Erin & Tom O’Brien, Peak to Peak.

Hey there.  Can we talk?    

We own Keep Magnolia Clean.  We’ve been watching a lot of changes in the background that you might not know about, but you are just starting to notice some changes. The recycling industry is extremely challenged, and it’s about to make your life a little more expensive.   

Why?   

1. China is no longer buying our used plastic.  It’s too dirty, and there are too many contaminants.  Their limit is 5% contamination- meaning non-recyclable items.  The average household recycling has 20% contamination.   

2. Virgin plastic costs about one third what recycled plastic does.

3. We have really bad habits, and it is making it really, really, expensive to operate a recycling plant. 

August 2019    

So, let’s take a deeper dive into this. Western disposal stopped allowing free recycling and compost drop off in Boulder as of Summer 2020. 

Now Gilpin County has started charging for its recycling because it’s getting expensive and people are dumping all kinds of stuff in there. I’ve seen it personally. I’ve pulled some of the Styrofoam, plastic bags and film, and rubber floor mats out of there myself. They used to be able to take a ton of single stream to Denver for $5 per ton five years ago. Now it’s $75.   

One by one, waste facilities and the companies that run them are getting out of the used plastic business because we aren’t sorting properly. Western Disposal has all but stopped accepting these items and covers the cost of contamination by charging customers the same price for landfill and recycling alike. And I can’t blame them. The plastic they are getting is dirty. At three times the cost of virgin plastic, it just isn’t profitable to sell used plastic. 

When we first bought this company in 2017, we would only have a bag or two of recycling that was so bad that we had to process it as trash. Now, all but two of my customers are giving me clean bags that I don’t have to pull items out of. It’s not that people are doing this intentionally, but that life takes over, and we forget how essential proper sorting is and we just say, “Oh, to heck with it. I don’t care. I don’t have time to dig that out.”     

Other countries don’t have this issue because there are steep fines for not putting things in the right place, and incentives to package responsibly. A juice box in the wrong bin would run you about $100 when I visited Germany in 1998. I cannot imagine what it would be now. They have something like five or seven bins to sort things into.    

The US is slow to adopt recycling and slow to see its value. It is seen as stifling profits and a barrier to sales because they think customers don’t want to pay for the increase in cost. This is why we have single stream. Governments and companies alike just don’t have confidence in us being motivated enough to do the work. Here’s the rub, the consumer pays regardless. If we don’t select some better materials as consumers, and sort properly, we are going to see steep increases in our garbage bills. If we do not take the time to sort properly, we are going to fill our landfills.     

This week the Nederland Transfer station saw noticeable more business since the policy change in Gilpin. This is on top of already stressed capacities as more people stay home and more garbage hits our trash cans instead of the bins at the mall or business dumpsters. 

Some changes we’ve noted 

1. Cardboard has gone from being 1/10th of our loads to a full 1/3rd. We may have to start charging for cardboard because we can only fit so many things in a truck, and if we have to start making two trips in a day as a matter of course, we need to be able to pay for the extra trip and wear on the truck.   

2. We’ve seen a lot more waste, period. Our volume is nearly double now than what it was pre-Covid. An uptick in convenience foods and the meal boxes people order from companies like Sunbasket and Hello Fresh, our cardboard is up 300% and food waste is increasingly tossed into the landfill bags instead of going to compost.   

3.  People are getting fatigued. We are seeing more and more contamination in our bags, and we have no choice but to process a lot of bags as landfill. I had to throw out six contractor bags of recycling. That 300 gallons of recycling that ended up in the landfill because there was so much contamination that I couldn’t just pull out the one or two offenders.    

4. We are seeing less composting, and it saddens us. A typical load of household waste is 30% food waste, paper towels, shredded paper, soiled food containers, etc. If those items are all compostable, that’s one third less stuff that has to be processed as landfill or recycling. That is a huge number.   

