Because of the changes in global recycling markets — with China this year not taking many kinds of waste — New York’s governor this month directed the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to improve recycling.

The DEC is encouraging New Yorkers to “recycle right” and urging, “When in doubt, keep it out.”

Terry Laibach has expertise that goes beyond the slogans. She’s the recycling and outreach section supervisor in the DEC division of materials management’s bureau of waste reduction and recycling.

She’s been at it for 29 years.

“I was hired in 1989, right after the passage of the Solid Waste Management Act of 1988, and that came hot on the heels of the garbage barge from Long Island and that whole odyssey,” Laibach said.

She was referring to a barge that set out to sea with over 3,000 tons of garbage from New York City and the town of Islip on Long Island. Since landfill space was rapidly filling on Long Island, officials paid a private hauler to take the trash to a dump in North Carolina, which would cost a fraction of disposal in the Northeast.

North Carolina turned the barge away and it traveled for two months, looking for a dump site that would take the garbage — being rejected by Louisiana, Texas, Florida, and Belize. According to a Newsday account, authorities in Mexico and Cuba threatened to fire artillery at the barge if it tried to dock. Eventually, the barge returned to New York, the garbage was burned in Brooklyn, and its ash was buried in an Islip town landfill.

“Recycling markets fluctuate,” said Laibach. “It’s commodities like anything else and today, yeah, we’re in a bit of a crisis. It’s stressful with the recycling markets.”

But Laibach is an optimist. “I really think everybody is looking at ways to improve the recycling system … Part of it is to educate. But also the people that make recycling equipment, the people that collect and transport, the people that are the recycling markets that make the secondary materials — everybody in the chain is looking at this now and seeing how we can do it better.”

The DEC will be holding a series of meetings — the first one was Aug. 29 — with representatives from industry, local government, state and federal agencies, and the public to develop sustainable solutions for recycling and to identify open markets for recycling.

After the shake-up, Laibach said, “I believe that good things are going to come out of it.”

One of those things may be New Yorkers becoming more careful with what and how they recycle. Laibach said that, currently, about 30 percent of what New Yorkers put in their blue recycling bins is not recyclable.

“We call that ‘wish recycling,’” she said. “People tend to think: This item has value to me. I can’t use it anymore and they’ll figure out something to do with it.”

What Laibach wants New Yorkers to know is this: “Your recycling materials are going somewhere after they leave the recycling facility; they’re getting bailed up or aggregated and they’re going somewhere to be a secondary feedstock in the manufacturing process. So, it’s a raw material. That’s why it has to be the right stuff. That’s why it has to be clean.”

Five years ago, a lack of quality in recycled goods pushed China, then the biggest importer of recyclables from the United States, to adopt Operation Green Fence, subjecting shipments of recyclables to inspections with penalties for violations. This year, China adopted its National Sword Policy, banning import of many recyclables. (See related story.)

Something as seemingly harmless as putting a broken dish in with glass containers to be recycled can cause an entire load of glass to be discarded, or, worse, can cause an explosion during the glass-making process, said Laibach.

Many local municipalities commingle recyclables — for example, in the town of Guilderland, glass, plastic, and metal are tossed in together — making it more attractive for residents; paper and cardboard are separate, each with their own bins at Guilderland’s transfer station.

 

 

“The city of Albany does single-stream,” said Sean Taylor, an environmental youth educator at Cornell Cooperative Extension of Albany County. “It makes it easier for people.”

Regulations vary from municipality to municipality. For example, many won’t take pizza boxes because the oil that sinks into the cardboard hurts paper production.

But Guilderland, for example, does take recycled pizza boxes. “We take all kinds of cardboard except really old boxes that are moldy,” said David Corey, the transfer station foreman. “We want pizza boxes, unless the pizza is still in it.  We bale our own cardboard.”

Corey said he is always looking for markets for the recyclables Guilderland collects. He urges residents if they know of a potential market, “Stop in and let us know. I’ll look into it. That’s how we’ve found places.”

He adds one caveat: “It has to be local. If someone tells us about a market in California, we can’t make it work.”

The DEC has created a list of items not to be recycled as detailed and explained here.

