Plastic: Recycler, Beware!

Be sure to read the companion piece, Recycling: Doing Our Best

Swarthmore residents love the environment. So here’s a simple suggestion to up your green game: next time you gather around the backyard fire pit, burn your plastic. Pile high some Styrofoam and black plastic takeout clamshells, plastic forks, and condiment cups. Throw on some crumpled coconut water drink cartons, add some chip bags, stoke it with some junkmail kindling, and torch it.

You’ll be doing the environment a huge favor. Why?

Throwing plastic onto a backyard bonfire means not burning the polluting diesel required to truck it 50 miles to the recycling center in Birdsboro, where it would be sorted and baled. It saves the diesel used to truck bales from Birdsboro to a port and then ship them across the Pacific to Southeast Asia, where they would likely be burned.

If the acrid stench of burning plastic doesn’t appeal to you, there’s another alternative: throw your empty containers in Crum Creek. This too would be better for the environment than putting those containers in your blue recycling barrel. Dumping them in local waterways will prevent them from being shipped to places like rural Malaysia and Indonesia and then discarded in trash-clogged rivers.

In recent years, investigative journalists have documented how often plastics from U.S. recycling programs have met fates like those. I particularly recommend three episodes and articles from Frontline (swat.ink/frontline-plastic), Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (swat.ink/john-oliver-plastic), and the New York Times (swat.ink/times-plastic). 

How can we tell which items in our curbside recycling bin are actually being recycled rather than disposed of overseas or in a landfill nearby? Since no Pennsylvania regulations require tracking and reporting what happens to our recycling, we can’t be sure.  

But there is a way to make a good guess. We can look at which raw materials manufacturers are willing to buy to make items like bottles, insulation, rugs, jars, and cans. Materials that no one wants — that no manufacturer will buy — are literally trash. When these zero-value items go into our recycling bin, we engage in “wishful recycling,” or “wish-cycling.” 

Some items from our curbside recycling —  glass, small bits of paper, and small plastic items like bottle and jug caps — are worth something, but often not enough to make recycling them worth a manufacturer’s while. Because of the costs of separating, transporting, cleaning, and processing, these items are routinely trashed after sorting. (For more on the valuation of separated recycling material, sign up for a one-day trial membership at recyclingmarkets.net.)

However, with a bit of effort, we can sift through the alternatives and make better choices. We can use the ratio of recycling market values to recycling fees to help guide us. (Swarthmore pays $104.50 per ton for curbside recycling, $58 per ton for trash, and $0 per ton for items correctly placed in containers at the Swarthmore Recycling Center on Dartmouth Avenue.) For items that are worth much more than fees, we can feel realistically hopeful that putting them out at the curb or bringing them to the recycling center is worth doing. If an item is worth much less than recycling fees, we can avoid using it. 

There is still a market for three types of plastic (when they are clean): numbers 1, 2, and 5. Everyone should recycle these. 

Aluminum cans and cardboard are also worth recycling — especially if you take them to the recycling center so the borough does not have to pay to have them hauled. Non-aluminum cans are best brought to the “igloo” containers at the recycling center or put in the trash (they’ll be recovered using magnets). The best place for glass is also in the appropriate recycling center container; much more of that glass is actually recycled than the glass we put in our curbside bins. Clean, non-shredded mixed paper can go in your curbside bin.

For plastics with no recycling value (numbers 3, 4, 6, and 7, plastic bags, film, chip bags, Styrofoam clamshells, and any dirty plastic), it’s actually better for the environment (and human health) to skip the recycling bin and place them directly in the trash. This keeps them from making a trip to an unregulated dump or fire in someone else’s neighborhood on the other side of the world.

If we put such valueless plastic in our trash instead of “wish cycling” it, it ends up in Chester’s Covanta trash incinerator. Here it is burned well within breathing distance of many people, including — on a calm day — Swarthmore residents. 

You may be wondering how that could possibly be a better choice. 

The answer is that, unlike open burning or unregulated landfills in Southeast Asia, the Covanta incinerator has at least some pollution controls. Environmental Protection Agency regulations and the facility’s air permit specify temperature, oxygen, and maximum levels of pollutants. They also require post-combustion filtering, acid-fume scrubbing, and continuous monitoring and reporting. This makes local incineration of valueless plastic trash a great deal preferable to sending it overseas.

And of course, something everyone can do right now is to energetically and persistently advocate for more transparency and accountability in our recycling laws and systems. Until we get those, we have to accept that putting a used item in the trash is often a better choice than sending it on a long, complex wishful-recycling journey to a trash pit or fire far, far away.

Bill Foster is a retired scientist with a doctorate for research in neurophysiology and a career in toxicology. This piece is based on his interviews with personnel at the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, the Delaware County Solid Waste Authority, the Covanta trash incinerator, and our region’s recycling sorting companies (Waste Management, Republic Services, and Mascaro and Sons TotalRecycle). He lives in Swarthmore.