Quick quiz: Which of the following could contaminate your recycling?
- Cardboard frozen food boxes
- A bag of shredded paper from your shredder
- An empty, unwashed dog food can
- Plastic garbage bags
If you guessed all of them, you’re already ahead of the game when it comes to sorting recyclables. Contamination is a huge and costly problem that many people contribute to unintentionally. It’s estimated that 25 percent of all items put in a recycling container are contaminates, creating both financial and environmental burdens for all of us. Luckily, combating contamination is an easily achievable goal for both individuals and businesses that generate recyclable waste.
How Recycling Contamination Happens
As it relates to recycling, contamination is a pretty broad term. When you think about contamination in a recycling stream, you might picture dirt or grease or other food waste getting mixed in with clean recyclables and damaging them. A peanut butter jar that still has smears of peanut butter inside it is contaminated, for example – but that’s just one type of contamination.
Contamination occurs whenever something that enters the recycling stream that doesn’t belong there. Sometimes contaminants can be recycled themselves, but not as part of the stream they end up in. Think of plastic bags ending up in a mixed paper stream, or hard-to-recycle #7 plastics mixed into a bin of #1 and #2 plastics. Sometimes it’s the state of the material that makes it a contaminate. Shredded paper can contaminate non-shredded paper, as it’s too small to be processed the way other paper is. Products that can’t be safely recycled at all, like hazardous materials and trash like dirty diapers, may also be contaminants.
Bad habits and misunderstandings about what can and can’t be recycled contribute to contamination. It can be the result of wish-cycling, which happens when people put things in recycling containers because they think or hope those items can be recycled. Think of frozen food containers, like in the quiz above. If the box that the frozen peas came in is made of cardboard, the person making dinner might chuck it in the recycling bin without a second thought. But because frozen food containers are typically coated in a layer of plastic, they often can’t be recycled. That box would be considered a contaminate and ultimately would be landfilled by the recycling facility.
The Costs of Recycling Contamination
Contamination costs recyclers money, costs that may ultimately be passed onto consumers. Plastic bags get wrapped around recycling equipment, requiring workers to stop the machines and remove the bags, costing man hours and slowing down processing speeds. It takes a great deal of paid time for workers to manually sort through materials and remove contaminates. Contaminates can also damage expensive equipment, increasing the recycler’s costs.
This is also a serious and costly problem for recycling exporters. In 2018, China imposed a strict contamination standard (which we’ve written about here, here and here) it calls China Sword, for scrap material. Now China will only accept recycled U.S. scrap that is no more than 0.5 percent contaminated. This standard is nearly impossible for recyclers to meet. Considering China was once a top destination for U.S. recyclables, buying 31 percent of U.S. scrap in 2017, the new stricter contamination policy was a devastating blow for exporters.
Contamination also creates waste that ends up in landfills, defeating the purpose of recycling in the first place. Imagine a leaking bottle of juice contaminating a container of cardboard. A small amount of liquid can soak through a lot of cardboard, making the pieces stick together and rendering them all unrecyclable. All that material that could have potentially been transformed into recycled cardboard would have to be trashed instead.
Beating Contamination
Your business can fight against contamination by committing to better sorting practices. The first step is finding out exactly what your municipality and/or recycling vendors will accept for processing, and spreading that information so that everyone in the workplace knows what belongs in the trash and what belongs in your recycling containers. You may also want to assess the number, size, type and location of recycling containers on your premises. If you’re creating a recycling friendly workplace, one of the keys to eliminating contamination from your recycling is making it really easy for everyone to separate things in the right containers.
Miller Recycling is here to make recycling easy and cost-efficient for your business. We can help you assess your current setup and suggest ways to improve your recycling process, reducing contamination and potentially maximizing the money you’re paid for your recyclables. Call Miller Recycling today to learn more about next steps.