In October 2017, Rogue Disposal & Recycling, which provides much of southern Oregon with garbage and recycling pickup, faced a stark problem. The company, which also operates a landfill and composting center in Medford, had bales of mixed plastic and paper rapidly filling their small warehouse and nowhere for it to go. “At the near term, the only realistic solution seemed to be landfilling, which is basically the worst thing you can have to consider as a recycler — but there was literally no place to take it,” said Laura Leebrick, Rogue’s community and government affairs manager.
The move was also, under Oregon law, potentially illegal. But Medford wasn’t the only place suddenly drowning in recycling due to an international issue: China, which for years took the lion’s share of the United States’ recyclables, closed the door on our plastic and paper.
Quickly, Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality brought together a stakeholder’s group of recycling haulers, processors, and municipal leaders. “We realized that the option we had that was supposed to be used only in worst-case scenarios, was happening. That was the concurrence process,” said Peter Spendelow a waste reduction specialist at DEQ.
Concurrence, in layman’s parlance, is putting material designated for recycling into a garbage landfill. State law says materials set aside for recycling must indeed be recycled, but only if it costs less for a hauler to collect and sell it off to a processor than to landfill it. And at the end of 2017, that was no longer the case for most recycling haulers in Oregon — and nearly everywhere else in the West — thanks to China’s sudden ban on most solid waste imported from the U.S.
In the nearly two years since that Chinese policy sent recycling markets all over the West into a tailspin, everyone involved in the vast recycling industry, from those of us throwing stuff into our blue bins to the haulers, sorters, sellers, and processors, has had to rethink not only their jobs, but their way of life.
When Rogue Disposal used to truck the recycling they picked up from customers to a sorting facility more than 300 miles away in the Bay Area, it was just the beginning of a long journey for all that plastic and paper. After the processors sorted the recycling into bales, most of it ended up on container ships bound for China.
Around March 2017, Leebrick started to hear something unsettling from the processors. “We were getting word from them that China was rumbling,” she said. Those rumblings, initially, were about contamination of material. It was enough for Leebrick to start considering the need for a re-education campaign of what should go into the recycle bin, and what shouldn’t.
Medford residents, like those in most of Oregon and cities throughout the West, tossed their paper, plastic, and glass recycling into the same big blue commingled bins for curbside pickup. After it was sorted, the material was sold from those processors to actual recycling plants all over the country and world. They turn old plastic into new plastic, crush and melt glass to make new bottles, and mulch paper at mills to create the recycled stuff.
Over the years, many programs, especially here in the West, started shipping most of these items overseas for the actual recycling part. At the time, this made a lot of fiscal sense. Huge container ships carrying made-in-China goods to the U.S. would often head back totally empty. China’s enormous manufacturing industry needed plastics and paper to make into new products and packaging. So, for decades, China paid recycling sorters and processors in the U.S. good money to take all that material off our hands.
“Recycling basically subsidized the trade imbalance with China,” said Dylan de Thomas, vice president of industry collaboration at Recycling Partnership, a national nonprofit dedicated to improving the nation’s recycling systems. “The overseas market exploded … when [recyclers in China] realized how inexpensive it was to ship, especially from coastal areas, than to truck to an inland paper mill. That’s why in those years we saw a lot of domestic paper mills close.”
Though regional export data is scant, “the general consensus is that the West Coast was very reliant on the overseas market … in particular when it came to mixed plastics,” said de Thomas.
From 1994 to 1998, the U.S. exported 7 million tons of scrap material to China, but by the five-year period of 2009 to 2013, we sent 104 million tons — nearly 15 times as much — according to data from the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries. And while sorters baled up the papers and plastics and did their best to remove items that didn’t belong, chances were good that some glass or non-recyclable plastics would end up in those mixed bales. Back then, it didn’t seem to matter much because labor in China was so cheap. So, especially in Western states where recycling is steeped into our environmental consciousness, people started practicing wishful recycling.