 

 

Plastic bags

In 2009, New York’s Plastic Bag Reduction, Reuse and Recycling Act went into effect, requiring large stores and chains that provide plastic carry-out bags to customers to have visible collection bins for the bags. In 2015, plastic packaging products like newspaper bags, dry-cleaning bags, and shrink-wrap, were added to the list.

Stores are required to recycle the plastic bags and film plastic collected and are prohibited from disposing of the collected plastics as solid waste. Stores are also required to keep records describing the collection, transport, and recycling of plastic bags and film plastics for at least three years.

Further, stores are required to sell reusable bags, made of cloth or other machine-washable fabric, made for multiple use.

The DEC says that Americans annually throw away more than 100 billion plastic bags; less than 1 percent are recycled. Recycling reduces material in landfills and also protects wildlife because plastic bags and film plastics hurt animals that ingest them or are strangled by them.

Laibach estimates that between 10 and 15 percent of single-use plastic bags are recycled through store programs in New York State. She said the recycling bins are most often found in the front of grocery stores and pharmacies or in the customer-service area.

Asked if there is an enforcement mechanism to make sure stores are complying with the law, Laibach said, “Generally, what happens is we get a complaint and then we’ll follow up with the store. A lot of times, they’re just not aware of the requirements.”

She said the DEC has the best results “dealing directly with corporate.” She gave a recent example of a chain of stores that didn’t have bins for recycling film plastic. “And so we worked with their sustainability officer,” she said. “Corporate ordered bins for all stores. We were in compliance within two weeks.”

Governor Andrew Cuomo set up a task force in 2017 to deal with the problems created by plastic bags in New York, but his proposal, in April of this year, for a statewide ban on the bags didn’t get legislative support.

More than a dozen individual communities in New York have implemented bans or fees for single-use plastic bags, Laibach noted. Outright bans, she said, “tend to drive people to paper, which doesn’t solve the problem.”

She explained, “Paper is more resource intensive … and they’re also more expensive to make. So now you’re raising the price across the board of groceries” and consumers at check-out just switch to paper when they don’t bring their reusable bags.

Single-use items

Single-use cups and plates, condiment packages, coffee pods, stirrers, straws, and paper napkins are not to be recycled, the DEC says.

Asked why, Laibach said, “It’s a two-pronged answer.” The first has to do with the seven-part numbering system for plastics. And the second prong focuses on the DEC’s push to get consumers to move to durable items.

The Society of the Plastics Industry started the numbering system in 1988 so recyclers could tell different types of plastics when sorting. The grade of plastic is stamped into a triangle on each piece of plastic.

Number 1, polyethylene terephthalate, is the easiest plastic to recycle; often used for water or soda bottles, it is recycled into bottles or polyester fibers. Number 2, high-density polyethylene, is also easily recycled. It is used most often for hair-care products, bleach, milk containers, detergents, and motor oil, and is recycled into bags or bottles.

Number 3, polyvinyl chloride, is hard to recycle and is a major health and environmental threat; PVC is used in many, many products, from toys to furniture.

Number 4, low-density polyethylene, is used for many kinds of wrapping, sandwich bags, and grocery bags and can be recycled to make more bags. Number 5, polypropylene, is used in ropes, clothing, tubs, and bottles, and can be recycled into fibers.

Number 6, polystyrene, is used to make foam food trays, cups, and packing peanuts. Because it is so bulky and lightweight, it is hard to recycle, but it can be reused. Number 7, described as “other,” can be a mixture of any or all of the first six kinds of plastics; recyclers generally don’t want it.

“Numbers 1 and 2 have traditionally been very strong for recycling, not so much 3,” said Laibach. “Five is another one that has a stronger market, but there’s not enough volume of the material. Six … is pretty much the least recyclable and 7, which is mixed, is not a strong recyclable.

“So really, 3 to 7 are contributing to the National Sword problem with China; it’s not the numbers 1 and 2 that we have traditionally recycled here. That’s really the reason we picked on the single-use items,” she said of the DEC list of items not to recycle.

She went on, “We’re also trying to drive people more to durables, to not use disposables because we want to divert material from the waste stream to begin with. It’s the reduction thing: Reduce first, then reuse, then recycle.”

Laibach noted there is a recent “uptick” in single-use packaging. “Like coffee pods,” she said. “Technically, they could be recycled, but they have to be cleaned out and they have to be captured.” Since they’re so light, she said, machinery in recovery facilities has difficulty handling them.

