May 24, 2020
The 73rd Year
Day 66
Saturday is trash day!
Every week the process is the same: load the trash and recyclables into my aging Chevy pickup and drive five miles to the transfer station. There is no curbside pickup here in the boonies and the transfer station is a young guy parked at the local car wash with a high-sided pickup and a trailer. He told me once: “I do this Saturday morning so I can drink beer Saturday night.”
Trash goes in the pickup, recyclables in the trailer. Both are filled to bursting in about three hours and are driven off to a regional waste center another eight miles away. The separated waste is stored and eventually loaded onto separate, humongous tractor trailer containers. The trash is eventually taken to a large landfill about 60 miles away. The recyclables are hauled to processors for domestic use or to ports to be shipped to markets overseas.
That is how it is supposed to work.
These days more often than not both trucks head north to the landfill where the waste and recyclables are buried. Welcome to yet another Covid-19 crisis. In this case the coronavirus did not create the problem, it just made an existing problem unmanageable.
Vermont law mandates that homeowners, haulers and waste management companies separate recyclables. And as the example above demonstrates Vermonters follow the law. Despite all this effort and investment in recycling, the landfill is often the final depository for everything.
State began to embrace recycling in the late 1980s as Americans became more environmentally aware and landfill space became harder to find. Some states mandated that glass, paper, cardboard and some plastics be recycled. Others established markets and encouraged consumers to participate.
Today recycling is in trouble.
First, trash is a mostly for profit business. But recycling is no longer profitable. Waste handlers need to sell recyclables overseas to make money and until 2018 China was the single largest purchaser of U.S. waste. But China banned waste imports in a effort to better utilize domestic waste and encourage local processing. This was a serious blow to an already fragile marketplace.
For most consumers the good news is that oil prices have dropped and the price of gas at the pump has plummeted. In fact, oil prices are so low here in the frigid northeast that homeowners are looking to pre-buy next winter’s heating oil, calculating that prices will rise in the Fall.
But there is a downside to the drop in oil prices. Plastic is basically oil and it is now much cheaper to make products from virgin plastic than from recycled materials. Also manufacturers have designed ways to save money by making plastic containers thinner, a process known as light weighting. A recycler once told me that some plastics, like polystyrene, are basically “air” and you cannot make money recycling “air.” Thinner packaging has made plastic recycling much less attractive to waste companies.
Covid-19 panic shopping has increased the waste headed to our landfills, especially plastics. The first items to disappear from the grocery store were bottled water and toilet paper. All those single use bottles and the miles of shrink wrap covering jumbo-pack toilet paper stored in our basements will eventually end up in our landfills.
Los Angeles began diverting recyclable to landfills in mid March when processing centers were closed because social distancing was not possible in the existing work environment. By late March recycling centers in LA stopped taking cans, bottles, cardboard and other materials as it had no way to process or sell them. Everything was suddenly just trash.
Some states require deposits on bottles and cans, mostly soda and beer and related alcohol drinks. These bottle deposit states have traditionally had a much higher recycling rate than states that have mandatory or voluntary recycling. The returned bottles and cans in this system move from retailer back to distributers, some of whom crush and bale the materials. Some even store the aluminum to sell when the markets are high. Most plastics are immediately transshipped to for further processing. The deposit system has worked well for the states that embraced it but it is an expensive way to recycle. These programs cannot survive without a robust market for recyclables.
All is not lost! We can do something about this; we can make a difference. Here are three simple ideas:
* Buy a reusable water bottle. Fill it from your tap at home.
* Buy drinks in refillable bottles. Beer drinkers can lead the way. Many brew pubs offer their local offerings in refillable bottles called growlers. Most simply charge a one-time deposit.
Unfortunately, most breweries had stopped selling beer in smaller refillable bottles by 2010. The refillable Narragansett long necks of my late teen years were refilled on average 22 times! The long-neck bottles are missed; the beer not so much.
If consumers ask for refillable bottles, they will reappear. Since 2018 Widmer Brothers, Oregon’s oldest brewery, has been successfully selling its brands in refillable bottles.
* Make bulk purchases. With restaurants closed Americans are cooking more. Do we really need everything individually wrapped? Buy grains and flour and herbs and spices in bulk and store them in ball jars. If you do not want to go out to the market, all these items are available for bulk purchase online.
If we step up, we can make a difference.
