For almost three decades residents of Farmcolony were able to recycle numerous items at the Greene County Solid Waste Facility in Stanardsville: plastic, junk mail, phonebooks, magazines, glass, cardboard, newspaper and metal cans. That is now a thing of the past. Greene County has scaled back its recycling program to include only cardboard, newspaper and metal cans. The other items are now being tossed into the landfill.
Greene County is not alone. Changes in market conditions for recyclables are making it difficult for municipalities across the country to cover the costs of their recycling programs. That leaves two choices: Pay higher rates to get rid of recyclables or throw it all away. Most are choosing the latter. Greene County is choosing the latter.
The Greene County Supervisors voted to remove the subsidies that supported the Greene County Solid Waste Facility and its recycling program after some residents took notice of the $250,000 subsidy and opposed the spending during the fiscal year 2019 budget cycle. In their view, the facility should be self-sufficient, meaning that it should cover its own costs of operation. The supervisors raised commercial fees at the same time to help cover operating costs for the facility. Losing the subsidy of $250,000 made it fiscally impossible for the county to continue its recycling program without change under existing market conditions.
Existing market conditions for recyclables
Americans started recycling efforts back in the ’70s and ’80s believing it to be the answer to environmental problems created by the mounds of trash overrunning our landfills from our consumer-driven society. Instead of investing in the infrastructure needed to properly treat recyclables, waste companies took advantage of U. S. free trade deals that provide access to poorer, more vulnerable countries where environmental laws are weaker or do not exist and costs of processing is lower. This is true with most “free trade” agreements. Labor and environmental protections are ignored making it cheaper for corporations to move their processes overseas.
As U.S waste companies began exporting recyclables oversees, they primarily sold the scrap plastics to brokers and other middlemen who in turn sold to Chinese importers, often near ports, who then resold the scrap plastics to small traders who transported it to small-scale, family-owned workshops where recycled plastic is processed informally, mainly at a household scale. According to statistics provided by the China Plastics Processing Association, in 2006 the country was home to roughly 60,000 small-scale, family-owned workshops.
Sorting through all this waste is a foul, tedious job and for decades it has fallen mostly upon these Chinese workers to suffer the worst risks. Informal processing involves washing and melting the plastic, which uses a lot of water and energy and produces a lot of smoke. The untreated water is discharged into waterways. Around 20% of the plastic is unusable so it is also dumped into waterways or burnt, creating further litter and air quality problems. Burning plastic can produce harmful air pollutants such as dioxins, furans, and polychlorinated biphenyls and the wash water contains a cocktail of chemical residues, in addition to detergents used for washing.
Working conditions at these informal processors are hazardous, with burners operating at 260-400℃. Workers have little or no protective equipment. The discharge from a whole village of household processors concentrates hazardous air and water pollution into a small, local area.
In 2018, China said, “No more!”
As recyclables began piling up, China announced plans to phase out imports of waste. In 2018, it placed a ban on certain recyclables, including mixed paper—magazines, office paper, junk mail—and most plastics, except for material that China cannot substitute. Suddenly, there was no place for mixed paper and plastics to go.
Initially the plan was to divert the mixed paper and plastics to different places like Southeast Asia, but countries like Malaysia and Thailand quickly became overwhelmed with plastic and also stopped importing. In the middle of last year Thailand and Vietnam announced restrictions on imports and said it would stop issuing import licenses for plastic imports, as well as paper and metals. Thailand plans to stop all imports by 2021. Malaysia has revoked some imports. India just announced it would not take plastics, so the quest for markets is ongoing.
Manufacturers are not bearing the costs.
For a long time, Americans have had little incentive to invest in recycling infrastructure at home since China was willing to absorb the excess materials. China’s ban on recyclables has left us holding the bag at a time when the United States is creating more waste than ever. In 2015, the most recent year for which national data are available, America generated 262.4 million tons of waste. That amounts to nearly five pounds per person a day. Creating this much waste has a price we haven’t had to pay so far.
Recycled plastic costs manufacturers just pennies more than new plastic, but it is still less expensive for manufacturers to produce products using new materials rather than recycled ones. The manufacturers are not adding disposal costs of all these new plastics into their production costs, however. We taxpayers are picking up that tab. As long as companies don’t bear those disposal costs, they have no incentive to manufacture products out of material that costs a little more, but is easier to recycle, and new plastics will continue to increase with nowhere to go.
Oil and natural gas are the raw materials used in making plastic, so the price of virgin plastic is tied to oil and natural gas prices, which are currently low. New plants coming online will further drive down the price of virgin plastics and will do more to encourage the consumption of new plastic and discourage recycling.
Big oil, natural gas and chemical companies poured an estimated $200 billion into more than 300 petrochemical expansion projects across America from 2010 to 2018, according to the American Chemistry Council. Fossil fuel giants ExxonMobil and Shell, as well as plastic makers like SABIC and Formosa Plastics, are building and expanding at least five ethane cracker plants in Appalachia and along the Gulf of Mexico. The facilities turn ethane, a byproduct of natural gas fracking, into polyethylene pellets, which can be made into a variety of products, including milk jugs, shampoo bottles, food packaging and the like.
