Sustainable Recycling: A Proposed Pilot Project
Do you wish your community were better at recycling? Here’s a proposed pilot project you can try in your own home, organization or neighborhood to show how recycling can be done well.
Color Coding Waste Bins
The basic plan is to separate waste at the source using color-coded waste bins.
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Brown for food composting.
White for paper composting.
Blue for metal and clean cardboard recycling.
Green for glass.
Yellow for returnables (if your state has a bottle bill).
Black for plastics.
Red for household hazardous waste.
Many cities have started similar color-coded waste management programs, including San Francisco and Salt Lake City.
Composting
Composting is the single most effective way to reduce the costs of solid waste management, protect health and well being, and make the best use of all the materials your family, organization and community are using.
Everything that was once alive, we can compost back into a rich soil amendment. Composting, in case you need a quick refresher, is encouraging oxygen-breathing microbes to break down big molecules into smaller molecules. Carbohydrates, proteins and fats are examples of big molecules that microbes can break down. Water and carbon dioxide are the two primary results, but they disperse, leaving a molecular mix rich in nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and other elements that are great fertilizers.
You can take an enormous, stinky pile of organic garbage, compost it, and end up with a small batch of dark, earthy humus. This can happen in your back yard or in a facility your neighborhood, organization or town manages. There is no need to ship organic material to a sanitary landfill; in fact, sending food and paper waste to landfills is a very bad idea.
What happens if you try to landfill instead of compost organic waste?
Let’s say you don’t compost your organic waste, but send it to a sanitary landfill. In that case, the microbes living in that anaerobic (“without oxygen”) condition will produce methane (“natural gas”), which is one atom of carbon with four atoms of hydrogen. Water (hydrogen and oxygen) and carbon dioxide (carbon and oxygen) can’t be created without oxygen. Producing methane by accident is dangerous, because it’s explosive, and bad for the planet, because it’s a potent greenhouse gas that causes climate change. Producing methane on purpose in a special air-tight facility, called a “digester,” is a way to turn garbage into “renewable natural gas.” Burning methane combines the carbon and hydrogen atoms with oxygen to produce water and carbon dioxide. One way or another, most organic matter eventually turns back into water and carbon dioxide. Composting is a simple and safe way to do that; landfilling is not.
Rats and bears are two reasons to be careful about what you try to compost in your own backyard. Most guides recommend against composting meat, cheese or other items that might attract rats. But leaves, paper, cellulose sponges, cotton clothing, and a whole range of other non-aromatic items (which I’ll lump together in the category of “paper waste”) can be safely composted anywhere without attracting vermin.
If you have a good rat-proof system and don’t live in bear country, you can compost everything—food waste and paper waste—in your own backyard. In that case, you could have a single composting bin for all your organic waste. (In a future post I’ll share what I do to compost fish, cheese, meat, and bones without creating a big mess.)
But if you are worried about rats, then you should consider having two composting bins: brown for food that a rat might like, and white for paper and other compostables that are not appetizing to a rat. If you’re not equipped to compost your own food waste, you have three main choices with what to with your brown bin waste:
Pay for a curbside composting service to take it away.
Deliver it to a municipal composting facility yourself.
Make friends with a local farmer or gardener.
For your paper waste and other non-aromatic compostables, I strongly recommend that you collect those in a white bin and try composting them in your own backyard if at all possible. A three-pile system works best in my experience (for an example, see “The Ultimate Guide to Building & Using a Three Bin Composting System”). Into your own backyard compost pile you can throw all of these items:
Office paper and junk mail (remove any plastic windows in envelopes)
Pizza boxes (scrape off all cheese and toppings)
Paper towels and paper napkins
Paperboard (cereal boxes and toilet paper tubes)
Sawdust (clean wood only, NOT pressure treated wood!)
Wooden utensils and chopsticks
Paper cups and plates (scrape off any food first)
Paper takeout containers
Paper labels from cans and bottles
Packing peanuts (try dissolving them in water — if they dissolve, they can go in your compost pile)
Wrapping paper and greeting cards
The trick is to shred everything and water your compost pile. You may need to throw in some grass clippings and maybe even mix in a compost accelerator. Don’t forget to water! You’ll produce a wonderful humus that you can use for trees and flower beds.
Recycling
Metal and clean cardboard are actually recycled in the United States, so these are the two materials to focus on. Put all sorts of metal and clean cardboard into a blue recycling bin. Your local municipality should either have a curbside recycling program, or can tell you where you can take metal and cardboard to be recycled in your community.
Glass in theory can be recycled endlessly. In practice, glass is often not actually recycled because it is heavy and low value. Furthermore, there are several different kinds of glass which can be difficult to recycle together. For a more in-depth understanding of the problem, see “Why glass recycling in the US is broken.”
Despite the reality that glass is difficult to recycle, many people don’t want to hear it. They just don’t want to put glass into a trash can. So I recommend that you collect glass in green bins and then do your best to dispose of it, using whatever system your community provides. In my town, I can put out my blue bin of metal and clean cardboard that has a good chance of getting recycled, and my green bin of glass that does not, and the “single stream” recycling hauler will pick up everything in both bins.
Ten states, including my home state of Maine, have “bottle bills” that are designed to encourage people to “recycle” beverage bottles. (For details, see “Bottle bill states and how they work.”) If you live in such a state, you can use a yellow bin for returnable bottles. There is a slight chance that some of those bottles will be recycled (more likely most will be incinerated or buried), but more importantly, you’ll get your deposit money back if you follow the rules of your state’s bottle bill.
Waste
After sorting your garbage into the five types of bins I’ve already described, you have two major categories left:
Household hazardous waste.
Plastic and other non-hazardous synthetic materials.
Every household, organization and community should have a plan for universal hazardous waste. I recommend using red bins that are clearly labeled for this. Here are some things that go into the red bin:
Batteries and handheld electronics.
Cans of fuel, fertilizer, and other chemicals.
CFL light bulbs and other fluorescent light bulbs (these contain mercury).
Expired or unused medicines.
Anything else that gives you an uneasy feeling.
If you’re not sure whether it’s safe to put something in a regular garbage can, put it in a red bin. Then find out when your community has its next household hazardous waste collection day, and take your red bin there. If your community does not provide hazardous waste collections, here’s your chance to be a sustainability leader! Step up to volunteer to organize one.
Now all that’s left is plastic and other synthetic materials like pressure-treated wood and dried up latex paint. It’s hard to recycle plastic, and there is good evidence that trying to recycle it actually creates more problems than it solves. (See “Plastic Recycling Doesn’t Work and Will Never Work.”)
Why can’t we recycle plastic? First, there is a huge variety of types of plastic. Most plastic containers have a number from one to seven, but there are many more than seven types of plastic. Numbers one through six identify the family of resin, but number seven simply means “none of the above.” Second, there is a huge amount of contamination. Most packaging and most products include several different types of plastic. Lids, for example, are a harder type of plastic than bottles so that when you screw on the lid it can bite into the threads, forming a tighter seal. Third, plastic is light and bulky. It’s tremendously expensive to collect and transport it. Fourth, the process of recycling involves sorting and shredding, which creates tiny bits of plastic which are extremely difficult to contain. “Micro” pieces of plastic have polluted rivers, lakes and oceans all over the world.
I recommend using a black bin for plastic and anything else that doesn’t clearly go into your brown bin for food compost, your white bin for paper compost, your blue bin for metal and clean cardboard, your green bin for glass, your yellow bin for returnables, or your red bin for hazardous waste.
A friend and I will be proposing this pilot project for his neighborhood. I’ll let you know how it goes!
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