Tracing the afterlife of recyclables in the Adirondacks
By Richard Figiel
Depending on where you are in the Adirondacks, you can toss the household stuff you think is recyclable into one bin and put it out by the curb, or you may need to carefully separate the bottles, cans, paper, etc. and cart them off to a collection center. In either case, everything then proceeds to … where exactly?
Various entities play a part in that throwaway afterlife: municipalities, private corporations, nonprofits, the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), followed by a slew of “end markets”—glass factories, paper mills, grinders, assorted melting pots, all ending in new products on shelves—or, if things go wrong, the dump.
End markets (and prices they pay for recycled materials) are constantly changing. When China abruptly stopped accepting waste from the U.S. and Europe in 2018, container ships were paralyzed on the high seas for months all over the world, with nowhere to go. A well-meaning but desultory recycling effort suddenly had to get serious. It has taken years to figure out and implement what to do with our refuse.
The benefits of recycling are compelling. Aside from drastically reducing the pile-up of landfills, reprocessing materials takes much less energy, and emits much less greenhouse gas and other pollution, compared to virgin production from raw materials. As a result, recycling can help the state achieve goals set to confront climate change.
The importance of recycling rose in 1998 when the last public landfill within the Adirondack Park was closed near Elizabethtown, under Gov. George Pataki’s watch.
Breaking down plastics
There are many challenges for the public and the industry to “get things right,” but clearly the thorniest has to do with plastic—and all those little numbers inside imprinted triangles of chasing arrows.
The numbers signify different chemical compositions derived from petroleum resin, designed for different functions. They can’t be mixed. Many of them cannot be recycled—they have no end market.
The chasing-arrows recycle symbol is untrademarked and unregulated; manufacturers can put it on whatever they please, according to a report on plastic recycling by Greenpeace cited in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) documents. That can give the impression that plastic is generally recyclable, which in turn promotes public acceptance and growth of the petroleum-based plastic industry, the report stated.
The EPA has urged the Federal Trade Commission to set “a very high bar” for use of the symbol and ban it from plastics with no viable end market.
The rise of ‘zero sort’ recycling
We are left to struggle deciphering which plastic containers can be recycled, and recycling facilities struggle with drop-offs of mixed-up materials. To try to make things easier and encourage more participation, about a dozen years ago some operators started accepting “single-stream” drop-offs of mixed glass, metal, paper, cardboard and plastic, to be sorted at specialized facilities.
“The most successful, most environmentally and economically sustainable recycling program is single stream. It is more efficient for customers and participation rates are much higher than sorted collection,” said Jeff Weld, director of communications of Casella Waste Systems, one of the largest recycling companies nationwide. “It is safer, cleaner, and more efficient for our employees as well.”
In Old Forge, Scott Gaffney, superintendent of public works, calls it “one-and-done.” Mixed-together materials go to the Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste Authority’s sorting plant in Utica.
Herkimer is the only Adirondack county with a facility to handle single-stream sorting.
Todd Perry, executive director of the Franklin County Solid Waste Management Authority, says: “I’d like to get to zero sort, that would be a blessing for me, but volume-wise we don’t have enough to get to that point.” (The entire population of Franklin County is less than three-quarters than the city of Utica.).
Related reading
In the 1960s and ’70s, nearly every town in the Adirondack Park had its own dump or landfill.
Gov. George Pataki and his administration decided in the 1990s that the Adirondack Park was not the place for trash.
No landfills remain in the park, yet counties face rising costs for hauling waste
Casella: A leader in waste management
Some of Franklin and Clinton and most of Essex and St. Lawrence counties fall within the sphere of operations of Casella Waste Systems, active in nine northeastern states.
A family-run company based in Rutland, Vermont, Casella operates independently from counties and local governments but sometimes also jointly.
Division Manager Joseph Soulia says before they introduced single stream recycling in 2012, Casella processed 400 tons per month at their facility 30 miles east of the Blue Line. Soon thereafter, they were up to 3,000 tons per month. In the past year Casella trucked-in more than 3,000 tons of material from the Adirondack region alone, most of it collected as zero-sort.
The $6 million Rutland plant encloses 125-foot-long conveyor belts mechanically separating materials with blowers and various magnets. Seven men and women also manually comb the line followed by three robots snatching plastic containers with lightning speed.
Casella says 10% to 12% of the material brought in for recycling is rejected and diverted to a landfill in Coventry, Vermont. The national average is close to 25%. Another recycling company active in the Adirondacks and based within the park near Elizabethtown, Serkil L.L.C., has no website and did not respond to inquiries.
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This article first appeared in a recent issue of Adirondack Explorer magazine.
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A 20/80 rule to recycling
A common public belief that most recycled material just goes into landfills is untrue. Most eligible material does end up in landfills because most people don’t bother to recycle it. “You have people who say ‘oh that’s too much work,’” says Franklin County’s Perry. “‘I’ll just throw it away.’”
DEC issues permits and regulations for waste treatment, conducts audits and inspections and collects data from annual reports. In the department’s Adirondack Regions 5 and 6, the rate of municipal solid waste that is recycled (from residential and commercial sources, businesses and schools) has been stuck around 20% since 2008. Statewide, the figure is about the same.
