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How American recycling is changing now that China won’t take it

by BrittneyMyrick6 Posted on April 1, 2019

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This story was originally published by the CityLab and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

“This facility is our version of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.”

That’s how Eileen Kao described Montgomery County, Maryland’s recycling center on a tour. Kao, who is chief of waste reduction and recycling in the county’s Department of Environmental Protection, pointed out how machines in the facility help sort recyclables. As she described how the machines worked, a magnet separated steel and tin cans into a storage silo while a shaker table collected pieces of glass that were too small to be sorted. Dozens of workers hand-sorted at certain steps along the process.

The county’s recycling center in Derwood, Maryland, processed more than 31,000 tons of commingled material and more than 45,000 tons of mixed paper last year. At this building, commingled material (bottles, cans, and containers) is sorted. Mixed paper, including cardboard, is sorted in another facility nearby.

Over recent months, news coverage has depicted China’s National Sword policy as a crisis for recycling in municipalities all over the United States. Since early 2018, China has banned many scrap materials and has not accepted others unless they meet an extremely strict contamination rate of 0.5 percent. (Contamination rates of U.S. recyclables before sorting vary from place to place, but can reach 25 percent or higher.) The decision reflects China’s desire to recycle more of its domestic waste. Previously, China had been the destination for about 40 percent of the United States’ paper, plastics, and other recyclables.

National Sword sent waves through the global recyclables market. The changes in China diverted many materials to Southeast Asian countries, whose ports were not prepared to receive them in such high volume. Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia have begun to enact their own restrictions.

Meanwhile, many municipal recycling programs in the United States have suffered. As of January, Philadelphia was sending half of the recyclables it collects straight to the incinerator. Minneapolis stopped accepting black plastics. Marysville, Michigan, will no longer accept eight of 11 categories of items (including glass, newspaper, and mixed paper) for curbside recycling, in order to cut costs. Deltona, Florida, stopped curbside pickup altogether.

Many recycling and solid-waste organizations, as well as the U.S. EPA, have dedicated resources and staff to “identify solutions to be able to help support recycling here in the U.S.,” according to Dylan de Thomas, vice president of industry collaboration at the Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit that gives grants to and works with communities to improve their recycling programs. The EPA, which has typically left leadership on recycling to local governments, held its first-ever recycling summit in November 2018.

While recycling centers have been closing down in some places, like in greater Birmingham, Alabama, and around California, programs elsewhere are stepping up their efforts to decrease contamination levels in the recycling bin by educating residents about their role in the recycling process. This emphasis on outreach suggests a heavier onus on citizens to stop tossing items absentmindedly into the bin, and start disposing of them in a more informed, deliberate way.

Take plastic bags, for example. Whereas most grocery chains accept plastic bags for recycling, most municipal recycling programs do not. Still, plastic bags are frequently found in recycling bins. The mistake is so pervasive that Washington, D.C., mailed postcards to residents instructing them not to put plastic bags in the recycling bin. (D.C. only prints two types of mailers each year for recycling, one an overview and another focused on a particular issue.)

D.C. also did a pilot program with the Recycling Partnership to provide curbside feedback for residents. On one route, staff left a note behind for residents who had plastic bags in their recycling bin. Another route was the control, and staff did not leave tags. The route that gave residents feedback in the form of tags saw a 19-percent drop in plastic bags over the course of two weeks. The control route? An increase in bags of 2 percent.

“What we’re suggesting … is being very strategic and consistent with your tagging,” said Cody Marshall, the Recycling Partnership’s chief community strategist officer. “You have to go to the same houses over and over again four to five times with the tagging messages to really have an impact.”

Systematic tagging is an important strategy in the toolbox, according to Marshall, because it’s a targeted intervention to decrease the high contamination levels plaguing many municipalities as they try to bring their bales of recyclables to market. Recycling programs in central Virginia, El Paso, Tampa Bay and Orange County, Florida, and Phoenix are all tracking the impact of tagging on contamination.

The need for systematic approaches to reduce contamination is clear. Even though Americans recycle more now than ever, they’re not always sure what their local recycling program accepts. Increasingly, those mistakes can be costly for municipalities that are trying to sell the recyclables in bales. And, of course, to ensure that even more materials don’t end up in the landfill or incinerator.

Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) Recycling and Composting Rates, 1960 to 2015

Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Many Americans are either aspirational recyclers,” said David Biderman, the executive director and CEO of the Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA), “or they’re confused recyclers. Just because it’s made of plastic doesn’t mean it can be recycled.”

What can and cannot be recycled, as well as how recyclables are separated, differs based on where you live. Montgomery County, for example, has a dual-stream model. Residents have to sort their recyclables into two groups: commingled materials (bottles, cans, and containers) and mixed paper (cardboard and paper). Under a single-stream approach, by contrast, residents throw all household recyclables into one bin, separate only from non-recyclable trash. D.C. has a single-stream system.

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While dual-stream recycling allows the sorting process to begin before waste reaches the facility, single-stream recycling is convenient because people can put everything in the same bin. Between 2005 and 2014, the single-stream model went from being used by 29 percent of American communities to 80 percent, according to one survey. It may lead to people putting fuller bins out to be collected, but the uptake of single-stream recycling has also meant higher contamination rates.

Some communities are switching back to dual-stream in an attempt to bring down contamination. Otherwise, they’re hoping citizens can make better recycling decisions. Ecomaine, a nonprofit that processes recycling for more than 70 communities in Maine on a single-stream model, recently hired a new educator to inform residents about what’s recyclable, what’s not, and why.

“It has certainly been a tough year-and-a-half to two years,” said Ecomaine’s communications manager, Matt Grondin. “But in the end, that landfill storage is forever storage, and to abandon recycling programs for a year or two of a down market really is a short-sighted solution to a long-term problem.”

Back in Maryland, China’s policy hasn’t led Montgomery County to stop recycling anything. It continues to generate revenues from all the materials it recycles, Kao said, except mixed-color, broken glass, which it pays to recycle because it has little value. The county sells the majority of its bales domestically. In fact, one silver lining to China’s crackdown is a growing domestic market in the United States. More than a dozen North American paper mills have announced new capacity to process recycled paper, although it will be a few years before all of it comes online.

In any case, there are strategies that local programs can use, either separately or in combination, to find their way back to health and continue recycling waste. China’s policy change may not represent the much-feared “end of recycling” in the United States so much as an inflection point.

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How American recycling is changing now that China won’t take it

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Explained in 90 Seconds: Why 1.5 Degrees Matters

