Sustainable Recycling: Practical Advice for Individuals and Governments
Sustainable Recycling: Practical Advice for Individuals and Governments
What actually gets recycled? Metal and cardboard, but not plastic no matter how much we may wish it so. To learn why, see my last post, Sustainable Recycling: One of Five Ways to Manage Solid Waste. The fact that more than 90% of plastic waste in the United States is burned or buried but not recycled leads a good question, as posed by a reader:
This is great [to know], but also distressing. Can you end with some advice?
Composting More
The single most important thing any of us can do is compost more. All organic material can be composted safely in your backyard or basement, if you have the right equipment and enough time. And if composting is not your cup of tea, your local municipality or an eager entrepreneur could compost for you. No food waste should ever go to sanitary landfill or a waste-to-energy incinerator. Mixing in paper, cardboard, dried leaves and wood with food waste makes the composting process work better.
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If we could divert all organic material at the source and compost it, we would save money, prevent pollution, and literally make the world a better place for all life. Composting turns garbage into richer soil. Anything that was once alive, including cellulose sponges and natural fiber clothing, can be composted to return to the soil to create new life.
Blow your nose? Put the used tissue in your compost pail. Get junk mail? Put it in your compost pail. Have a pile of wood scraps left over from a project? Bury it and let it rot (unless it is pressure treated, of course). Have cotton underwear with too many holes? Let them finish decomposing in your compost pile.
Why should we keep every single scrap of organic material out of a landfill? Methane. Force feeding our landfills organic materials makes them fart this dangerous greenhouse gas. A diet without organic materials slims down our landfills and makes them much better neighbors.
If you don’t want to make your own compost, see if there is a curbside composting service in your area or whether your town has a municipal composting facility.
Buying Less Plastic
As an individual, or even as a single municipality, there’s not much we can do to recycle plastic. Putting more plastic in our own recycling bin will not magically solve the problem. In fact, trying to recycle materials that jam plastic reprocessing machines (like plastic bags) makes the plastic recycling problem worse.
Remember that recycling is one of five strategies to manage solid waste. Plastic is not organic so it cannot be composted or otherwise managed like food waste, so that leaves landfilling, burning or recycling. If you can avoid buying plastic, that’s even better than having to choose how to manage it as waste.
You can eliminate a large category of plastics from your life by drinking tap water (did you know that 93% of sampled bottled water contained microplastics from the packaging and bottling process?), using refillable stainless steel water bottles, buying soda or beer in aluminum cans, and buying milk in reusable glass containers.
Maine has banned single-use plastic bags, so that’s another category of plastic waste we don’t have to manage. In our state, it’s paper or reusable, not paper or plastic.
Choosing glass containers instead of plastic containers and buying in bulk are two more ways to reduce the amount of plastic you buy when you’re out shopping. To avoid single-use plastic when dining out, you can bring your own set of utensils and your own to-go containers. If a dining establishment is using lots of plastic, you might suggest alternatives or you can let them know you can no longer support them unless they rethink their use of plastic. Buying from local farmers and cooking at home are the ultimate in sustainable eating and avoiding unnecessary plastic.
What About Glass?
Glass is a conundrum. It’s a safe, fully-recyclable material, but fragile, heavy and bulky. I’m always digging up glass that’s been buried around our house. Is it really worthwhile to send my glass to a sorting facility, only for it most likely to end up being buried in a landfill? Why not just bury it in my own yard and save the hassle?
Glass is inert. Dig a deep hole and bury a bunch of glass, and it might be several generations before anyone encounters it again. Our house was built in 1828 and I think I’ve found glass artifacts buried in our yard from almost every decade since then.
If I lived closer to a facility that could actually recycle glass, then it would make sense to put it in a recycling bin. But the farther away from a facility that actually makes anything out of glass, the less sense that makes. At some point it’s creating more pollution, wasting more time, and creating more pollution than it’s worth to put glass on trucks and drive it around.
On the flip side, since glass is inert, it’s possible for a materials recovery facility to crush and store glass for years or decades until it is economically viable to ship it for recycling. I hold out hope that the United States will build electric rail and that companies will buy long-haul class 8 electric trucks, which would greatly reduce the economic and environmental costs to ship glass longer distances.
Until then, while I love buying milk and other produces in reusable glass containers, I’m honestly not sure what to do about glass that is not reusable. I’ve got a growing collection in my basement as I ponder the right strategy and wait for transportation to electrify.
A Sustainable Curbside Recycling Service
In my town of Brunswick we have been trying our best to develop a sustainable curbside garbage and recycling system.
We used to operate a landfill next to the Androscoggin River. Building a landfill right next to a river is not the smartest move, since it’s very difficult to control leachate (the liquid that seeps out of a landfill). But we did put our landfill there, paid the fines for polluting our local river, and kept our landfill open as long as possible.
Planning for the closure of our landfill focused our minds on the fact that landfill space is a scarce resource and we ought to charge people for using it. So Brunswick introduced a “pay-as-you-throw” system: the more garbage you produce, the more you pay. At the same time, we kept curbside recycling free. That gives everyone a strong incentive to put as much as they can in the recycling bin, to save money.
On trash day, just one truck comes to collect both the garbage bags and the recycling, since our trash hauler provides “single-stream” recycling. It’s all sorted at a materials recovery facility for us—all we have to do is buy garbage bags for the things they don’t want us to put in the recycling bin, and find ways to sneak extra stuff into the recycling bin so we don’t have to buy so many garbage bags.
If I were running the recycling show in Maine, here’s what I would do:
Buy big cans for every household and business so they don’t have to buy plastic garbage bags. My mom lives in Salt Lake City and they have a great system with color-coded containers that can be picked up by robotic garbage trucks.
Require households and businesses to separate their solid waste into four streams, similar to what they do in Salt Lake, but with a slight twist: plastic, metal and cardboard, compost and glass.
Buy electric garbage trucks with robotic arms.
Shut down the waste-to-energy incinerators and convert them to composting facilities.
Build a glass processing facility in the state.
The “Horch Solid Waste Management” system would reflect the reality of recycling (i.e., that we really can’t recycle plastic) and eliminate some of the pain points:
We’d eliminate the expense and waste of plastic garbage bags.
We’d avoid repetitive stress injuries from lifting and throwing garbage and recycling into trucks all day long.
We’d eliminate a major source of air pollution in Portland by shutting down the Ecomaine incinerator.
We would improve our ability to recycle valuable metal and cardboard.
We would make it easier for households to compost all organic waste and keep it out of landfills.
We would directly landfill plastic.
We would actually be able to recycle glass in Maine.
Do you have ideas for how to improve recycling in your town and your state? I’d love to hear them!
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