The trash not recycled—that remaining 80%—represents the fourth largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions created in New York, roughly on a par with the amount produced by the cars, trucks and buses in the state.
The next generation of plastic
Unlike glass and metal, plastic degrades each time it is melted down and reformed (some new plastic is usually mixed in). Only a small percentage is recycled for food-grade packaging. More can be used to make non-food containers like shampoo bottles; still more reappears in carpeting, clothing, decking, toys and other items.
Plastic may take hundreds of years to break down—no-one really knows, since plastic has only been around for about 100 years. Alternatively, some plastic waste goes to incinerators, producing electricity along with toxic emissions and ash. An incinerator for Adirondack waste is in Hudson Falls, just outside the park.
Maine has passed landmark legislation requiring producers to pay into a fund based on the amount and recyclability of packaging. The fund will be used to reimburse municipalities for costs of waste management and to make investments in recycling infrastructure.
Greenpeace and other environmental organizations are campaigning to do away with plastic packaging altogether. They argue that plastic recycling is a public-relations charade, a petroleum-industry gambit to perpetuate its products. Recycling companies and agencies may be complicit, but they stress that since plastic packaging is ubiquitous, it’s imperative to send as little as possible into the waste stream.
The only players with deep enough pockets, worldwide influence, and political “supplicants” are Big Oil and other prducers of forever chemicals. I can only hope our children’s children can cut the insidious chains we shackled ourselves with, and will make the necessary political and societal changes that we have proven unwilling and unable to do. With 8 billion people and counting, we are all aware – whether we admit it or not – that the status quo is not sustainable.
The world’s largest landfill is actually our oceans. It has been said the mass of human trash in the oceans will soon pass the amount of biomass found there. I don’t know if it is true now, but it eventually will be. Pleasant dreams….
There is very little transparency in trash and where our recycling goes to. Many of spend lots of time carefully sorting items, and then wonder if all our efforts just get trashed in the end. I’ve asked multiple times at the North Elba Lake Placid transfer station, and none of current workers there seem to care about or know about where it goes from there. Some private company picks it up, but they really are clueless. This article is a good start, but only a start, to shedding to light what goes on. I think Casella should have some public tour invite days to their facility, for more transparency, and town workers should be informed and care about what happens to the trash that passes through their facilities.
I spend about 52 hours per year dealing with trash and sorting recyclables from my one short term rental house – it’s shocking how much garbage and recycling people generate. I am very strict with my renters, have to hand sort all their stuff, and always find commingled trash with recyclables. It only takes 1 careless person in a group to throw in coffee grinds or food into the recyclable container. My other rental home uses Casella zero sort. Casella is not cheap though, I spend $65/month!
I am not sure that most people think thru the trash they create. When you go to the store look at the packaging you are bringing home to eventually put out at the curb for a trash truck to pick it up.
I have a friend who’s back yard is a waste management land fill. So think about it, You buy the waste product put it in the trash and pay for a truck to haul it to my friends back yard. Sounds very irresponsible to me to dump trash into someone back yard. Almost everyone does it. You just say ” throw it away”. There is no “away”. We have been taught this since we could walk. It is time to tell your kids the truth about throwing your trash into someone else’s back yard.
I don’t have a trash man. Everything on my farm is recycled. It can be done but it takes time and energy. In the 60’s and 70’s most of the trash was metal cans, glass bottles and newspaper and cardboard. Not much plastic then. We had a place in town that paid me by the pound for all of this. I gathered from my neighbors and made good money for a kid.
My point is paying us for our trash would solve most of the trash problem.
As Boreas so aptly observes; “With 8 billion people and counting, we are all aware – whether we admit it or not – that the status quo is not sustainable.”
We keep coming back to that same, old, reliable, wildlife mgt. definition of “carrying capacity” again, and again, and again.
Actually, Pataki didn’t decide the Adirondack were not the place for trash. After pressuring Essex County to build a landfill, a deal was made by the state to subsidize the county’s trash disposal if it would voluntarily close that landfill. Pataki got involved after a false rumor was spread that Essex County wanted to take NYC trash. Pataki believed it and wanted to avoid bad press, hence the closure agreement.
One of the things i learned from 40 years of transporting waste and recyclables (i worked for Conrail, Norfolk Southern, Louisville and Indiana RR and New York And Atlantic Railway) is that the quality of your material is key. the main point is that cross contamination has significant impact on commodity prices and therefore the economics of the entire recycling effort. Single Stream/Zero Sort does generate more material for recycling, but how much of it is aspirational as opposed to practical? It takes a very well run MRF to make that work, and even at that, are they recovering material that will get highest and best use? a good example is glass beverage container recycling. Only bottles separated from other forms of glass can be made into a new bottle (usually blended in with new material to do so). a single piece of pyrex or drinking glass in a batch of cullet can cause a bottling line to shut down. mixed types of glass have different applications (asphalt, concrete, abrasives, insulation), but they do not command the same price that high quality cullet used in beverage container manufacturing does. many people are unaware of the need for good quality material and unknowingly place things like broken glass in their zero sort curbside bins. a broken piece of glass ruins paper that could otherwise be recycled.