Gyrations in recycling market prompting changes, higher fees everywhere, including Tacoma

Of all the conservation-minded and environmentally beneficial measures available to the average citizen, recycling has always had the greatest appeal and the most robust participation.

Most Americans accept a certain underlying logic behind the concept of recycling. Doesn’t it make environmental and financial sense to reuse what we’ve already made rather than dumping it in a landfill or burning it and starting over? In fact it did, with calculable gains in energy savings, among other benefits.

Recycling appeals to whatever sense of thriftiness and resourcefulness remains in the American psyche. We remember the stories of paper and scrap-metal drives as part of home-front life, and we like the idea of making our own contribution to winning a war or saving the planet.

Best of all, recycling doesn’t require from its participants huge expenditures of money or time. Separating glass, cans, paper and plastics from other waste and hauling the containers out to the curb on collection day isn’t an arduous ask for most people.

Recycling has become a big part of American industry.

Millions of dollars have been spent on materials collection networks for commodities like wastepaper (Weyerhaeuser was at one time a big player in the business) and the de-inking facilities that turn used paper into new products. The American steel industry runs predominately on scrap metal rather than metal refined from iron ore. At Ardagh Group’s bottle-manufacturing plant in South Seattle, huge piles of glass cullet await remelting to make more bottles.

So with all those attributes, why are municipalities like Tacoma pulling back on their recycling programs?

By now you’ve seen the notices from the city of major changes in the curbside recycling program. Sometime this year glass collection will be ended. Instead the city will set up glass drop-off boxes. Customers also face a $2.82 monthly surcharge to cover increased recycling costs.

Tacoma is no outlier when it comes to trends in recycling programs.

The publication WasteDive catalogs instances not just in Washington but around the country in which cities and counties have restricted the materials they’ll accept or have ended residential collection entirely, or have imposed additional recycling fees. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Lexington, Kentucky, ended paper recycling, with one official lamenting the city couldn’t even give its wastepaper away.

Gyrations in the market for waste materials aren’t new.

Temporary gluts of materials on occasion have depressed prices to the point that recycling is a cost center, not an income stream. At least two commercial ventures in Washington to recycle plastics into new products have failed. Sometimes the technology doesn’t work at a price point that makes financial sense.

What’s going on now, though, is a more permanent restructuring of the recycling market.

For years American cities, especially those on the West Coast, had a ready market for recyclable materials: China. But China has in the last several years put restrictions on its imports, complaining about contamination by unwanted materials in the waste stream.

All that material that used to go to China is now staying at home, sending prices tumbling.

“There are not sufficient alternative markets to handle the material China no longer accepts,” the Ecology Department warned last year. “Commodities such as paper and plastic are piling up or being sent to landfills. Washington’s robust recycling rate — a national leader at about 50 percent — is at risk of buckling.”

The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries points out some unique challenges residential recycling programs face.

“Recycling in the U.S. involves far more than what is placed in the blue bin, or cart, at the end of the driveway,” the trade group says. “While residential collection programs may be the most visible part of America’s recycling infrastructure, it represents less than 30 percent of the volume of material recycled in our country. The other 70 percent comes from the recycling of commercial and industrial materials that tends to be cleaner, and therefore can be processed to higher grades with greater marketability.

“What makes the residential stream so different is that while it is subject to the same demand-driven end market, it is saddled with an ever changing and heterogeneous mix of materials on the supply side, and that material flows into the stream whether there is a market for it or not. This sets the residential recycling infrastructure apart from commercial and industrial recycling in the U.S., and that is why it demands a unique approach.”

So far that unique approach is coming in the form of legislation.

Washington’s Legislature last year approved the creation of a Recycling Development Center to study development of new markets for recycled commodities. At the federal level there are proposals to address the issues of market demand for recyclable materials and the quality of those materials.

As good-intentioned as recycling may be, as warm and fuzzy as it may make us feel that we’re Doing Something and Making a Difference, neither of those come for free, especially not with the current prices and conditions in the recycled-materials market.

One of the attractions of recycling was that it defrayed its own costs. How fast and successful efforts to boost prices and cut costs turn out to be will determine whether recycling, residential at least, remains an accepted, normal part of life, or one of those things we used to do but don’t any more.

This story was originally published January 4, 2020 at 7:00 AM.