Rogue knew it was happening: waxy milk cartons, plastic bags, and clear clamshell containers — all no-nos — were nonetheless collected and shipped off to China to be dealt with there. But that re-education campaign Leebrick wanted never took place. Because by October 2017, the processor where Rogue hauled their material told them they would not be paid for any loads; in fact, Rogue would have to pay to deliver any recyclables.
“And they told us our allotment for what we could deliver was cut in half, from 600 tons to 300,” Leebrick said.
Because of new national pollution restrictions, China in July of that year announced bans on recovered mixed paper and many plastics. Up to half of the recycling the U.S. was exporting was actually being thrown in Chinese landfills or, worse, ending up in waterways. Accordingly, Chinese facilities that used to buy recycling full of contamination put into place new requirements: if there was more than 0.3 percent contamination in any load, they’d turn it right back around to the U.S. The door to China effectively was closed.
For a small hauler like Rogue, without much room to store, it represented an immediate crisis.
“In the case of Medford, they were pretty far away from any processors, so the cost of collecting materials, packing them up, and shipping them to a processor, then actually paying that processor to get rid of them once they were there, was significant,” Spendelow said.
Ultimately, Rogue was among the 24 waste and recycling companies in Oregon involved in the concurrence program that trashed at least some of the materials they collected through recycling programs. Oregon, a state where recycling is so baked into its DNA that it was the first state in the nation to pass a “bottle bill” to incentivize the recycling of beverage bottles in 1971, had no choice but to allow it.
Leebrick describes the period of concurrence — ultimately, 3,396 tons of their recycling waste was sent to landfills — as “total crisis mode” not just for Rogue as a company, but for herself and their customers.
“I look back on that period, and our customers really went through the five stages of grief over recycling. It was hard, very hard,” she said. “The landfilling part was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do in my time in this industry, and I’ve been working in recycling for 21 years.”
Medford’s exported scrap represented a tiny percentage of the 17 million tons exported to China each year, but Leebrick felt personally responsible for the waste that probably ended up in Chinese rivers and landfills. “I felt, for me, and our company in particular, I need to be more accountable for where our materials that we collect from the public ends up,” she said. “I need to follow it all the way down the line.”
To get that accountability back on track, Rogue took what some saw as a drastic step. In March 2018, Rogue announced it would accept just four different items in its blue bins: corrugated cardboard, newspapers, milk jugs, and tin or aluminum cans. If people in Medford want to recycle mixed paper (like junk mail) or glass bottles now, they must drive those items to a collection depot and drop them off in a separate box. Rogue sends that waste directly to a paper or glass mill, so nothing has to be sorted.
The recycling committee convening at the state level made a list of recycled materials that there was still a market for, based on what the processors in the group told them. Many of the communities in the Willamette Valley, south of Portland, as well as along the Oregon coast restricted the materials they were collecting at curbside to match that list, according to Kristan Mitchell, executive director of the Oregon Refuse and Recycling Association.
Others, like Medford, made their program even more restrictive to match what their sorting facility would accept. On the whole, a lot less material is being recycled in Medford, but everything moving through Rogue’s program is being closely tracked and staying closer to home. Leebrick, for one, feels more certain that the waste they’re overseeing now, even if it’s less than before, actually is being recycled.
But the change has not been easy. “People are very emotional about recycling,” she said. “For me personally, I realized that recycling was a way that allowed me to feel OK about my consumption, it was something I could do that made me feel a little better at the end of the day. ”
While Medford and other communities have restricted their recyclable lists, the progressive Portland metro area has made no restrictions to curbside pickup.
“It’s fair to say there’s been some frustration in other parts of the state that had made these changes and weathered unhappy customers, then were faced with questions from people in Lincoln City or Bend, who would go to Portland and see that they say they still can recycle these other products [that they no longer could],” Mitchell said.
For now, Portland is focused on reducing contamination and supporting the processors in the area, according to Pam Peck, the resource conservation and recycling planning for Metro, the regional government overseeing the Tri-County area around Portland.
Processors have slowed down sorting lines to reduce contamination, and invested in technology that helps get non-recyclables off the line — which costs more money. “So our local governments raised rates to support the additional processing costs,” Peck said. After the China embargo, the rate the average home in Portland paid for waste pickup went up $2.55 per month. Several other communities, even some that also restricted materials, have also had to raise rates.
