Municipal Recycling Supplement--Expansion Teams

With no magnetic qualities to speak of and barely perceptible differences in weights between grades, plastics have always suffered their share of problems when it comes to municipal recycling.

At 23 percent, plastic’s recycling rate lags far behind that of other commodities recycled at Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs), like ONP, which has a recycling rate of 73 percent, according to the American Forest & Paper Association.

And while a number of factors contribute to plastic’s comparatively low recycling rate, recyclers and plastics organizations are working on ways to expand municipal plastics collections.

ALL-BOTTLE ADVANTAGE

Volume is the key roadblock that prevents Chesapeake, Va.-based recycler Tidewater Fibre Corp. from expanding its plastics collection to include "other" grades, says Mike Benedetto, company vice president.

"The challenge is there isn’t a high enough amount of them to make it worthwhile," Benedetto says. Tidewater Fibre Corp. recycles No. 1 and No. 2 plastics, and Benedetto says the company doesn’t plan to include any additional grades any time soon.

"It’s such a small percentage," he says. "It would take us a year before we accumulated a truckload."

All "other" plastics—grades No. 3 through No. 7—only make up about 4 percent of containers manufactured. PET and HDPE bottles make up the other 96 percent of the market, according to the American Plastics Council.

The drastic difference in numbers is why some larger recyclers advocate a centralized system for "other" bottle recycling as a means to expand total collections, Karl Mockros, vice president of Recycle America Alliance (RAA), Houston, says.

"There’s only so much you can do in most MRFs to separate different grades," Mockros says. "It’s too much time, and there’s not enough volume to make it worthwhile."

Mockros says the disparity in volumes between PET and HDPE plastic and their less common counterparts in bottle manufacturing would make it overly expensive and inefficient for smaller city MRFs to handle expanded plastics collections on their own. Instead, RAA wants to encourage smaller municipal MRFs to send mixed bales to one of its high-volume plastics recycling facilities in Raleigh, N.C., or Chicago, Mockros says.

At these facilities, which are strictly devoted to plastic recycling, the mixed bales can be undone, sorted by resin and color and re-baled accordingly, he says.

Centralizing the process would facilitate an "all-bottle" recycling approach, which would benefit consumers of all grades, Mockros says.

"Centralizing the process adds value," he says. "It expands the marketplace and helps recover some things that would otherwise end up in landfills."

Making it easier for smaller MRFs to collect grades No. 3 through No. 7 will automatically increase the more plentiful No. 1 and No. 2 grades, he says.

"The advantage is that going to all bottles increases the whole volume, which in turn, increases the ones and twos," Mockros says.

MRFs might as well start recycling "other grades" because research shows the facilities receive approximately the same amount of No. 3 through No. 7 whether they ask for them or not, says Judith Dunbar of the American Plastics Council (APC), Washington, D.C.

Dunbar says in consumers’ efforts to recycle, less-desirable plastic grades find their way into most municipalities’ material streams no matter what.

Promoting all-bottle recycling would also remove the hassle and confusion among consumers of checking for numbers, making it more likely that they will participate in recycling programs, says Mockros. "It makes it easier on residents, and every time you make it easier, you attract another group of people," he says.

Dunbar says feedback the APC has received from recycling coordinators echoes Mockros’ sentiment. "Residents appreciate not having to deal with the numbers, and that makes plastic recycling simple to understand," she says.

THE ONES THAT GET AWAY

But encouraging growth in the collection of and markets for "other" plastics isn’t the only way to expand municipal plastics collections. In addition to promoting all-bottle recycling, improvements at the local MRF level can help capture more of the common No. 1 and No 2. plastics that make up most of the material stream, says Benedetto.

One way to expand collections is to take advantage of the best sorting technology available, says Benedetto. Improved sorting technology is the answer to the problem of single-serving containers literally slipping through the cracks of the reclamation system, he says.

Benedetto says smaller, 12- or 16-ounce single-serving bottles have been traditionally difficult to recapture, especially in facilities that rely on hand sorting.

He says that when single-serving bottles make it to the MRF, hand sorters are apt to let them go by on a quickly moving conveyor, reaching for larger bottles first.

But, he says promising advances in optical sorting technology are improving the recovery rate of single-serving bottles.

Smaller, single-serving plastic bottles also evade recycling because so many of them never make it to the MRF in the first place, says Mike Schedler, vice president of technology for the National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR), a trade association based in Charlotte, N.C., that promotes the recycling of PET bottles.

"The nature of the beast is that people that are consuming away from home are extremely limited in their recycling options," Schedler says.

NAPCOR and the APC have made efforts to implement programs to reclaim plastic bottles consumed at large public venues, like arenas and sports stadiums.

While the response is growing, these venues aren’t having much of an impact on total national bottle recovery rates just yet, says Dunbar.

NAPCOR has changed its fundamental strategy toward collecting bottles at areas and stadiums, Schedler says. "Early on, we tried putting all kinds of receptacles and reverse vending machines in," he says. But more bins didn’t seem to equate more bottles collected.

"When people go to a sporting event, the last thing they’re thinking about is ‘What am I doing with my garbage?’" he says. "It’s a cultural thing."

Instead of installing recycling bins, Schedler says it’s more efficient to rely on the people cleaning up the venue after the event, rather than the spectators during the event. He says implementing a program is as simple as getting the cleaning crew to agree to put bottles aside for recycling instead of into the garbage.

"Post-event pickups generate large volumes of material," he says, often recovering nearly 90 percent of the post-consumer bottles left behind. Schedler says particularly large events, like big city football games, can take in as much as 10,000 pounds of bottles per game.

Schedler says all it takes is a leadership decision from the venue owner to participate in a program. "They’re fairly easy programs to implement—the marginal amount of additional costs is usually covered by the avoided cost of disposal." n