Be safe!
The 73rd Year
Day 66
Saturday is trash day!
Every week the process is the same: load the trash and recyclables into my aging Chevy pickup and drive five miles to the transfer station. There is no curbside pickup here in the boonies and the transfer station is a young guy parked at the local car wash with a high-sided pickup and a trailer. He told me once: “I do this Saturday morning so I can drink beer Saturday night.”
Trash goes in the pickup, recyclables in the trailer. Both are filled to bursting in about three hours and are driven off to a regional waste center another eight miles away. The separated waste is stored and eventually loaded onto separate, humongous tractor trailer containers. The trash is eventually taken to a large landfill about 60 miles away. The recyclables are hauled to processors for domestic use or to ports to be shipped to markets overseas.
That is how it is supposed to work.
These days more often than not both trucks head north to the landfill where the waste and recyclables are buried. Welcome to yet another Covid-19 crisis. In this case the coronavirus did not create the problem, it just made an existing problem unmanageable.
Vermont law mandates that homeowners, haulers and waste management companies separate recyclables. And as the example above demonstrates Vermonters follow the law. Despite all this effort and investment in recycling, the landfill is often the final depository for everything.
State began to embrace recycling in the late 1980s as Americans became more environmentally aware and landfill space became harder to find. Some states mandated that glass, paper, cardboard and some plastics be recycled. Others established markets and encouraged consumers to participate.
Today recycling is in trouble.
First, trash is a mostly for profit business. But recycling is no longer profitable. Waste handlers need to sell recyclables overseas to make money and until 2018 China was the single largest purchaser of U.S. waste. But China banned waste imports in a effort to better utilize domestic waste and encourage local processing. This was a serious blow to an already fragile marketplace.
For most consumers the good news is that oil prices have dropped and the price of gas at the pump has plummeted. In fact, oil prices are so low here in the frigid northeast that homeowners are looking to pre-buy next winter’s heating oil, calculating that prices will rise in the Fall.
But there is a downside to the drop in oil prices. Plastic is basically oil and it is now much cheaper to make products from virgin plastic than from recycled materials. Also manufacturers have designed ways to save money by making plastic containers thinner, a process known as light weighting. A recycler once told me that some plastics, like polystyrene, are basically “air” and you cannot make money recycling “air.” Thinner packaging has made plastic recycling much less attractive to waste companies.
Covid-19 panic shopping has increased the waste headed to our landfills, especially plastics. The first items to disappear from the grocery store were bottled water and toilet paper. All those single use bottles and the miles of shrink wrap covering jumbo-pack toilet paper stored in our basements will eventually end up in our landfills.
Los Angeles began diverting recyclable to landfills in mid March when processing centers were closed because social distancing was not possible in the existing work environment. By late March recycling centers in LA stopped taking cans, bottles, cardboard and other materials as it had no way to process or sell them. Everything was suddenly just trash.
Some states require deposits on bottles and cans, mostly soda and beer and related alcohol drinks. These bottle deposit states have traditionally had a much higher recycling rate than states that have mandatory or voluntary recycling. The returned bottles and cans in this system move from retailer back to distributers, some of whom crush and bale the materials. Some even store the aluminum to sell when the markets are high. Most plastics are immediately transshipped to for further processing. The deposit system has worked well for the states that embraced it but it is an expensive way to recycle. These programs cannot survive without a robust market for recyclables.
All is not lost! We can do something about this; we can make a difference. Here are three simple ideas:
* Buy a reusable water bottle. Fill it from your tap at home.
* Buy drinks in refillable bottles. Beer drinkers can lead the way. Many brew pubs offer their local offerings in refillable bottles called growlers. Most simply charge a one-time deposit.
Unfortunately, most breweries had stopped selling beer in smaller refillable bottles by 2010. The refillable Narragansett long necks of my late teen years were refilled on average 22 times! The long-neck bottles are missed; the beer not so much.
If consumers ask for refillable bottles, they will reappear. Since 2018 Widmer Brothers, Oregon’s oldest brewery, has been successfully selling its brands in refillable bottles.
* Make bulk purchases. With restaurants closed Americans are cooking more. Do we really need everything individually wrapped? Buy grains and flour and herbs and spices in bulk and store them in ball jars. If you do not want to go out to the market, all these items are available for bulk purchase online.
If we step up, we can make a difference.
Be safe!
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