This is a tactic de Thomas, of Recycling Partners — and who happens to be a Portland resident — agrees with. “I would rather see more of the materials collected at curb recycled than fewer.” And if that means increasing fees for now, and waiting for domestic markets to catch up to the increased need, so be it.
Far West Recycling’s Hillsboro plant sits in a quiet suburb about 10 miles outside Portland. Here, 7,000 tons of recycling are hauled in each month from blue bins throughout the city.
Since he started driving a forklift part-time there in 1990, Vinod Singh, now the company’s outreach manager, has seen the work change. Years ago, for example, those working the sort lines were allowed to bring home things they found like coupons in the paper or even cans good for deposit money; now, nothing’s allowed off the line. But no change during his career measures up to the Chinese import ban.
Before November 2017, all the plastic and paper that came in to the facility could basically be sorted into two different streams: mixed plastics and mixed paper. From there, Far West, like most sorting facilities, worked with a broker who found the mills and plants that do the actual recycling. Just like the sorters Rogue was selling to at the time, the vast majority of Far West’s waste was headed to plastic plants and paper mills in China.
Today, things are different. On a Thursday morning in July, Singh regarded the massive pile of waste in the warehouse in Hillsboro, while a bulldozer pushed the pile more tightly together to make room for more loads from more trucks.
“The problem is with contamination,” said Singh, pointing out several items in this towering mass that shouldn’t be there at all: plastic bags, a laundry basket, some styrofoam, some glass, a toy golf club, an air filter. He pushed at a clear plastic clamshell container with his foot, the kind strawberries come in at the grocery store and are thrown into blue bins all the time. “None of these clamshells are supposed to be in there. … This is all currently ending up in the landfill because there’s no market for them anymore that’s regular and accessible.”
In the warehouse, the towering pile of recyclables is fed via a system of tubes and ramps up and over one side of the warehouse, where it’s dumped onto a large conveyor belt. Multiple people stand over the belt at various points throughout the building. Everyone wears hard hats, masks, ear plugs, and gloves. The machines are loud, and everything looks pretty grimy. As the belt moves by, the sorters grab at items that shouldn’t be there. At the first station, they take off anything too big to go through the rest of the machinery and other items that obviously shouldn’t be there. At various points, machines with magnets snag ferrous metals, which need to be separated from non-ferrous metals. Specialized belts ensure that cardboard goes one way and aluminum another, but when it comes to the separation of plastics, humans are picking up the slack now that China’s changed the game.
“Anything that was plastic, we used to throw down this chute, and bale. That was the mixed grade plastic,” Singh said, pointing to one of the many chutes carrying waste throughout the maze of a warehouse.
Singh surveyed the scene almost apologetically. “For us, this is kind of an inefficiency,” he said. “We’re adding some modification, adding a drum feeder to help our sorting process. A lot of facilities with more capital have reacted to changes by adding robots and opticals. We’re not at that point yet — we want to see where this is all shaking out.”
For now, Far West’s recycling ends up in big bales outside of the facility, sorted by plastic type. Rigid plastics like laundry detergent bottles, soap bottles, and coffee containers make up one rainbow brick. Another is full of nothing but slightly opaque plastic milk jugs. And still another made up of shiny clear plastic soda and water bottles.
Today, Singh said, those bales of plastics will almost all be sold to domestic buyers, and some in Canada. But just finding domestic markets for our recycling won’t solve every problem facing the industry.
Take cardboard, for example. Far West has been selling their cardboard off to the same mills in Oregon and southwest Washington for thirty years. After the China ban, Singh and Far West didn’t even consider that market might shift, too. “That was the one market we thought, ‘Hey, no problem.’” But now, with a market flooded with material that used to go to China, the prices those mills are offering for cardboard are at a 25-year low.
All of this is good news for domestic recycling plants — those that still exist. Plastic recyclers in the U.S. and Canada are reportedly doing big business thanks to the high need. In the last year, $400 million worth of new and expanded plants were announced. The added capacity means only one jurisdiction, The Dalles, is still landfilling any of their recyclables in Oregon. And Rogue Disposal is currently experimenting with collecting two more types of plastics at depot centers that they hope to add back to the acceptable list of their blue bins soon.
