“Who is wealthy? One who is happy with his lot!” – Ben Zoma (Pirkei Avos)
What Happens to Your Recycled Items?
The County only handles a small portion of the county’s recycling because much of it is handled by private haulers like LeMay Pacific Disposal, now part of Waste Connections, the third largest integrated solid waste company. It collects, transfer and disposes non-hazardous waste and recovers resources through recycling and renewable fuels generation for 9 million customers across the United States and Canada. Its 2024 sustainability report claims it has reduced emissions 30% and increased recycling by 50% and biogas recovery by 40%.
The County operates three recycling centers – the Waste and Recovery Center at Hawks Prairie, the Rainier Drop-Box and Rochester Drop-Box. Hazardous waste is directed to the Hazo-House at the Waste and Recovery Center and sent on to vendors that specialize in disposing or recycling the material. Solid waste from the three facilities is loaded and transported to the Roosevelt Regional Landfill near Roosevelt, Washington on the eastern side of the state.
The recycling from these facilities is transferred by Republic Services to its materials recovery facility (MRF) in Seattle, paid through the County’s garbage disposal tipping fee revenue. The MRF sorts and bales the recycling by material type after which the bales are sold to private industries to be used in creating new goods.
Republic is a national company with 74 recycling sites. The Seattle facility is state of the art, recycling 50 tons per hour, 15,000 tons materials monthly, the equivalent of taking 85,000 gasoline powered cars off the road. Optical scanners sort materials based on their physical properties, such as color, size and shape down to the molecular level. They can separate different types of plastic (PET, HDPE, PVC), different metals (copper, aluminum, gold) paper, glass and organic waste. Aluminum is separated from other metals through magnets. Once identified, materials are directed to separate streams using compressed air jets or mechanical devices for further processing.
The Seattle facility recycles aluminum into 1/2 ton bales of 30,000 cans each. This aluminum becomes new cans on store shelves in as little as 60 days. Cardboard needs to be flattened for recycling. It is screened for quality control and eventually goes to a baler which creates 2500 lb. bales that are sent to paper mills to make new paper and cardboard. Plastic is melted into liquids to make new materials like carpet and T-shirts.
Contamination of the recycling stream by single use plastic bags, yard waste and bulky items will cause the operation to stop, slowing down the whole process. Glass in a commingled waste stream can contaminate paper and cause damage to paper mills’ equipment at great expense.
The Problem of Glass Recycling
Glass is handled separately and goes to Concrete Recyclers in Tumwater, which also recycles concrete, asphalt and bricks. Crushed glass is used for pipe and trench backfill and to replace sand or peagravel in construction.
But glass recycling has its own challenges. The largest glass manufacturer in the state, Ardagh Glass, indefinitely shut down its glass manufacturing facility in Seattle in July 2024. It processed 465 tons of recycled glass per day, mostly from curbside and drop-off programs in Washington. But the market changed. For one, the United States International Trade Commission decided not to imposed import taxes on glass bottles imported from China, despite a determination by the U.S. Department of Commerce they are being subsidized by the Chinese government. Add to this a drop in wine and beer consumption leading to a decrease in demand.
As a result, glass recycler Strategic Materials Inc., which cleaned and sorted much of Ardagh’s glass, started to run out of storage space for glass and began informing customers that they would need to stop accepting glass in September. The Regional Glass Recycling Roundtable, formed by King County Solid Waste and Seattle Public Utilities is working to find short and long-term solutions to the problem. These range from expanding rail transport to find cheaper places to store glass out-of-state to encouraging local wineries to use glass from Washington. The Tumwater facility has a similar problem of a pile of glass that just keeps growing due to it being too expensive to collect and recycle.
State solutions and Eco-efficiency
After China stopped importing recyclable materials in 2018, the Solid Waste Management division of the Department of Ecology adopted a Sustainable Materials Management approach which looks at the full life cycle of materials instead of focusing only on the end-of-life phase when material is either disposed or recycled. It considers eco-efficiency, the amount of waste produced relative to the amount of economic activity and states “that a strong economy does not need to result in more waste.”
In 2021, 49.5% of solid waste in Washington ended up in landfills, while 40.7% was recycled, short of the 50% goal established in 1989. Landfills create problems beyond leaking harmful contaminants into the groundwater. They also produce methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. Besides the direct costs of disposal or recycling, there are less direct costs of solid waste from extraction, mining, and manufacturing on public health and the environment. Ecology’s plan stresses the need for waste reduction and uses the EPA’s Waste Reduction Model (WARM) to calculate how much emissions can be reduced by reducing waste closer to its source. For example, models show greenhouse gas emissions would drop dramatically from a 50% reduction in food waste.
Our Consumer Society
We’re told to Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. There’s good reason why reduce is the first action we can take to stop waste. But we still haven’t achieved the Eco-efficiency that is finally becoming a consideration when it comes to the problem of too much stuff.
We’re all consumers. We have to use stuff. But consider the first two meanings of consume in Merriam-Webster
- To do away with completely: Destroy
- to spend wastefully: Squander
We will need a deeper understanding of what wealth truly is to stop the wastefulness and destruction of our living planet that characterizes modern life.
Thanks to April Roe, Recycling and Waste Reduction Specialist, and the staff at Thurston County Public Works for information contained in this article.
Esther Grace Kronenberg is a frequent contributor to Works in Progress
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