The Plastic Recycling Dilema
From Fast Company Magazine
Sept. 08 issue
By Melanie Warner

Anywhere from one-half to three-quarters of Americans say they participate in the environmentally virtuous act of recycling. I am one of them. Or at least I try.

The problem is that every time I open the cover of my big brown curbside recycling bin, I am confronted with an intimidatingly long list of “Don’t recycle” items. Yogurt tubs, microwave trays, clamshell containers from delis and salad bars, and disc-shaped hummus containers are all don’ts. I guiltily toss them into the trash, even though I live in hippieish Boulder, Colorado.

Most communities will recycle only plastic beverage bottles, which are marked with an often minuscule and impossible-to-read No. 1 or No. 2 on the bottom. There is no profitable aftermarket for plastics that are stamped 3 through 7 (such as the don’ts mentioned above), which are in smaller supply than the 1s and 2s that house soda, water, milk, and other drinks. But for many everyday folks, plastic is plastic, and t hey “recycle” it all. Sadly, all the things not labeled 1 or 2 get pulled out at the recycling facility and are trucked off to a big, smelly hole in the ground, where they will deposit their petroleum-based chemicals into the soil for the next 500 years.

In an age when Wal-Mart and GE are rhapsodizing about saving the environment, why haven’t we moved beyond this sort of profligate disposal? The problem is that businesses don’t want to take responsibility for making it easier for Americans to do their part.

While some 52% of paper, 36% of metals, and 22% of glass get recycled, only 7% of all plastics do, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Recyclers blame the plastics industry for this state of affairs. “They have not stepped forward to take responsibility for the end-of-life management of their product, the way glass, metal, and paper are trying to,” says Eric Lombardi, executive director of Eco-Cycle, Boulder’s recycler. “Get rid of the 25 types of plastic. Let’s narrow it down to a few that can be easily recycled.”

Plastics makers, of course, lay the responsibility at the feet of the recycling companies. “What we would prefer to see is an increase in the infrastructure at the local level,” says Steve Russell, managing director of the plastics division at the American Chemistry Council, the trade group representing plastic manufacturers.

Even food manufacturers that are committed to doing the right thing often get stuck. Stonyfield Farm, the Danone division that thinks of itself as a very dark shade of green, considered switching from its No. 5 yogurt tubs to No. 2, but it concluded that doing so would actually significantly increase the amount of plastic needed to make each tub, because No. 2 resin is less durable. And even more frustrating, if Stonyfield switched, most communities wouldn’t recycle them anyway — turns out that No. 2 tubs can’t be mixed with No. 2 bottles because they’re made from different chemicals. That’s probably more than you ever wanted to know about the convoluted and inefficient world of plastics.

There is some good news. Sort of. Cities such as Boston, Fort Worth, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Cleveland have started recycling the unpopular 3 through 7 plastics, even though in some cases they’re doing it unprofitably to prevent topping off near-capacity landfills.

The less-good news is that recyclers have begun selling big, unsorted piles of plastic to Chinese companies. There have been some reports that employees in Chinese recycling facilities are exposed to toxic fumes from the materials they are recycling. Which means that my recycling options just got a whole lot more complicated. Some choice: noxious chemicals in the soil versus the health of Chinese workers. It really isn’t easy being green.

Certification Marks for Green Seal-certified Products and Services

The non profit, Climate Counts funded by Stony Field Farms organic yogurt maker, rates companies on a scale of 0-100 for their efforts to halt climate change. If you are out shopping and want a company’s score, simply text  “cc” and the name of the company to 30644 to the the Climate Counts rating.

Simply type in a product category and city or zip code and the easy to use Earth911.org search engine pulls up a list of neighboring Earth-friendly centers to drop off everything from pesticides to appliances and paints. More than 250 items are categorized as automotive, household, lawn and garden, paper, plastics or electronics.

Some 100 million unused cell phones gather dust in drawers each year in the US recylcing them would conserve enough energy to power nearly 200.000 homes for a year. to find out how to recycle yours  visit epa.gov/cellphones.

An alternative to this is to dial their 1 800 clean up  (toll free hotline)

Frankly, I was blown away after finding out that the CFL’s contained mercury and when first being sold,  no one mentioned that the disposal of these bulbs is an important issue in the “sustainablity” side of using them.

I felt perplexed and angry over this new technology.   I read a response from an  article in O magazine, Ocober 2008 issue. Shedding Some Light.  Which helped me to understand  the big picture a little better.

One woman wrote in  to O with feeling more less my feelings. The next month  O  got a response from Lauren ” Schmitt Olabisi PHd, an environmental scientist.

“As an environmental scientist who works with energy issues, I ‘m writing in response to the reader who had concerns about the mercury in CFL’s. In fact, the amount of mercury contained in these bulbs is very small compared to the mercury released into the air when coal is burned to generate electricity (coal provides about 1/2 of our electricity  nationally). You reduce the amount of electrity you use when you install the CFL ’s, you are cutting back on carbon and mercury. ”

With this said, we still need to be aware and recycle these. Home Depot now has a national in store recycling prgram, go to homedepot.com/ecooptions and visit energystar.gov/cfls  to learn more about our options.

What I started to do is I designated a show box for old batteries, bulbs and other things I am not sure what to do with. When it is full, I start to research to find the best options to dispose/recylcle them.  Office Depot has a program where you can purchase special recycle boxes, fill them with all of your computers and gadgets, take the box to office depot and they will ship it for free to the appropriate recycling stations.