West Newsmagazine 9-26-18

42 I COVER STORY I
September 26, 2018
WEST NEWSMAGAZINE
@WESTNEWSMAG
WESTNEWSMAGAZINE.COM
Recycling Redux:
How changes in imports will impact local services
By JESSICA MESZAROS
The cost of recycling may soon mean
more than just a trip down the driveway.
Following a change in China’s legislation
regarding its U.S. recycling imports,
the recycling industry across the U.S. has
taken a hit and been forced to re-evaluate
its services. At the heart of the issue is
ongoing over-contamination, which raises
the cost of recycling efforts in the U.S.
market. In short, China only wants to
import clean recycling and single-stream
services – everything in one bin, picked
up at the curb – which results in recycled
materials that could be classed as “dirty.”
For decades leading up to recent
changes, China served as the largest consumer
of recyclable materials generated in
the United States. Five years ago, China
fronted the “Green Fence” initiative to
crack down on contaminated recyclables
coming into the country. In January 2018,
China continued its crackdown on contaminated
recyclables and passed its “National
Sword” policy. The action effectively bans
24 types of solid waste, including various
plastics and unsorted mixed papers, in
addition to raising contamination standards
again. Under its “Red Sword” policy,
China is rejecting shipments with contaminants
above 0.5 percent, a level that most
U.S. recyclers have difficulty meeting with
current methods.
In May 2018, China suspended all imports
of U.S. recycled materials until June,
regardless of the quality. Due to increasing
costs and the decreasing value of materials,
the switch created a stockpile of recyclables
and a lack of available buyers.
The impact has area municipalities and
the waste haulers that serve them debating
the future of single-stream, curbside recycling,
which makes up over 90 percent of
the region’s waste management market.
“China and the world markets have not
been silent regarding their concern of contamination
being collected curbside and
shipped by the U.S. recycling processors,”
said Mary O’Brien, Meridian Waste Services’
chief marketing officer. “This has
been an issue brewing for many years, and
just this year, the issue reached the height of
its impact with China’s Green Fence policy
followed by its Red Sword policy.”
“The policies were an effort on China’s
part to reduce the amount of contamination
coming into their country,” Brent Batliner,
general manager for Republic Services, said.
“They went from standards where the material
you shipped in could have
2 percent contamination in it
and dropped those standards to
around half a percent, which is
almost impossible to meet.
“If we got everything in
perfect, and if the public did
everything we wanted, we would still have
about 3- or 4-percent contamination, just
by things breaking or ripping in the truck,”
Batliner said. “Small pieces of paper or
plastic that break become grit in the system,
kind of like dirt.”
According to O’Brien, China’s crackdown
is due to widespread ignorance about
proper recycling.
“Contamination in the recycling stream
is the No. 1 reason the U.S. is in the predicament
we are in,” O’Brien said.
But getting consumers on board with
change won’t be easy and may mean the
end of single-stream recycling.
According to the National Waste &
Recycling Association, contamination
rates via the collection and processing of
residential single-stream recycling start at
about 25 percent, thus making the contamination
levels unacceptable for collection.
Resource Management Companies
[RMC], which owns and operates material
recovery facilities across the country and
serves locally as the collection facility for
a large number of waste haulers, has said it
will not accept single-stream recycling collections
after Nov. 1.
That change has forced municipalities to
reconsider recycling options for residents
moving forward.
The end of single-stream?
“It’s not hitting us yet, but we do anticipate
that it is going to hit us because it is essentially
a nationwide issue that is being dealt
with by the entire country,” Rick Brown,
Wildwood’s city engineer and director of
public works, said. Wildwood residents are
served by Meridian Waste Services.
Other municipalities are seeing a more
immediate effect.
In August, Kirkwood announced the
suspension of its residential curbside
recycling collection. The single-stream
program, which allows plastic, cardboard,
paper and aluminum to be recycled in one
container, will come to an end in October.
Kirkwood’s recycling processor is RMC.
Batliner, of Republic Services, said, “The
demand is still there, it’s just the logistics
of handling it, which has backed material
up globally. It has drastically driven the
value of the material down.”
Republic Services is currently working
on increasing personnel along sorting lines
and in other areas to continue to provide
recycling services to customers in municipalities
like Ballwin, Chesterfield, Ellisville
and Manchester, to name a few.
“We are going to have to invest more
money in equipment to make a cleaner
product to sell worldwide, and we are
making that investment,” Batliner said.
“We have had to add a few more people to
assure, with the quality control at the end
of our line, that everything is coming up
to the specification we need. Long term,
the processing cost will probably increase,
but once again, what offsets it is the value
of the material. That’s really the problem
right now ... but that will recover.”
Waste Management saw a 36-percent
decrease in average recycling commodity
prices in the first quarter of 2018 and
saw an increase in operations costs. The
increase is credited to the transportation of
materials to areas like Vietnam and India,
whose criteria is not as strict as China’s.
“If I’m not shipping thousands of tons a
month to China, now I have to find a new
home for it. That doesn’t happen overnight,”
Batliner said.
And it doesn’t come cheaply.
“Recycling is not free,” O’Brien said.
“It takes money to buy trucks, hire commercial
driver’s license [CDL] drivers,
invest in heavy equipment and processing
machinery, ship baled recyclables to end
markets and so forth. Understanding the
costs of recycling is step one. Then, when
markets are good, sharing the benefits of a
rebate is step two.”
Due to the steady export of contaminated
materials, the stability of the
market for recyclables has resulted in
processors having to pay more money to
get rid of materials, rather than reselling
cleaned materials with reusable capabilities
for a profit.
“It’s very attractive to recycle when markets
are good, as they were five years ago
and even earlier in the 2000s,” O’Brien said.
“However, when markets shift and what
used to be a refund becomes an expense, the
financial impact is harsh and very real.”
[Shutterstock image]
According to O’Brien, Meridian’s current
recycling processing fee of $37.45 per
ton is significantly higher than the company’s
internal rate of transportation and
disposal at locations across the country,
including the Eagle Ridge Landfill in St.
Louis, equating to about a 25-percent differential
between the current cost of recycling
processing and local landfilling in the
St. Louis marketplace.
Due to facilities like RMC no longer collecting
residential single-stream recycled
materials after November 2018, the $37.45
per ton rate is expected to increase even
more over time. According to O’Brien,
municipal waste contracts are typically
long-term, fixed-rate contracts.
“Recycling is a commodity-driven business
– individual materials have a value
based upon market conditions,” O’Brien
said. “Single stream, mixed materials have
a value as well. It truly is a classic economics
example of supply and demand.”
The rising cost of ‘wish-cycling’
The trend of “wish-cycling” is one of the
factors complicating the process.
Wish-cycling happens when uncertain
consumers choose the recycling bin for
an item that should go to the trash. Nonrecyclable
items like coolers, diapers, food
waste and plastic shopping bags get tangled
up in the system due to ignorance or
wish-cycling, creating additional demands,
delays and often repairs to the system.
According to O’Brien, some of the most
common wish-cycling items are plastic
toys, aerosol cans, pizza boxes and clothes.
Waste from non-recyclable materials can
contaminate other collected materials,
thereby impacting the ability of all the
goods to be recycled.
“If someone throws a whole jar of peanut
butter in [the recycling bin], and that jar
gets smashed, a pound of peanut butter
squirts out into all the other materials in
that truck,” Batliner said. “A lot of that
material then has to be trashed with it.”
Even small amounts of such viscous materials
are problematic.
Landfilling, by contrast, is easier and
cheaper, but with no value added.
“Maybe to have [trash] picked up from