Describing the process, Laibach went on, “It’s like a big giant game of Mouse Trap and things like stirrers and straws and coffee pods literally fall through the cracks of a conveyor belt and don’t get captured … So, even if you’re trying to do the right thing, if it’s not a container that’s made in such a way that it can be captured in a materials-recovery system, it’s just going to be garbage.”

Laibach said that the increase in single-use packaging is because of “convenience packaging for on-the-go, mostly eating, or drinking coffee — whatever it is — anytime of day, anywhere you are, those things are available.”

She said that now applies not just to fast-food restaurants but even grocery stores. “You can buy fruits or vegetables that are shrink-wrapped, one or two at a time. So it’s designed to be portable, but it’s also adding materials to the waste stream that aren’t readily recycled.”

Asked what can be done to cut back on such packaging, Laibach said, “Honestly, we’re still wrestling with that and ways to educate on that. I don’t have any good answers for you as to why that is, but we just know it is.”

Corey, at the Guilderland transfer station, said, “We don’t want napkins, tissues, anything that might have bodily fluid. Our guys have to sort through it and bale it,” he said. Corey said, though, that clean cups and plates could be baled.

Batteries

“We have a box for batteries at the transfer station,” said Corey. “We take rechargeables. Alkaline batteries aren’t recyclable; there’s no harm from them — they go in the garbage flow. .”

He concluded of batteries, “There’s no market for them in our area. We’re not in California.”

In 2010, an Environmental Conservation Law was signed in New York, requiring manufacturers of covered rechargeable batteries to collect and recycle them in a program funded by manufacturers at no cost to consumers.

When not disposed of properly, most rechargeable batteries contain toxic metal that can be released into the environment. Batteries covered by the law include nickel-cadmium, sealed lead, lithium ion, nickel metal hydride, and and other dry-cell battery capable of being recharged.

The law does not apply to batteries weighing 25 pounds or more, batteries used for powering a vehicle, batteries used for storage of electricity generated by solar- or wind-driven generators, or backup batteries that are integral to an electronic advice. Nor does the law apply to common alkaline batteries.

Manufacturers are responsible for financing the collection and recycling of the batteries, advertising their programs to consumers, and reporting on the progress of their programs.

A disposal ban was enacted in 2011, prohibiting people from knowingly disposing of covered rechargeable batteries as solid waste.

Laibach said she didn’t have numbers on the percentage of rechargeable batteries that are being recycled in New York, but said, “I can tell you that it’s similar to the return to retail for the film plastics: If you go to a Best Buy, or Lowe’s, or Home Depot, you can go to customer service and you’ll find bins for these types of materials there that you simply just drop in then then you go about your shopping.”

She went on, “I rarely get complaints on people not being able to find outlets for dropping off rechargeable batteries … There’s also a mail program for them, too, so it makes it easy.”

Organic waste

Yard trimmings and food scraps are to be composted at home or through local municipal programs.

“We know that almost 30 percent of the waste stream between food waste and organic waste is … compostable or can go into systems like anaerobic digestion,” said Laibach.

In many rural areas, people do their own composting of food scraps and yard waste and municipalities are starting to offer curbside pickup, she said.

Laibach said of the ban on the DEC list, “Really, what this was meant to say is: Don’t put it in your blue bin. It should be set up separately for collection, apart from your recycling and apart from your garbage.”

She also noted, “The governor has proposed some organics-diversion legislation that hasn’t passed yet.”

In Guilderland, residents’ yard waste is ground up at the transfer station, Corey said. “Residents come and get it, and load it themselves to take home.”

He went on, “Years ago, we tried to compost grass … It started smelling so bad, we got complaints and gave up.” He noted that, unlike the transfer stations at some municipalities, Guilderland’s is located close to residents’ homes. “You can’t have odors in Guilderland Center,” he said.

Dishware

Dishware, mirrors, glassware, and ceramics are not be be recycled through municipal programs, the DEC says.

“We don’t have a market for any of those,” said Corey. “County Waste only wants food containers.” He speculated that the reason is the company’s machines are built to handle just such containers.

He added, “Anytime there’s a market, we’ll look into it.”

Laibach said it’s a common misconception that glassware, mirrors, and dishware can be put into recycling bins. People think, “Well, it’s all glass. Why can’t it all be handled together?”

