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Is recycling a waste? Hampton Roads cities weigh the high cost of recycling

Recycling
Posted at 6:06 PM, Aug 17, 2022
and last updated 2022-08-17 20:11:24-04

HAMPTON ROADS, Va. – More cities are taking a closer look at recycling and if it’s worth it.

Isle of Wight County officials say they’ll soon only accept a few items, and it has to do with cost.

It’s not just Isle of Wight. More and more municipalities across the country, including Chesapeake, are moving away from recycling altogether or changing the way they do it.

That brings us to the question - is recycling a waste?

Peter Carlson in Smithfield has been doing it for two decades.

“I think most of us try to do the right thing,” Carlson said.

Like many folks in Isle of Wight, he drives to one of its several recycling centers and drops off cardboard, plastic, glass and more, keeping it out of the garbage.

“I think it’s much tougher on the environment to keep filling the landfill and we’ve all got a responsibility to help take care of our earth,” said Carlson.

Starting September 14, however, the county will no longer recycle most of the traditional items.

Instead, only clean cardboard – so no pizza boxes – and aluminum and steel cans will be recycled, leaving the other stuff to be taken out with the trash.

“The reason for the change is cost, the cost to recycle,” said Isle of Wight County’s Solid Waste Manager Michael Etheridge.

Etheridge said they’re simply not making much money on some items, but there’s still a strong market for cardboard and aluminum.

When they started the program a decade ago, he said recycling was taken at no cost. Now, the price they pay to get rid of the waste is the same to recycle it.

Etheridge said for them, recycling everything just doesn’t make sense.

“There’s not a lot of money to be made in any of the recycling based on quantity,” he said. “We don’t generate a huge quantity of material. We have two things. We have distance that we have to haul to move the material, and then the amount of material we’re collecting. It’s a little less than 4% of our entire waste stream that we’re currently collecting.”

In Chesapeake, city leaders ended their curbside recycling program altogether, and cut ties with TFC Recycling in July. It’s a move they say will save them $2 million a year.

The city said in a statement that “nearly half of the material collected in the blue bins is either burned or disposed of in the landfill.”

It’s a problem facing the entire nation. A lot of things taken in as recyclables right now are actually ending up in the landfill. That’s because a lot of stuff being tossed in the bins shouldn’t be there and it’s expensive to sort. As a result, some cities are losing money on recycling.

But TFC disputes that.

In a statement TFC Recycling President/CEO Michael Benedetto, said the market is good for all materials.

TFC Recycling is a locally, family-owned business that has been operating in Chesapeake for nearly 50 years. TFC provides recycling collection programs in 16 municipalities throughout Virginia and North Carolina and is nationally recognized as an industry leader in recycling.

Recyclables are commodities and markets change, and TFC Recycling has shown its ability to continue to recycle in good and bad markets, selling over 100,000 tons of recovered recyclables every year – 200 million pounds. Current markets for recycling are good, and materials collected by TFC Recycling are being properly recovered and sold.  TFC Recycling’s single stream recycling process ensures that residential recycling is the most convenient, efficient and efficient way for residents to recycle and as such, our collection dwarfs the capability of other collection systems in terms of recycling volumes collected, costs, and convenience. This means TFC can accept and recycle many different types of paper, bottles and cans, including missed paper, plastic food and beverage bottles and other items, because we have invested in the technology to make recycling viable for the long term. The vendor working with IOW may be limiting in its capabilities, or the place the vendor is delivering recyclables may charge more. Either way, reducing the list of recyclables is not in the best interest of our environment, especially when competitive markets and efficient collection practices exist for these recyclables.

TFC Recycling is the responsible choice for regional recycling. Still, we do agree there is certainly a need in the region to educate residents about the right materials to place in their recycling carts to reduce contamination, much of why TFC has invested over $15 million dollars in the aforementioned processing technology at its recycling plant in Chesapeake, so that we can continue to improve and expand recovery rates, while others continue to limit their lists of acceptable items.

However, experts said, last year the U.S. generated roughly 40 million tons of plastic waste, but only 5% to 6% of it was recycled.

Experts say it’s partly because the market in China has dried up.

“There used to be a pretty robust market for recycled materials but that was largely because it was an export market,” said Prof. Gabriel Filippelli, the executive director of the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University. “China, and many Southeast Asia countries used to buy a tremendous amount of our recyclable material, process it and then send it back to us. We’d buy it back basically as raw goods. That market has ended because of some policy changes on the China side.”

So, is recycling a waste? Maybe not entirely.

“It keeps it out of the garbage stream, so it’s helpful in that sense,” said Peter Carlson of Smithfield.

Isle of Wight County officials are encouraging folks to continue recycling cardboard and aluminum after next month because they say that could eventually save taxpayers money.