The Plastics Industry Association, Washington, has released its first official statement on marine debris in which the organization recognizes the critical importance of the world’s oceans and the environmental challenge that uncollected plastics present. The statement also mentions the industry’s commitment to preventing and mitigating marine debris through strengthened recovery systems around the globe.
The association says its statement “serves as a public commitment by the industry to meaningfully address the problem and as a bridge to open dialogue about solutions with other important partners that are equally invested in solving this issue.”
“Plastics offer many sustainability advantages that can significantly reduce greenhouse gasses, water consumption and air emissions,” says the association’s President and CEO William R. Carteaux. “But plastics must be prevented from entering the environment through investment in proper recovery systems. The entire plastics industry is committed to being part of the solution—finding real ways to combat the problem.”
In the statement, the association says it supports data-driven research efforts that identify opportunities to meaningfully address marine debris, including educating manufacturers and the public to prevent litter, expanding collection opportunities, developing new end markets that increase demand for recycled plastics, promoting the design of plastic products in a way that facilitates recovery, promoting cleanups and ensuring plastics are managed properly at manufacturing sites through programs like Operation Clean Sweep and Zero Net Waste.
“The plastics industry is committed to preventing and mitigating marine debris,” the statement reads. “PLASTICS recognizes that marine debris is a global issue and partners with other associations, nongovernmental organizations and intergovernmental authorities to coordinate efforts to strengthen recovery systems around the globe and prevent the loss of any plastics, all of which are valuable, into the environment.”
Florida's Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners names Waste Pro employee to committee
Tracy Meehan has been appointed to the Solid Waste Technical Management Committee.
Waste Pro USA Inc., headquartered in Longwood, Florida, has announced that its Municipal Marketing Manager Tracy Meehan has been selected for a Pinellas County (Florida) Board of County Commissioners committee.
The board unanimously approved Meehan to the Solid Waste Technical Management Committee, which reviews and makes recommendations on rates, policies, facilities, technologies and more. As a member of the committee, she will represent private sector solid waste services firms.
Tracy has been a Waste Pro employee since June 2014. She was named one of Waste 360’s 40 Under 40 in 2016 and is president of the board of Keep Pinellas Beautiful, which recently won the Award of Excellence. Keep Pinellas Beautiful is the local affiliate of the Stamford, Connecticut-based national organization Keep America Beautiful, which aims to improve the environment.
Waste Pro USA Inc. operates in nine southeastern states and has revenue is in excess of $600 million. The company serves more than 2 million residential and 40,000 commercial customers from more than 75 operating locations and maintains more than 265 exclusive municipal contracts and franchises.
A&W Food Services of Canada to eliminate plastic straws
Restaurant chain says it will stop using plastic straws by the end of the year.
Vancouver-based A&W Food Services of Canada Inc. says it will eliminate plastic straws from its restaurants by the end of this year, becoming the first quick-service restaurant chain in North America to make this commitment.
"Reducing waste from landfills is a top priority for A&W and this is one big way that we can make a difference," says Susan Senecal, A&W Canada's president and chief executive officer. "We are proud to make this change, which has been driven by the wishes of our guests, franchisees and staff."
A&W says it will provide guests the option of using paper straws that biodegradable, compostable and sustainably sourced. The straws last two to three hours in a drink without breaking down, but naturally biodegrade in three to six months in the environment, the company says of the paper straws it will offer. This move will keep 82 million plastic straws out of landfills every year, according to A&W.
"Introducing packaging innovations that reduce waste is key to A&W's environmental strategy," says Tyler Pronyk, A&W Canada director of distribution, equipment and packaging. "By using compostable packaging, real mugs, plates and cutlery, we are diverting millions of single-use packaging from landfills every year.
"Eliminating plastic straws is another big step for us,” he continues. “As we learn more about new tools and sustainable practices, we look forward to more improvements ahead.”
Caesar Residential recycling programs have existed in the United States for the better part of the last 30 years. Recycling from home generally has made good sense environmentally and economically for everyone involved, despite the ups and downs of the markets for recovered paper, plastics and metals.
Residential collection haulers, whether operated by municipalities or private companies, collect materials for processing at material recovery facilities (commonly known as MRFs). MRF operators pay the collection companies for each ton of material delivered. In good times, collection companies can receive a substantial price for the recyclables. The earnings from these recyclables have helped subsidize the cost of providing the collection service to residential customers who expected recycling to be “free” or at least at a lower cost than trash collection.
The recycling world, however, has changed dramatically in the last six months. We have gotten to the point where longtime recycling veterans are saying, “Recycling as we know it isn’t working.” (This was James Warner, the chief executive of the Solid Waste Management Authority in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the Wall Street Journal article titled “Recycling, Once Embraced by Businesses and Environmentalists, Now Under Siege,” from May 13, 2018.)
Residential recycling will not make economic sense today in many places in the United States unless customers pay more for the service. The current price that recycling collection companies charge to collect recyclables from residential homes does not come close to covering the costs of deploying a truck and driver and the cost of delivering recyclables to a MRF. MRF operators are now charging collection companies close to, if not more than, the cost to landfill the same material.
The current conditions are the result of several factors, the two most critical ones are: 1) high levels of contamination in the recycling material collected from homes and 2) changing international markets for recycling commodities, especially in China.
What do we mean by contamination?