When recycling, though, she said, “We’re talking specifically about container glass.” She cited examples like mayonaise jars or beer bottles.

She explained, “When you’re making glass for container glass, it’s melted at a higher temperature than it is for these other types of glass. So, what can happen is, if you mix any of that in with it, you’re going to have pieces of fragments in with the container glass. So it’s no longer a high-quality glass if you’ve got little pieces of ceramic in there.

“And it can be dangerous, too, because, if you’re now pressurizing a bottle and there’s that weakness in it with that little piece of ceramic or whatever it happens to be, you can have an explosion hazard.”

The explosion, she said, would typically happen during the manufacturing process. She added, “I don’t think there have been a whole lot of stories of containers exploding on grocery-store shelves.”

But, she said, the product can be damaged. “You want to ensure that the container is as structurally sound as can be,” Laibach said. “That’s why the recycled content specifications for container glass are so stringent.”

Laibach pointed out a third problem as well.  “If a load is contaminated with this stuff, it’s just going to get rejected. They’re not going to take any chance. There’s really zero tolerance.”

This leads to more waste, in the long run, because the glass that was properly recycled then gets wasted, too.

Asked, then, what should be done with items like mirrors or dishware, Laibach said, “If they’re broken, obviously, it’s a safety hazard.” Those would end up in the landfill.

She went on, “But sometimes things have just a little chip, or you’re just tired of it. It’s an old style or somebody gave it to you and you don’t like it … If that’s the case, donate it, if it’s in good condition.”

Textiles

Although some textiles can be recycled — Taylor notes that wool, for example, is biodegradable and can be composted — Laibach says textiles are listed by the DEC because they should not be placed in the blue bins. They can be recycled if the correct market is found.

“It’s just the blue bin is not the appropriate place for it. First of all, they’re just going to get so filthy … and also jam the equipment.” Recycling centers call textiles “tanglers,” she said, because they literally tangle up the sorting machines.

Laibach lauded the Re-Clothe NY Coalition — made up of governments, recyclers, and not-for-profit groups — which encourages New Yorkers to reuse and recycle textiles. The DEC estimates that 1.4 billion pounds of clothing and textiles are disposed of each year in New York State. The coalition estimates the market value of those discarded textiles at $130 million and says that more than 1,000 jobs would be created statewide of the textiles were recovered for reuse and recycling.

The goal of the coalition is to educate New Yorkers to recycle not just clothes but also bedding, curtains, stuffed toys, and shoes.

The clothing industry is second only to oil for world pollution, according to the New York League of Conservation Voters.

The Guilderland transfer station, like many in the area, has a Salvation Army bin so that residents with used clothes may drop them off along with their recyclables.

Electronic waste

The average American uses 24 electronic products, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. This can include cell phones, e-readers, computers, televisions, video games, and even hearing aids. In 2010 — and the amount is increasing rapidly every year — the United States generated 2.44 million tons of electronic waste, known as e-waste, according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency. But less than a quarter of it was recycled.

Recycling e-waste is essential for two reasons — it contains toxic substances like mercury, lead, cadmium, and beryllium. It also contains precious and special metals like gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.

The United States has no national regulations but about half of the states have adopted laws requiring e-waste recycling.

Since Jan. 1, 2015, New York consumers have been prohibited from disposing of certain types of electronic equipment — like computers, televisions, and cathode ray tubes — in landfills, at waste-to-energy facilities, in the trash, or at curbside for trash pick-up.

Instead, New Yorkers have two options: They can use a manufacturer’s take-back program or they can go to an electronics collection site.

Manufacturers are required to accept their own brand of electronic equipment for recycling. They are also required to accept one piece of electronic waste of any manufacturer’s brand if offered by a consumer with the purchase of electronic equipment covered by the law of the same type by a consumer.

There have been some problems in that, once manufacturers have met their performance standard — and for many, that’s just part-way through the year — they no longer finance the recycling. The financial burden then shifts back to local municipalities.

Laibach called the take-back program over the last three-and-a-half years in New York “very successful.” She went on, referring to extended producer responsibility, “It’s a really big first EPR initiative in the state” and had diverted harmful materials.

Taylor, too, stressed the importance of the take-back program, saying, “A lot of materials used in creating e-waste can leach into the soil and contaminate it. It shouldn’t go to the landfill.”

