In the face of grim headlines about soaring recycling costs and municipal program cutbacks, two nonprofit executives argue that the US recycling industry isn’t actually dying. China’s ban on contaminated scraps presents new opportunities for improvement, they say.
“We need to usher Big Waste out of recycling and let common sense and entrepreneurialism take over,” Neil Seldman and Peter Anderson wrote in an op-ed for Waste Dive. Seldman is co-founder of the sustainable community development nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance and Anderson serves as executive director of the Center for a Competitive Waste Industry, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization.
The two executives responded to recent articles in the Atlantic and the New York Times about the effects of China’s National Sword policy banning certain types of solid waste as well as contaminated scraps.
“Some 20 years ago, Big Waste companies made a deliberate decision to disrupt the then well-functioning dual-stream systems by convincing cities to switch to single-stream recycling,” the men wrote. “This caused contamination rates to increase and led to the market crunch started by Chinese import restrictions.”
Although single-stream systems increased recycling participation, they didn’t increase actual recycling because contamination levels were so high, Seldman and Anderson say. Now China’s policy is spurring domestic scrap-based processing and an evaluation of local recycling infrastructures.
Recycling Crisis and Opportunity
Many municipal recycling programs are currently in a state of crisis. Prices began soaring last year as sorting standards got higher. Some customers saw rates jump as much as 400%. Last month the crunch was so bad in California that an association representing counties in the state begged the governor to establish a statewide commission on recycling markets that could evaluate potential market solutions.
The shifting recycling landscape also prompted major companies to re-evaluate their own strategies. Speaking with Environmental Leader this month, vice president of energy and environment at AEG John Marler said that the global sports and live entertainment company is trying to respond in cost-effective and environmentally responsible ways.
“We realized that the waste and recycling side of the business is in for huge changes,” he said. “We’re doing a soup-to-nuts audit and asking, ‘Is there a better way for this specific item?’”
Coca-Cola’s philanthropic arm recently awarded $5.4 million in charitable grants for community recycling pilots in seven US cities. One of the goals is to reduce recycling contamination through increased awareness.
Seldman and Anderson aren’t big fans of the single-stream system first introduced in the 1990s. They say that cities can take advantage of the new market dynamics by producing cleaner materials through dual-stream or sensibly scaled and locally operated single-stream processing plants.
“Recycling never died, and it is not dying,” they wrote. “It is adjusting to a strange new set of circumstances that are not of its own making — but for which it has solutions.”
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