When recyclers put out their bins full of old newspapers, cardboard boxes, junk mail, water bottles, aluminum cans and milk jugs, they face a dilemma: Should I put this item in the trash or in the recycling bin? When recycling bins were small, people put the objects that might or might not be recyclable in the trash. But when customers were provided with big carts for recycling, the default became putting the object in the recycling container in the hope that it would get recycled (a behavior referred to as “wish cycling”). Confusing recycling arrows and messages have not helped.
Single-stream recycling (where a resident can put all recyclables into a single container) is also part of the challenge. There are countless stories of objects that have come across MRF conveyor belts that have no business being there—plastic bags, strings of Christmas lights, dirty diapers, hoses, bowling balls, car mufflers, etc. In most cities, the contamination levels of recyclables collected on the curb range between 15 and 30 percent.
MRF operators try, with some success, to get the contamination out of the finished commodities. Bales of processed cardboard, however, typically contain at least 5 percent contaminants by weight (92.5 pounds of junk for every 1,850-pound bale of material). To reduce contamination levels to acceptable levels, conveyors need to slow down and additional sorting (either in the form of people or devices) need to be added—both of which have caused processing costs to soar. As a result, MRF operators have to charge more to stay in business.
What does China have to do with recycling? A lot. For over a decade Chinese paper mills have been important buyers of recovered paper from the United States. Last year, the Chinese bought almost two-thirds of the recovered paper (about 10 million tons), most of the mixed plastic and half the scrap aluminum that the U.S. sold overseas, according to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI). For years, Chinese mills complained about the quality of the recovered paper they bought from U.S. recyclers, but they continued to buy it, and we continued to sell it to them.
Things have changed now, and the Chinese are unlikely to be the active buyers they once were. The Chinese government has responded to concerns that China had become the dumping ground for other countries’ trash. Pollution levels in China are high, and air and water quality are poor, and people were noticing. In early 2018, the Chinese government imposed a restriction of no more than 0.5 percent contamination in recovered paper sold to China (That equals 9 pounds of junk in a 1,850-pound bale.). The country also imposed a ban on mixed residential recyclables of any kind and on postconsumer plastics, while also making a push to develop its own recycling programs.
Without the Chinese market, U.S. MRFs have turned to other markets in Asia as well as to domestic producers; but, recovered paper has flooded those markets and prices have come crashing down. The price for a ton of mixed paper (a hybrid of small cardboard, newspaper and cereal boxes) that sold for $80 per ton one year ago has a value today in many parts of the U.S. of less than zero. Similar trends in old newspapers and mixed plastics have further reduced the entire value of the recycling stream.
Like most commodity markets, the recycling market has been cyclical, and adverse conditions eventually turned around; but, this time it is different. The importation of recyclables/trash has become a political subject in China, not just an economic one.
What does this mean to the recycling customer? In the short term, it means the cost of recycling outweighs the value of recycling for most companies involved in the process. MRF operators who face rising costs and falling values for their commodities must pass those costs on to collection companies to survive, and collection companies, in turn, must pass on those costs to customers. No collection company is immune to this challenge. Some may charge more for trash service to continue the illusion that recycling is lower-cost than trash collection, while others will charge appropriately for recycling services and explain why higher prices or additional fees are warranted.
Although the convenience of residential recycling is attractive to consumers, it has to make economic sense for companies or local governments to continue providing it. No one is happy about the situation we find ourselves in today, but recycling that is not economically grounded is just not sustainable.
Bill Caesar is chief executive officer at WCA Waste Corp., Houston. This is an edited version of an essay that he first shared on LinkedIn May 24, 2018. It is reprinted with his permission.
WasteZero releases report on impact of pay-as-you-throw programs
The report contains direct comparisons of municipalities with and without PAYT programs in southern Maine.
WasteZero, a Raleigh, North Carolina-based certified B-Corp that partners with towns, cities, counties, state agencies and private organizations, has released a report analyzing the impact of unit-based pricing, also known as pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) programs, on residential trash. The report contains head-to-head comparisons of municipalities in southern Maine with and without PAYT programs. It reveals that, on average, municipalities with PAYT annually generate 44.8 percent less trash per capita and have 62.3 percent higher recycling rates than municipalities that do not.
Key findings include:
Nine of the 10 communities with the lowest annual pounds of trash per capita use PAYT.
For PAYT communities, the average pounds of trash per capita was 356.
For non-PAYT communities, the average pounds of trash per capita was 645.
For the PAYT communities, the overall average recycling rate was 33.1 percent.
For the non-PAYT communities, the average recycling rate was 20.4 percent.
The report uses data provided by Ecomaine, a nonprofit organization providing waste disposal, recycling and waste-to-energy solutions for municipalities in southern Maine based in Portland, Maine. For fiscal 2017, WasteZero gathered data from 20 municipalities and included all Ecomaine customers who met the following criteria:
provide curbside trash collection service to residents;
provide curbside recycling collection service to residents; and
have clean data on file with Ecomaine.
The following data points were collected for each city or town:
population;
trash tonnage;
recycling tonnage;
recycling rate; and
whether the municipality uses a PAYT trash program.
Of the 20 municipalities identified, 11 have bag-based PAYT systems and nine have no PAYT programs. For each municipality, WasteZero calculated the average pounds of trash thrown away per person during fiscal 2017. The company then ranked the communities based on how much trash per capita they generate. The report is available at wastezero.wpengine.com/resources/analysis-of-payt-impact-in-southern-maine-ecomaine.
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