Our waste problem has largely been hidden because we spent a lot of time somewhere else, namely school, work, and businesses. That cardboard box wasn’t shipped to us, but to the mall. We never saw waste from our meal out, and we throw an amazing amount away at work and school. We are going to have to face it now as markets dry up and there’s nowhere to put the stuff.    

“So, what do I do?” you might ask.  

The cliche answer has always been reduce, reuse, recycle. That is no longer good enough, so here is our list of things you can do to help solve the issue.   

1. Reflect. Yup, that’s right. Seriously ask yourself if you really need the item you’re considering for a new purchase.  A lot of times we upgrade and only consider that item’s role in our home space. We get a new coffee maker because it has a new feature we did not have before. We upgrade appliances because we want to increase our home value. We buy a new car to reward ourselves for a promotion or because we want to be seen differently. We buy new clothes because the old ones bore us or we’re worried others might see us as lagging behind the trends. At some point being eco-chic is going to include buying for the long term and valuing what we’ve bought more for its function than trends or boredom.    

2. Resource. Instead of buying new, consider posting in your area groups for what you want. Not only do you save an entire load of boxes, Styrofoam, and plastic bags, but you also put your cash directly into your local economy, get a great deal, and sometimes can even score what you’re looking for with just the price of gas.    

3. Rethink. Reducing your waste does not have to be painful. There are a lot of easy switches that maintain your convenience and you don’t have to give up what you enjoy. Wax sandwich bags instead of zip bags, Sodastream or iced tea instead of canned soda, filling a growler at The Very Nice Brewing Company or Knotted Root Brewing Company instead of buying a six pack at the liquor store, or using a water bottle and a filter instead of bottled water. Think twice about that can of Pringles and other packaging made of laminated materials like to go cups with foam exteriors or plastic cutlery that can’t be recycled.    

4. Replace. Ditch the plastic. If you have a choice between an all-cotton shirt or a synthetic, one, go for the cotton. Wool or synthetic fleece? Go with the fleece. Glass can be recycled many more times than plastic, and aluminum or steel are good second choices. Opt for paper bags instead of plastic. Use silicon reusable bags instead of polyethylene ones. Plastic is a huge reason why many species are becoming infertile, including our own. Did you know that men of this generation have half the sperm count that their dad did? It is true, and it’s due to endocrine disruptors in plastic that affect how fetuses develop. Physical measurements in males are getting closer to female measurements in newborns.    

5. Reduce. but not in the way you think. Consciously choose the product with less packaging. If we don’t buy the stuff, we don’t have to figure out what to do with it later, right? This biggest scam in the history of the modern world is convincing consumers that it’s our fault that we have garbage in the first place. We didn’t ask for plastic bottles and single use things. Those were marketing ploys and a cheaper strategy for outsourcing the job of dealing with waste to the consumer. The Keep America Beautiful anti littering campaign was not paid for by the government so much as it was by private industry, worried that we might rebel against the single use containers that were showing up alongside roads and trails. Now, over 100 years later, the issue is coming up again, as you can see in this article.    

We will be covering more ways you can truly make a difference in your daily actions as the year progresses in our Weekly Warrior Reports. Each segment, we’ll cover a way you can reduce your footprint in a meaningful way or divert it to a renewable or recyclable option. 

The biggest thing? Take individual responsibility and stay positive. It DOES make a difference when you recycle properly.   

It DOES make a difference when you compost instead of chucking that leftover chicken in the trash. We can do this! Humans have found ways to overcome adversity and rise to the challenge over and over again. Let’s do this before we get to that pain point and cause yet more damage.  

If you need help or want suggestions on how you can make changes, feel free to contact us at owner@keepmagnoliaclean.com. We’ll send you an answer as soon as we can. Or you can check in on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/KeepMagnoliaClean or on our website at www.keepmagnoliaclean.com. 

(Originally published in the January 7, 2021, edition of The Mountain-Ear.)