Corey noted that Guilderland may soon switch back to using Evolution Recycling for its electronic waste. “They take it aparat, sell the metal for scrap, and recycle the plastic,” he said.

Rope

Rope, hose, and twine are not to be recycled in municipal programs, the DEC says.

“The only alternative is to put it in the landfill,” said Taylor. “It’s unfortunate but people don’t have the resources to turn it into other things.”

Corey agreed. “There’s no market. It’s all just thrown out,” he said.

Laibach said that rope and twine, as with textiles and with plastic bags that are inadvertently thrown into bins, holding glass or plastic or other recyclables, “will just wreak havoc on equipment.”

She said, “They’re tanglers. And the other piece of this is, in jamming equipment, you’re not only going to bring the processing operation to a halt, now you’ve got to send workers in to untangle this … It’s a safety issue for the workers at these centers.”

Hazardous waste

Hazardous waste is in a category all its own.

Laibach said it is handled differently throughout the state. “We leave it up to each planning unit,” she said, explaining that a planning unit can be a county or several counties, with New York City being its own unit and the towns on Long Island being their own planning unit as well.

“If more towns went in on it … and made it more regional, that makes the most sense,” she said. She added that population density is usually the driving force in how hazardous waste is handled. Some densely-populated areas have a hazardous-waste facility that functions year-round while some less-populated areas have an annual hazardous waste day.

The town of Berne recently cancelled such a day when two other Helderberg Hilltowns bowed out of sharing the costs. The DEC reimburses for half of the cost.

Guilderland has a hazardous waste day twice a year, fall and spring, for town residents. “They’re very, very expensive,” said Corey. “Spring is always smaller.”

About 400 residents participated in the spring for a cost of $29,000 and about 800 participated last fall for $42,000. This fall’s hazardous waste day is scheduled of Oct. 6, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Guilderland works with MXI, a company based in Virginia. “They’re very thorough, and have to get an incredible number of permits,” he said. “They do on-the-spot safety training.”

The day-long event is staffed by eight Guilderland highway workers and 20 MXI workers. All of the waste is hauled out of town in MXI trucks to destinations that Corey is unfamiliar with.

“They package and sort it. We help load it on their trucks, and off they go,” he said.

The town has been holding the waste days for over 20 years, Corey said. Previously, Guilderland residents had to go to regional waste days in Albany where the wait could be four to five hours, he said.

“If we didn’t do them, where’s all the stuff going to go?” asks Corey. “People would be throwing it out, or dumping it in the woods.”

Laibach said the events are often used for “legacy waste,” when, for instance, “People are cleaning out Grandma or Grandpa’s house, things from 50 years ago,” she said.

Laibach went on, “Municipalities do a good job of educating residents what should go in, what can or cannot come to these programs, and what alternatives are.” This information is often listed on a town’s website, she said.

Guilderland, for example, lists such acceptable items as pesticides, cleaning products, automotive fluid and batteries, fluorescent lights, and paints. It also lists unacceptable items like explosives and ammunition, medical and infectious waste, radioactive materials, asbestos, empty aerosols, and alkaline batteries.

So what happens to these?

Corey says the asbestos, empty aerosols, and alkaline batteries can be brought to the transfer station. He recommends “calling your hospital” for medical wastes. The other unacceptable materials don’t have easy pathways. “Permits are too expensive for radioactive materials,” said Corey.

Asked where these unacceptable hazardous wastes should go, Laibach said, “This is where we’re trying to get some extended producer responsibility, just like the electronic waste.”

She gave an example of smoke detectors, which have radiation in them. “A lot of the companies that provide smoke detectors do have mail-back programs for them. But the question becomes: How many people are going to actually do that … take the time to mail something back to a company.”

Another example is latex paint. “We advise people to dry it out,” she said. But getting paint back to the manufacturing companies would be a more practical solution, she said.

Asked where the DEC gets clout for legislation that would require more manufacturers’ takebacks, Laibach said, “New York has a product stewardship council … It’s an all-volunteer board but they work pretty exclusively on things that have been identified through our various solid-waste associations, things we’d like to start working on or the state would like to see some EPR initiatives on. And I know paint is one of the top ones they’re working on … Carpet is another one.”