Paper mills, too, are finding new life. A 130-year old paper mill in West Linn that closed in 2017 will reopen this summer thanks to funding from a Clark County investor, who is also helping to revive a pulp mill in Dayton, Washington. Another paper mill is expected to open in Utah by 2022. In the last year, $2.56 billion worth of investment has been announced for projects to start and improve North American paper mills, according to de Thomas.
Singh said when he first started at Far West, almost all of the paper they recycled was newspaper, and all of it got sent to the North Pacific Paper Company mill in Longview, Washington. But over the years, as newspaper made up less and less of the recycled paper Far West had, the mill didn’t want mixed paper — but China did.
Today, with China out of the picture, NORPAC, the Longview mill, is buying mixed paper. Singh said the opportunity to sell to a mill so close is gratifying.
“The silver lining [of the ban] is we should be handling this stuff, locally, domestically,” Singh said. “We’d way rather send something 40 miles north than 4,000 miles to the west.”
While Singh, who also sits on the Oregon recycling steering committee, is glad that positive steps have been made regarding domestic markets, his broad view on recycling is shifting. “My upbringing was definitely: this was the bad bin [the garbage], this was the good bin [the recycling].”
Thanks to the giant wrench thrown into this complex industry, and all the research being done to find the best path forward, the good bin-bad bin philosophy is starting to feel outdated.
When Joel Gunderson opened his winery, Coopers Hall, in Portland in 2014, it was the first keg-only winery in the region. Instead of using single-use wine bottles, Coopers Hall sells wine by the glass out of their restaurant and tasting room, and wholesales to bars and restaurants that serve wine on tap.
Upending a tradition-bound industry like winemaking is a good way to make enemies, Gunderson said, but he feels a responsibility to challenge the environmental status quo, especially as someone producing luxury goods. So when his assistant winemaker came to him last year to say he’d found a more sustainable way to bottle, Gunderson jumped on it.
One year later, on a cool Pacific Northwest evening in July, people filtered in and out of the bars and restaurants along Southeast Portland’s hip Division Street. Gunderson joined a group gathered at Imperial Bottle Shop to celebrate an anniversary of sorts. The honored guests were on display along the bar: a row of chunky, brown bomber-style bottles. The labels showed the names of several Oregon breweries, but among them were three Coopers Hall wines, packaged in the same brown bottle you would associate with beer or cider.
These bottles were being celebrated because, after they were emptied that evening, they would not be recycled. Instead, they would be washed, the labels removed, and refilled with beer, cider, or wine. That process would take place 25 times, reducing the carbon footprint of recycling a beer bottle by 90 percent.
The year-old refilling pilot program works thanks to Oregon’s bottle deposit system. Beginning in 1971, Oregon taxed consumers an extra nickel for those bottled beverages, which folks would get back if they returned the bottles. Back then, consumers returned bottles to the store where they bought them, then the distributors for Coca-Cola or Henry Weinhard’s or whoever would recycle the bottles themselves.
Today, the deposit on bottles is 10 cents and the logistics are all taken care of by the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative. The opportunity to be a part of the OBRC refillable program was a way to create a shelf presence for his wine without “betraying our original idea, and our ethic of curbing single use items,” Gunderson said.
That evening at Imperial, while the bartender cracked open bottle after bottle of beer, cider, and wine, Gunderson addressed the crowd. “I do think that we are in a bit of a crisis here when it comes to single-use items,” he said. “And as makers, we need to challenge ourselves to come up with a solution.”
Messaging from the Oregon Refuse and Recycling Association indicates bottlers like Gunderson may be onto something. The ORRA has gone into schools for years to talk about the “Three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” But Mitchell, at ORRA, said one of those Rs has probably been getting too much love.
“I have to say that, the thing with the recycling message is — it’s really effective,” she said. “It’s easy to talk about recycling, but it’s hard to do it right. It’s easy to get people to understand why it’s important, but then you put it in the cart and it goes away.”