by BrittneyMyrick6 Posted on December 10, 2015

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Negotiators are pursuing a far more ambitious limit on global warming. But can that really be achieved? Update—December 10, 2015, 4:50 pm ET: Delegates in Paris appear to have agreed on Thursday to “pursue efforts” to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit)—a target that US negotiators had been pushing for. That’s substantially less warming than the 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) limit that was agreed to in Copenhagen in 2009. Here’s the latest text from Thursday evening’s draft agreement: However, the document also “notes with concern” that the actual actions that countries have so far agreed to take to reduce their emissions fall well short of both the 1.5 degrees C target and the 2 degrees C limit. Original story: The international climate summit in Paris may be getting too ambitious for its own good. There are a lot of numbers flying around at Le Bourget, the modified airport in the northern Paris suburbs where diplomats from around the world are racing toward an unprecedented international agreement to limit climate change. Many of the most important are dollar figures: the need for wealthy countries to raise $100 billion annually to help vulnerable countries deal with climate impacts; promises by the US to double spending on clean energy research and climate adaptation grants for developing countries. But right at the top of the draft agreement is another number that, in the big picture, could be the most important. That’s the overall limit on global temperature increase that the accord is designed to achieve. At the last major climate summit, in 2009 in Copenhagen, world leaders agreed to cap global warming at 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, based largely on findings from scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that anything above that level would be totally catastrophic for billions of people around the world, from small island nations to coastal cities such as New York. All the other moving pieces in the agreement, which officials here hope to conclude by late Friday or Saturday, are more or less aimed at achieving that target. It’s the number that is really driving the sense of urgency here, since earlier this year the world crossed the halfway point toward it. In other words, time is running out to keep climate change in check. As the negotiations push into their final hours, something unexpected is unfolding: That target might get actually get even more ambitious. There’s a very good chance, analysts and diplomats say, that the final agreement will call for a limit of 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F)—a crucial half-degree less global warming. Here’s the relevant section of the text; negotiators need to pick one of these options: The US delegation is supporting Option 2, according to an official in the office of Christiana Figueres, the head of the UN agency overseeing the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official is not authorized to speak to the press about the negotiations. That aligns with the announcement, made yesterday by Secretary of State John Kerry, that the US will join the European Union and dozens of developing countries in the so-called “High Ambition Coalition,” a negotiating bloc that has emerged to push for the strongest outcome on several key points, including the temperature limit. Negotiators in that bloc have realized, the official said, that “if they move the long-term goal further out, it will move politics in the short term closer to where they need to be.” If the 1.5 degrees C target makes it into the final agreement, that would be a massive win for climate activists and delegates from many of the most vulnerable nations, especially the small island nations. Since the 2 degrees C goal was set in Copenhagen, the leaders of low-lying countries like the Marshall Islands and the Maldives have increasingly protested that even that level of warming would essentially guarantee the destruction of their islands. The fact that the US is now backing a more ambitious target is a sign that President Barack Obama is hearing that message, said Mohamed Adow, a Kenyan climate activist with Christian Aid. “Paris is meant to indicate the direction of travel, and the US giving in on this point demonstrates their solidarity,” he said. “You’re talking about a level of warming that we can actually adapt to.” But here’s where things get problematic. There’s a huge difference between including the 1.5 degrees C limit in the agreement, and ensuring that it could actually be met. That’s because other key pieces of the agreement, that could actually make that level of ambition possible, are still far from clear. The biggest obstacle could be the hotly debated “ratchet mechanism,” which would require countries to boost their targets for greenhouse gas reductions over time, and which the US delegation appears to be resisting. The current draft of the text includes language directing countries to provide an update of their progress every five years or so, which would be compiled into a global “stock-take,” a kind of collated update, sometime after 2020. But the enforcement stops there; there’s nothing in the agreement to penalize countries that lag behind or to compel them to boost their ambitions. Yesterday, Kerry offered a confusing take on that problem when he said that in the agreement, “there’s no punishment, no penalty, but there has to be oversight.” Everyone here seems to agree that Paris is only a starting place: Without an incremental ramping-up of climate goals, 2 degrees C—not to mention 1.5—will remain out of reach. The current set of global greenhouse gas reduction targets only limit global warming to roughly 2.7 degrees C (4.9 degrees F). That’s a big gap. “It’s not looking good,” Adow said. “If the US means business, are true to their support, they need to agree to an annual review starting in 2018.” Instead, it seems that the US could be trading a concession on the 1.5 degrees C target for steadfast resistance to increasing its funding for climate adaptation in developing countries. The US is also standing in the way of a “loss and damage” component, which would require heavily polluting countries to compensate countries that have been wracked by climate impacts. Without extra money on the table to invest in clean energy, developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere won’t be able to contribute to the 1.5 degrees C target, said Victor Menotti, executive director of the International Forum on Globalization, a San Francisco-based activist group. “The US is pretty clear they want 1.5,” he said. “The question is what’s going to accompany it, and at what price. They’ll be able to claim climate leadership, but without any means of implementation.” The upshot is that the whole Paris accord risks losing credibility if it comes up with a really ambitious target and no way to reach it. All of these pieces are essential, because even with the best possible outcome in Paris, 1.5 degrees C is going to be really hard to meet, said Guido Schmidt-Traub, executive director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. In a recent report, Schmidt-Traub found that meeting the 2 degrees C limit means ceasing all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2070. And because most coal- and natural gas-fired power plants have multi-decade lifespans, that means we need to start planning to cease building them as soon as possible. “The bottom line is that 2C requires all countries to decarbonize their economy at a very rapid rate, but in our analysis there is some wiggle room,” he said. “If you go to 1.5C, it becomes very hard to have any wiggle room left. This is a very fundamental point that is not being discussed at all in the negotiations.” Master image: A climate activist at the Paris conference calls for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Michel Euler/AP

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Explained in 90 Seconds: Why 1.5 Degrees Matters

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Explained in 90 Seconds: Why 1.5 Degrees Matters

Posted in eco-friendly, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, Hagen, LAI, Monterey, ONA, OXO, PUR, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Explained in 90 Seconds: Why 1.5 Degrees Matters