New challenges for recycling may have recycled solutions

By PATRICK ADRIAN
[email protected]
ASCUTNEY, Vt. — The current challenge to municipal recycling programs is rather complex, said Tom Kennedy, president of the Southeast Windsor Regional Planning Commission. The state of Vermont requires municipalities to recycle a growing variety of waste materials that have little to no value because the market for recycling has tanked. Simultaneously many residents feel that, because recycling is an important public service, it should be free.

“People want to recycle and believe it’s important, but they also need to understand that it’s not free,” Kennedy said. “If recycling continues to lose towns money, their transfer stations will need to raise prices.”

Kennedy’s organization operates the Southern Windsor and Windham Counties Solid Waste Management District, which currently provides waste management services, support and strategic planning to 14 towns in the Windsor and Windham region. The district serves Springfield, Rockingham, Windsor, Weathersfield, West Windsor, Chester, Athens, Grafton, Cavendish, Ludlow, Andover, Baltimore, Plymouth and Reading.

The economics of recycling

The plummet of the recycling market has many towns in the region making difficult choices regarding their transfer station operations. Last month in Charlestown, New Hampshire the selectboard discussed sending the town’s recyclable plastics to the landfill rather than to the recycling center in Keene, after Keene increased the price to take plastics from $55 per metric ton to $90 per metric ton. In June the Springfield Selectboard voted 4-1 to increase user fees in order to avoid a 2% increase to the tax rate, which the town said was due to increasing costs to recycle.

The recycling crisis is felt worldwide as well as nationally. China, which used to receive 7 million tons of plastic waste annually from outside countries, stopped accepting plastics, leaving the United States and other countries without sufficient alternatives.

Kennedy said that the United States used to have mills that processed material waste like plastic and mixed paper for repurposing, but their inability to compete with the growing Asian market at the time forced American mills to close.

With Asian companies no longer accepting foreign plastics and paper materials, the market will need to adapt, Kennedy said. Some American mills may reopen and companies are always looking for new ways to make recycling economically viable again, but no one can currently say whether or not the market will recover.

The contamination problem

Kennedy said that people need to learn not to send contaminated materials to recycling bins.

Contaminated recyclables are materials that have not been properly cleaned before adding to the recycling bin, such as food containers with organic matter.

“If sorting centers find a lot of contaminated recyclables in the mix they will reject or devalue them,” Kennedy said.

Recycling centers have to employ sorters to separate the usable plastics and other materials from the contaminated or unusable. With the decline in value for these materials sorting centers are left to decide between hiking the cost for their sorting services or rejecting larger volumes of material.

For Charlestown the cost to send their plastics to the landfill would only be $53 per metric ton, as opposed to $90 per metric ton that Keene planned to charge. Shortly after this announced price increase, however, Keene returned the price to its previous rate due to customer reaction.

Moving forward in Vermont

“We are always looking for entrepreneurial types to find new ways to manage our waste,” Kennedy said of his program.

But Vermont’s government is very reluctant to make changes from its current system, he said. The state has invested heavily in recycling policies, which includes laws for food composting that will take effect in 2020. The state worries that changing habits might disconnect people from recycling habits and make it difficult to get them back.

While individual residents might get away with mixing recyclable materials in their garbage, Vermont does expect municipalities to follow its recycling laws and can issue fines to towns or cities if their inspection of transfer station haulers finds that employees are not following recycling requirements.

“The main message for people to understand is that recycling is not free,” Kennedy said.