Recycling seems simple.
Use a product made of plastic, paper, cardboard, metal or glass, toss it in one of the city-provided blue bins, set it by the curb, hop back on your stationary bike and get back to binging the latest season of this year’s top show.
Simple, right?
Not so much.
“We try to educate our customers and drivers because they’ll pick up anything that’s plastic or metal or glass and most of it cannot be processed,” Jill Sessions, solid waste director for Plant City, said.
The guidelines for recycling are actually much stricter.
Plant City uses single-stream recycling. Meaning, all recyclable materials are collected in one bin, then sent to Republic Service’s Material Recovery Facility (MRF, pronounced murf) in Lakeland, where trash and non-recyclable materials are removed and the rest is sorted, formed into bales and sent off to eventually be recycled.
Only the choicest materials, however, make it to that final step.
Clean and Dry
“One of the most important items that we’re talking about now is the contamination in even the plastic or the cans,” Debbie Mullen, municipal services manager for Republic, said. “We want it clean and dry.”
Contaminants, like food residue, can create major issues in the recycling process, Mullen said. Republic recovers the material, but it’s then sold to mills around the country, and sometimes globally, where the material is returned to a raw state and eventually recycled into new products. A cardboard box can be an easy candidate for recovery, but the grease-stained box from last night’s pizza might not past the test.
Mullen said the recycling industry as a whole is seeing a big push towards emphasizing the importance of clean and dry material. China, a country that often receives recovered material from the U.S. for recycling, has a current initiative called National Sword 2017 that serves as a major crackdown on waste imports. Before being allowed entry into the country, baled material is meticulously checked for contaminants and excess moisture. If it doesn’t pass muster, those shipments can be turned around and sent back. Originator facilities can potentially incur major costs.
“When in doubt, leave it out,” Sessions said.
Chris Jones, general manager of Republic Services for Polk County, said consumers need to focus on making sure the items they add to their recycling bins have been rinsed well or they can contaminate other items as well. There is, however, a caveat. Excessive cleaning of items, like a peanut butter jar, can negate the environmental benefits of recycling.
“If you have to use hot, soapy water to clean something, you’re not really helping the carbon footprint,” Sessions said. “Some things are just worth throwing away.”
Living in a material world
So, you’ve tossed your food-drenched takeout containers in the trash and cleaned (but not too much) what items you can. The job as a consumer might be over, but now the real work of the recovery and recycling world kicks in.
Larry Saylor is the MRF operations manager for republic. He oversees the 80,000-square-foot facility responsible for sorting through most of the recoverable material between Tampa and Orlando.
Materials brought in for recovery are fed to balers and sorted. Glass gets removed almost immediately. It’s the least valuable of all the recyclable materials.
“For the recovery industry it’s pretty worthless,” Saylor said. “It’s abrasive. It tears equipment up.”
Some recycling contracts, Jones said, now exclude glass from recyclable materials.
At Republic’s MRF glass is broken down and separated into fine pieces, which will get sent to landfills for daily covering, 3/4-inch to 2-inch pieces that can be recovered and larger pieces that are contaminated with other materials like plastic and paper that also go straight to the landfill.
However, Saylor said even the recoverable materials of the middle group can be largely unrecoverable during wetter months because of contamination. Glass, the heaviest recovery material, makes up 30% of the materials they receive by volume, Saylor said. Most of it winds up in the trash.
In the balers, cardboard, often the largest material by size, gets separated first. Steel “stars” rotate, acting as screens that remove the cardboard and place it on conveyer belts, separating it from other material. As the remaining material moves on, other stars (the rest made of rubber) operate as screens separating other materials.
Plastics are organized into seven number categories. Ones, water bottles and most thin food containers, get separated by an optical sorter. Twos, thicker plastic containers like those for laundry detergent, are sorted separately and threes through sevens are grouped together.
An “eddy current” separates aluminum cans from number 3 through 7 plastics with a current that launches the metallic items over the plastics, allowing the plastics to fall through.
Paper is also separated through the baler’s screens.
Saylor said between 85 and 90% of material gets separated by the machine, but workers are positioned at various points to catch materials that slip past screens and remove non-recyclable trash items, like contaminants, shopping bags and other plastic films.
Plastic films pose a unique threat to balers. If a baler was Superman, the films would be kryptonite. The thin films get caught in the spinning shafts of the screen, turning them into giant drums and preventing them from properly sorting materials, Saylor said.
Do not, by any means, put your Publix bags in with your recycling, he said, and don’t put your recyclables into plastic bags. Recycling in plastic bags won’t get sorted. It’s too dangerous to open those bags, he said, because people try to hide everything from animal parts to hypodermic needles in wrapped recyclables.
“By the time that bag with good recycling material gets through, our guys pick it up and throw it with the trash,” Saylor said. “You can’t take that risk.”
Off to the market
Once the material is separated by the baler, it’s organized into bales by material type. Those bales are then sold based on monthly Official Board Market (OBM) pricing, often referred to as Yellow Sheet Pricing. That pricing guide sets the market value for the recovered material, which is sold by weight. The pricing varies month to month and is adjusted for different regions of the country.
Once the material is sold, a processing cost is removed and the remaining money is divided between Republic and Plant City. Plant City gets 30% of the remaining funds.
Recycling isn’t a lucrative endeavor, Sessions said. In the 2015-2016 fiscal year, Plant City received about $20,000 in funds from residential recycling, which went back into the city’s solid waste fund. City participation in recycling programs is, however, mandatory.