So while finding and opening more domestic recycling facilities, and re-educating the public about what does and does not belong in their blue bins is a major part of the long-term solution, so, too, is starting to convince recycling-obsessed people that it is really just one tool in the sustainability arsenal — and it’s not always the most effective.
“What we’ve learned is, it’s time to reset the message,” said Mitchell. And that goes for consumers, manufacturers, and the waste industry, she said.
The Environmental Protection Agency has traditionally evaluated recycling programs by weight: comparing waste in landfills versus waste headed to recycling facilities. Now, the steering committee is thinking a whole lot less about weight, and a whole lot more about what it calls “life cycle analysis,” said DEQ’s Spendelow.
Take coffee for example. Years ago, coffee beans used to be sold in recyclable steel cans. Then we switched to big plastic tubs — also recyclable. Now you get coffee in these little film pouches that you can’t recycle, but they take up so little landfill space that they are considered “far better than the recyclable alternatives” from a life-cycle perspective, said Spendelow. That’s because making and recycling steel cans or plastic tubs for coffee takes a whole lot of energy, uses up more natural resources, and releases more greenhouse gases than producing those small bags. Life cycle analysis has led the committee to focus a little more on the other two Rs in the triumvirate, and organizations like the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative are already ahead of the curve.
Because it handles collection, hauling, processing, and even some of the recycling from start to finish, OBRC was one of the few recycling-centered organizations that weren’t thrown into a tailspin after the China ban.
“I recognize it’s bad overall,” said Jules Bailey, who launched the refillable program at OBRC. “But for us, honestly, it’s awesome … none of our recycling was going overseas anyway.”
In fact, thanks to the change, the plastics recycling plant they used to operate at a loss in St. Helens, Oregon, now turns a profit. The other advantage to the China ban? “People got more interested in recycling, which is good for us,” Bailey, who ran for Portland mayor in 2016, said. When folks in Portland realized a bunch of what went into the curbside bin may have been ending up in Chinese landfills and rivers, OBRC was quick to remind residents that, if they returned those bottles for deposit, they wouldn’t be a part of that problem.
In June, Bailey was invited to Washington, D.C., to testify in front of the Senate about the OBRC program. “They said, ‘The China ban is killing us, come talk to us,’ so we presented our system and said this is working. There’s no taxpayer money going into it, and it’s private industry supported.”
Ultimately, manufacturers must change their thinking in order to curb the prevalence of single-use containers that so often end up in the trash. In the U.S. alone, 50 billion bottles of water are sold per year. According to the EPA, just one-third of the 2.9 million tons of PET plastics (the type water and soft drinks are sold in) were recycled in 2015, and more than half of the 9.1 million tons of glass containers in our waste stream in 2015 ended up in a landfill. But getting consumers to care about refillables is a place to start, said de Thomas of Recycling Partners. “Industry listens to consumers, and if consumers are asking for something, they will do their best to do it in an efficient and profitable way.”
OBRC is already working with at least one major bottled water company to see whether they can replace plastic bottles with refillable glass ones that are collected, cleaned, and redistributed.
As Gunderson addressed the small crowd at Imperial, he offered another area of the world ripe for emulation. “There’s a wine region in France called the Loire Valley. And when you say the Loire Valley, people automatically think about biodynamic farming, organic farming … and sustainability,” he said, holding a glass of rosé in one hand and pushing his glasses up his nose with the other. “When I think of the wine world, and when I think of what’s happening with this bottle, and what’s happening in Oregon — we have the opportunity to brand Oregon as the mecca of sustainability.”
Bailey agrees. Holding the bottle in front of him, he pointed out how it was designed to hold up through dozens of refills. Booze could be just the beginning, he said. “The vision ultimately in the future is to have a bunch of different bottle types — one for coffee, one for kombucha, one for water,” he said.
Oregon, he continued, is an ideal place to start to shift the thinking around beverage packaging and sustainability. “It’s kind of the perfect confluence here. We like to drink, and we like to recycle,” he said, pausing for a moment before he added. “And reuse.”