The U. S. government is subsidizing the construction of these new plastic manufacturing plants. American taxpayers are also subsidizing virgin materials extraction. Recycling efforts, from collection to sorting to reprocessing, have not received comparable subsidies, which makes it impossible for recycling to compete with new plastics.
Oil and gas giant Shell is building a massive complex in Pennsylvania opening this year and produce 1.6 million metric tons of polyethylene every year. The plant will also receive $1.65 billion in tax breaks over 25 years. A Shell official told the Northeast U.S. & Canada Petrochemical Construction Conference in 2016 that without this fiscal package, the company may not have gone ahead with the project.
“The price of plastic is too low,” Ted Siegler, a resource economist at waste management company DSM Environmental Services Inc. based in Vermont, told HuffPost. “It doesn’t reflect the environmental damage associated with plastic.” Siegler years ago proposed a plastic tax to pay for much-needed recycling infrastructure. Charging plastic producers just a penny a pound ― roughly a 1% tax since most resins cost a dollar a pound ― would raise $4 billion to $5 billion per year, Siegler estimated. According to Siegler, the immense political strength of the plastics lobby makes it difficult to get any significant proposals on recycling or plastic reduction through.
Some of the big fossil fuel and chemical corporations are funneling some money into recycling efforts. Twenty-eight oil and gas, chemical and plastics companies, including Exxon, Shell, SABIC and Formosa, formed the Alliance to End Plastic Waste and collectively pledged $1.5 billion over five years for improving recycling infrastructure. But studies show petrochemical companies would need to make investments of up to $20 billion every year for a decade to make sure that 50% of global plastics get recycled or reused, according to a McKinsey analysis.
Today, over 350 million metric tons of new plastics are produced worldwide annually. In the next decade, production will jump 40%, spurred in part by the new manufacturing plants, according to an analysis by The Guardian newspaper. Where will all of these new plastics go?
There are environmental costs to landfills
There are environmental costs of disposing of recyclables in landfills, which is where Greene County’s banned recyclables are now going. When organic waste sits in a landfill, it decomposes, emitting methane, which is bad for the climate—landfills are the third-largest source of methane emissions in the country. Burning plastic also produces carbon emissions. Studies have found that they release more harmful chemicals, like mercury and lead, into the air per unit of energy than do coal plants.
And as cities are now learning, another cost is financial. Some dumps are raising costs to deal with all this extra waste. The United States still has a fair amount of landfill space left, but it’s getting expensive to ship waste hundreds of miles to those landfills. Burying trash is not only constrained by land availability, but it also poses a serious environmental threat by its potential to contaminate soil and groundwater.
So, what can we do?
First, if you do not support the subsidies going to new plastic manufacturing plants and virgin materials extraction, let your representatives in government know. You can also let them know if you want more support going toward recycling efforts and incentivizing manufacturers to make their products more suitable for recycling. If our representatives hear from enough of their constituents, it may counter the immense political strength of the plastics lobby.
As consumers we can work to reduce the amount of plastic we use. We’ve all heard of the three Rs – reduce, reuse and recycle – which helps to cut down on the amount of waste we throw away. The city of San Francisco is trying to get residents to think of a fourth R—“refuse.” It wants people to be smarter about what they purchase, avoiding plastic bottles and straws and other disposable goods. Probably the best way to avoid plastics is to buy less stuff, but that’s a hard sell in our consumer-driven society where consumer spending accounts for 68 percent of the GDP.
For the time being, there are still places where you can recycle certain items. The McIntire Recycling Center in Charlottesville is one place still collecting a wide variety of recyclables. The center is located at 611 McIntire Rd in Charlottesville, (434) 977-2976, https://www.rivanna.org/mcintire-recycling-center/. For a full list of recyclable items accepted at the McIntire Recycling Center, visit the Recyclable Accepted page. Rivanna offsets some of its operating costs for area recycling with money earned from the sale of recyclable materials from the Ivy Material Utilization Center and McIntire Center, and the County and City have agreed to cover the additional costs.
The final word
The final word goes to Pua Lay Peng who had this to say about America’s habit of shipping our wastes overseas to her country of Malaysia. “America, the way you dump your waste on us … it is very hypocritical,” she said to Patrick Winn, correspondent to Public Radio International’s World Report. “Stop sending your rubbish to other countries and start managing it yourself.” Pua Lay Peng is a 47-year-old chemist who devotes her free time to documenting plastic fires erupting around her countryside. She is a prominent figure in the Malaysian resistance to foreign plastic.
“This is the detritus of American consumerism — and it is inflaming a full-on environmental emergency more than 8,000 miles from US soil,” according to Winn. “And as I speak to other Malaysian activists, I hear a refrain: America, above all, has the power to make this stop.”
“The political strength of the plastics lobby is so immense that it’s very, very hard to get anything significant through at the state level, and I just can’t imagine in this political climate getting anything good at the federal level,” says Judith Enck, a former regional Environmental Protection Agency official and founder of Beyond Plastics. “So we’ve got to really work from the bottom up.”
“For recycling to return to Greene County, it will have to be subsidized by government—local, state or federal,” Allen Morris, director of operations for the Greene County landfill, told a Daily Progress reporter. He isn’t sure if recycling is something that is going to go away permanently in Greene County, but he does not expect it to return without taxpayer subsidies.
