, city trucks picked up trash twice a week. After starting the curbside program, we launched a ‘1 and 1’ program, where the second weekly collection was reserved for picking up recyclables,” Hector said. “After ceasing the curbside collection, we reverted to a twice-weekly trash pickup.”   So what was the biggest instigator of the change for Sierra Vista? According to Hector, aside from the global collapse of the recycling market, the biggest instigator was contamination in the mixed recycling stream. In Sierra Vista, an aggressive education program early on helped prevent quite a lot of contamination, but the recyclables were mixed with other communities’ recyclables, where contamination was about 50 percent, so the overall contamination was significant.   “By hand sorting materials that are dropped off, we are able to achieve nearly zero percent contamination, which increased the value of each load,” Hector said.   Another instigator was the tipping fee. When the city of Sierra Vista started the curbside program, Cochise County was able to sell the recyclables. Once global demand dropped, the county began charging the city $64 a ton to dump recyclables. As Hector explained, by diverting some of the waste to the drop-off program, the city is able to reduce its overall tipping fee expense while recouping some of the drop-off facility expenses through the sale of clean recyclables.   “Once they understood that we’re not reducing service, homeowners have responded positively to the change overall,” Hector said. “Our most grateful, and largest volume recyclers are from outside of Sierra Vista, where recycling has not been offered in the past. Our challenge in gaining acceptance of the change was educating the public about the global supply of recyclable materials, what is actually being recycled by buyers, and the plummeting demand.”   Although the Sierra Vista has made an innovative attempt to continue recycling, they are still facing challenges. “I think any municipality, particularly ones removed from large markets, will face them as well,” Hector said. “Our greatest challenge with the drop-off facility is the operation cost versus the revenue from the sale of clean recyclables. While we’re able to keep our labor costs low with DOC workers, and there was really no infrastructure to build other than a shade shelter, we are faced with expensive hauling costs to transport recyclables to buyers 80 miles away in Tucson.”   The greatest volume of recyclables that Sierra Vista collects is plastic bottles. “We are overwhelmed with them,” Hector said. “Currently we are hauling two 40-yard roll offs of plastic a month, each of which contains about 32,200 single-use plastic containers. And, unfortunately, the market price for plastic is minimal.”   Another challenge Sierra Vista is facing is the volume of corrugated cardboard. As the home to the U.S. Army’s Fort Huachuca, Sierra Vista has a very transient population, which is resulting in a lot of cardboard waste. As such, the city is looking at setting up a free box service, where they would set aside the better moving boxes for people to pick up.   “Not only will this reduce the volume and weight of boxes, it emphasizes the ‘reuse’ part of the 3Rs,” Hector said. “We’re waiting for Public Works to work out the logistics for this.”   Jennifer McClintock, public information officer, City of Oklahoma City Utilities Department, also said Oklahoma City recently modified its recycling program.   “Our current program is one we transitioned to in July 2018, alongside our solid waste contractor Waste Management,” McClintock said. At that time, Oklahoma City converted from a weekly 18-gallon open bin program to a large cart single-stream program that is picked up every other week.   “This not only affords our 195,000 eligible households the opportunity to recycle more, but also adds cardboard and paper board cartons into the mix of items we accept, increasing our overall volume of items recycled,” McClintock said. “It’s also cut down on the potential for contractor employee injuries since carts are picked up using trucks with automated side arms, and has cut down significantly on neighborhood trash since the carts have lids, and the items are no longer susceptible to being blown around in Oklahoma winds.”   For some of Oklahoma City’s rural customers who are not eligible for curbside recycling pick-up, the city has built two new drop-off centers that are conveniently located near easy-to-access intersections.   “Fees for our recycling services are bundled in with our regular weekly trash pick-up and monthly bulky waste, so all customers pay the same flat monthly fee for solid waste services and there is no extra charge for our regular recycling service,” McClintock said.   Later this year, Oklahoma City intends to offer a second cart for its more enthusiastic recyclers upon demand. They will charge a minimal fee for this second cart, but the overall program and pick-up will remain the same.   So why the change on Oklahoma City’s part? Quite simply, they heard the need from their customers for some time that they were ready for a better program, but from a logistics standpoint, the city wanted to take a more pragmatic approach.   “We considered first the impact a larger program would have in extending the life of our landfills, in addition to the significant increase in the amount of cardboard we were collecting due to the popularity of online shopping,” McClintock said. “Those two factors, combined with the increased demand from our customers for enhanced services, led us to reconsider how to change our service delivery model to one that not only encouraged more people to recycle, but also divert more recyclable materials away from our limited landfill space.”   McClintock said that overall, the changes have been very positive. “We had a lot of eager recyclers and are now seeing people who were hesitant to recycle in the small bin program because of the wind now embrace recycling fully,” McClintock said. “We have about 40 percent participation overall, which we hope to improve upon with continued education and outreach.”   As for what the future holds, Stevens said we need better education among consumers regarding what goes into their collection bins, more infrastructure in the U.S. to improve economics, and an increased level of demand champions who are committed to using recycled materials in their products and packaging.   “This will help to stabilize the costs associated with recycling supply chains and provide a more predictable return on investment,” Stevens said. “This will then re-stabilize municipal programs.”  

Published in the November 2019 Edition