{"id":795254,"date":"2019-04-27T17:36:01","date_gmt":"2019-04-27T23:36:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.summitdaily.com\/news\/recycling-in-summit-county-and-across-the-country-keeps-getting-harder-and-more-expensive\/"},"modified":"2019-04-27T17:36:01","modified_gmt":"2019-04-27T23:36:01","slug":"recycling-in-summit-county-and-across-the-country-keeps-getting-harder-and-more-expensive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/local-news\/recycling-in-summit-county-and-across-the-country-keeps-getting-harder-and-more-expensive\/","title":{"rendered":"Recycling in Summit County and across the country keeps getting harder and more expensive"},"content":{"rendered":"
A forklift stows bales of recycled cardboard at the Summit County Resource Allocation Park, Nov. 2017 in Dillon. The market for cardboard recycling has plummetted, along with plastics and several other recyclables no longer being accepted by China.<\/strong>
Hugh Carey \/ hcarey@summitdaily.com<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

American consumers throw tens of millions of items into the recycling stream every year. For decades, an \u201cout of sight, out of mind\u201d attitude has prevailed, with most of us assuming that once something is chucked into the green or blue bins with the \u201cchasing arrows\u201d symbol on them, the item will wind up in the \u201cright place.\u201d<\/p>\n

For most of that time, the \u201cright place\u201d was China. Until 2018, the Red Dragon\u2019s industry consumed half the world\u2019s recyclables to remake into consumer products. But after getting fed up with contaminated, disorganized and unsorted recyclables from the rest of the world polluting its own country, China closed the floodgates.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn average, 15 to 20 percent of recyclables that goes in the stream are contaminated,\u201d Summit County Resource Allocation Park director Aaron Byrne told Summit County\u2019s commissioners during their regular work session Tuesday morning. \u201cSince last year, China is only accepting a contamination rate of half a percent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Byrne was explaining to the county commissioners how the downstream effects of China\u2019s decision were creating rapid changes in the recycling industry. The industry has never been lucrative, and once the largest market for recyclables all but shut down, commodity prices on processing items like plastic and cardboard have been plummeting month-after-month since last January.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most dramatic change has been single stream recycling,\u201d Byrne told the Summit Daily. \u201cAt one point in 2017, we were actually earning $29 a ton. Today we have to pay $38 a ton just to process that same material. It\u2019s almost a swing of $70 a ton from positive to negative. That\u2019s been a huge expense increase to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Combined with increasing freight costs, the recycling market has become a black hole for the budgets of many towns and counties. For some, it\u2019s become too much to bear.<\/p>\n

Since last year, towns and counties from Oregon to Maine have shuttered their recycling programs. The city of Philadelphia has resorted to burning hundreds of tons of contaminated recyclables a day \u2013 or half of what Philly citizens have been throwing into recycling bins \u2014 for energy.<\/p>\n

Summit County, already behind the curve of the growing problem, approved Ballot Initiative 1A last year, which earmarked $1.7 million a year for funding existing and new recycling and diversion programs.<\/p>\n

But Byrne admitted to the commissioners that, whereas it was estimated that $500,000 would be needed to fund existing programs, the market changes meant that\u2019s now up to $750,000 a year.<\/p>\n

That is $250,000 less to fund new facilities and programs, such as a new convenience and drop-off facility at the entrance to the SCRAP to make it easier for residents to drop off heavy recyclables such as appliances.<\/p>\n

While Byrne and county public works manager Tom Gosiorowski said they did not anticipate needing to ask voters for more money, they do ask residents to help with the recycling market woes by doing their part by carefully reading recycling instructions before throwing something in.<\/p>\n

The county, for example, does not accept glass for recycling in single stream recycling. Pizza boxes are also a big nuisance, as the grease and food particles render them impossible to recycle. Single-use plastics and packaging are a global scourge, but they\u2019re also difficult to recycle in the county. And with a down cardboard market, the countless shipping boxes from companies like Amazon become a burden. And, finally, when it comes to containers \u2013 like cans, jugs and bottles \u2014 to wash them out and dispose of unrecyclable items like caps and tops before putting them into recycling.<\/p>\n

Given the limited capacity in the county and worth of recyclables, Gosiorowski also encouraged residents to more emphasis on the first two Rs in \u201cReduce, Reuse, Recycle.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe big message is to ask everybody to recycle everything they can, but try and reduce their usage of materials as well,\u201d Gosiorowski said.<\/p>\n

And while the economic issues are hurting his industry, Byrne looked at the situation as a big opportunity to reform it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that the big thing for us and in this community and this industry starting to recognize that this is the best thing China could have done, to push back so we\u2019re not shipping trash overseas,\u201d Byrne said. \u201cIt allows the recycling industry to focus on the problem at hand and figure it out. We\u2019ll be so much stronger as an industry going forward, and that\u2019ll present a lot of great opportunities for the state to look into creating more end uses for recyclables and recycling markets.\u201d<\/p>\n

via:: Summit Daily<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A forklift stows bales of recycled cardboard at the Summit County Resource Allocation Park, Nov. 2017 in Dillon. The market for cardboard recycling has plummetted, along with plastics and several other recyclables no longer being accepted by China.Hugh Carey \/ hcarey@summitdaily.com American consumers throw tens of millions of items into the recycling stream every year. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-795254","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-15 00:10:36","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}