Public Domain
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Some personal history: Deborah and I have recycled our household materials for as long as I can remember. Decades ago, this was a very difficult process. We had to separate plastics and paper, aluminums from other metals and had to be sure that the cardboard was clean (no used pizza boxes!) and that all cardboard boxes were broken down and flattened. We also had to separate the different colors of glass and make sure that everything was completely clean. For a while we even had to remove all of the labels from the glass and the metal cans (an often tedious and energy intensive process!)!
Once a month or so I would take the plastics and the non-aluminum metals and the cardboard to one recycling place, the paper to one of the big bins located in a nearby parking lot, the aluminum to a Boy Scout sponsored bin down near the highway, and the glass to a glass reprocessing plant over across the Allegheny River. Lots of running around, and lots of time and energy invested and expended.
Many of the larger towns around us (under pressure from new state laws mandating recycling) began curbside recycling programs in association with garbage pickup. The town in which we lived, though, was too small to be compelled to initiate one of these programs, so we kept at our self-motivated system for well over a decade.
A friend pointed out the energy cost of all of my cleaning, sorting and transporting of these recyclables more than erased the benefit of the recycling, but the closure of our materials-loop made it seem worthwhile to me. My family produced just a single bag of garbage a week and, so, were not adding substantially to the mountains of trash growing in area landfills. We were as close as we could get to living in a stable dynamic with our world.
Photo by U.S. E.P.A.
Then recycling came to my small town in the form of a twice a month visit by the recycling trucks manned by volunteers from the nearby Progressive Workshop. The trucks had compartments for all of the different materials, and we took ours down every other truck-visit day or so for the next 10 or 12 years. We still had to separate materials (including the different colors of glass) and they still did not want food-soiled cardboard (we were eating a lot of pizza back then, too! Too bad.), but the recycling truck’s proximity greatly reduced my recycling-transportation system’s gasoline costs. Again, there was something so satisfying about returning all of those cans, bottles, newspapers (yes, we read actual, paper newspapers back then!), and plastic doohickeys back into a system where they could be re-processed and reused.
Then there were budget problems and the trucks stopped coming. Back to our old recycling route? No, something even better (or something that seemed so much better) came into being.
Photo by M. Buckawicki, Wikimedia Commons
Deborah and I both taught at Penn State New Kensington, and the campus, working with its waste collections system provider, began a single-stream recycling program and encouraged campus employees to bring their recyclables up to campus and deposit them in the recycling dumpster. There were some restrictions: types of plastics, cleanliness of cans and jars, cardboard boxes had to be broken down and still no used pizza boxes were accepted (but we were eating much less pizza by this time!).
Deborah and I set up a single recycling receptacle in our kitchen and bought the clear, recycling bags (we learned from a trip to the single-stream processing plant that opaque trash bags were not acceptable for recyclable materials. Frequently, materials in these type of bags were simply thrown into the garbage by the initial sorting crew. They were being very cautious to keep garbage out of their system!). We were very careful with our types of plastics and only put clean cans and jars into the bin. Paper, cardboard, aluminum and everything else all went into one bag. Every few weeks I took the bags up and tossed them into the recycling dumpster.
It was so easy! It seemed too good to be true! And, it turned out that it wasn’t true! There were problems with single-stream and also problems with having unsupervised people depositing materials into the recycling stream.
The dumpsters frequently were filled up with boxes that had not been broken down and flattened. Also, odd, large objects that were quite obviously trash were tossed in with the recyclables. The recycling company also had a list of some potentially recyclable materials that they did not want in their recycling stream: small, plastic containers (yogurt containers, for example) and plastic bags (like grocery bags) were not on the acceptable material list because of their tendency to clog the sorting machinery at the single-stream plant. Apparently, though, not everyone paid attention to the change notices and many bags were full of these banned materials. I also noticed that many of the bags tossed into the recycling dumpster were those dark, opaque trash bags that the sorters didn’t want us to use!
The recycling collector fined Penn State because of these unacceptable materials and packages and, eventually, the cost of providing recycling to employees and the public became prohibitive. So Penn State put a lock on the recycling dumpsters and only used them for campus generated materials. About this same time the single-stream, recycling provider who is also the principle recycling entity for most of the community-based recycling programs in Western Pennsylvania, announced that they would no longer accept glass.
Photo by ShoZu, Flickr
Glass is an interesting material in recycling. First and foremost, it is without a doubt the most easily and almost infinitely recyclable material there is! Glass bottles and jars made from recycled materials are exactly the same as glass bottles and jars made fresh from natural, virginal resource materials, and they cost 90% less to make! There is no limit to the number of times glass can be used, recycled, re-processed and then re-used. But, glass is also heavy and can be costly to transport. If you happen to live in a city where there is no glass reprocessing plant, you may not be able to recycle your glass!
Western Pennsylvania, though, has a well established infrastructure for glass reprocessing. The reason that the single stream processor was no longer accepting glass had to do with the nature of the single stream itself. Glass in the mixed bag of recyclables frequently broke and then contaminated the other materials. Glass shards in the paper, or in the cardboard or in the plastic were hard to remove and made those materials less desirable to their end processors. Glass was making the single stream company lose money, so they banned glass.
There have been many levels of response to these changes. A few friends of mine have just stopped recycling. Single-stream was just so easy, it is hard to go back to the old sorting and hauling ways! Other friends switched back to their community, “glassless” recycling, and are doing their best not to buy products in glass containers. What glass they do accumulate they simply throw away. In Pittsburgh several groups have sponsored a series of “pop-up” glass recycling events. People save their glass materials until one of these recycling events is held near them, and then they take their glass to the event and add it to the recycling stream.
Deborah and I have found a local recycling group in a nearby town. They take all recyclables but require that glass, metal, aluminum, paper, cardboard and plastic (only #1’s and #2’s) be separated and sorted. We have set up a series of bins and boxes in the basement to store our sorted recyclables. Every four or five weeks, I take a carload over to the recycling center (they are open weekday mornings. No problem for us retired folks!) and drop them off. The volunteer workers at the center are friendly and helpful, and last time they even let me dump my own glass into the crushing machine! VERY satisfying!
Photo by D. Graham, Flickr
So, we’re back to almost where we started in personal recycling! Clean and sorted, carried to the center and deposited. Used pizza boxes, by the way, are still not accepted! I do have a garage full of them if anyone comes up with a use!
Interesting that this blog arrived at the same time as an email from Ellen Keefe who is executive director of Westmoreland Cleanways. I’ll forward it. There is place in Southwest Greensburg that recycles glass. You separate it there by color.
The single stream facilities were too good to be true.