Mixed Bag

Residents bid farewell to their recyclables by putting their magazines, cardboard boxes, plastic, and glass bottles into a bin — all mixed together.

Along with most of America, over 15 years ago, Ocean County abandoned the idea of asking people to separate paper, plastic, metal, and glass, opting instead for a “single stream” where all recyclable items are thrown into one receptacle.

This method optimizes public participation by making the initial process easy, instead giving recycling centers the job of unsorting the discarded potpourri.

Recyclables make their way on a series of belts and machinery that attempt to separate their contents.

At most stages, a series of “stars” mounted on the belts are designed to catch a given material.

“Cardboard rides over the top, everything else falls down,” says Mr. Kuhne. “It’s just physics. The flat stuff rides over the wheels, the rest falls through.”

The piles of trash make their way through successive areas of the facility, each with stars and devices designed to pick off paper, metals, glass, and plastics successively.

But the machines aren’t left to handle all that garbage on their own. Staff also stand on the side, occasionally picking out items that do not belong. Deposits of garbage that fell off conveyor belts dot the corners of the machinery throughout the facility.

The process has some high-tech elements as well, but still relies on a lot of hands-on human effort.

“Robots are clumsy, they miss things and they throw stuff all over the place,” says Mr. Kuhne. “From our estimation, even the best ones are just 20 percent effective… Labor is our biggest expense, but when humans are working, they’re 100 percent effective.”

More complex technology does an advanced sorting, working with an electric eye to extract the various types of plastics, after which blasts of air separate them by color, thickness, and chemical makeup.

Once all recyclables are separated, they are baled and tied together awaiting purchasers, and a new life.

Rubbish Revival

While townships try to advertise what does and does not belong in the recycling bin, likely most households have their own protocols — with varying degrees of accuracy.

A lot of things end up in the recycling bin because of carelessness or misunderstanding. Dirty diapers often make their way to bins, but that’s one product that will never be recycled

In the sorting center, sharp or combustible items can wreak havoc.

“Somehow a saw blade got into our plant, got vertical, and slashed one of our conveyors. It shut us down for a week,” says Mr. Kuhne.

Batteries are another vicious culprit.

“When the loader runs over batteries, they blow up and catch fire,” he said.

The center’s fire sensors caught a recent battery fire and extinguished it, but not without drenching a lot of material.

Observing the process gives us a new understanding of why recycling centers urge people not to bag recyclables. They make it difficult to separate the materials that have been disposed inside, and can easily get stuck in machinery.

And here’s some good practical guidance for recyclers.

“Whatever comes in gets sorted — dirty, clean, or otherwise,” says Mr. Kuhne. “If someone asks us whether or not we want pizza boxes, the answer is yes. A little oil isn’t going to kill us — just don’t include the pizza.”

Save on Space

The biggest surprise was to learn that yes, recycling is actually profitable.

As with most municipalities, Ocean County’s recycling is carried out in partnership with a private company — in this case, Atlantic Coast Recycling. Almost none of the employees working hands-on with the garbage are on the government payroll, but on Atlantic’s.

And that means it’s obviously worth it for them. The company splits all profits 50-50 with the county. In recent years, Ocean County walked away with around $2 million. A cut of that goes back to each municipality, at around $7 per ton.

Those dollar amounts don’t make a huge dent in town’s budgets, but savings for taxpayers comes from saved landfill space. It costs around $85 per ton to dispose of garbage in the county’s landfill in Manchester Township. Last year, the county estimated that the 73,728 tons of material recycled saved over $6.1 million.

“We don’t have another landfill in Ocean County and when that one fills up, we won’t have another one here,” says Sean McLaughlin, the county’s environmental specialist and recycling coordinator. “It will take property tax hikes to take the trash out of state, so it’s in everybody’s interest to conserve space.”

No Second Chances

The most complicated and controversial part of any recycling operation is plastics. Ranked by a confusing set of acronyms like PET (which include standard beverage bottles) and HDPE (which are milk jugs, shampoo containers, and detergent bottles), plastics must be separated into their respective groups to become a marketable commodity.

According to the last extensive EPA recycling study in 2018, only about 13 percent of plastic put into recycling bins became new products. To compare, 81 percent of paper and cardboard was recycled.

“The markets aren’t there,” said Marco Castaldi, professor of chemical engineering at City College of New York. “The real issue is that recycled plastic is a mixed material, so if you’re looking for one pure type of plastic, you probably won’t get it. The second issue is aesthetics — no one is going to drink from a bottle that’s black or yellow.”

Theoretically, beverage bottles could be melted down and turned back into refreshed versions of themselves, but a mix of their own labels and other contamination makes that process challenging.

“There are 120 grades of plastics. Some can be recycled easily, others need really specialized equipment,” says Alex Jordan, a professor at University of Wisconsin, Stout, who specializes in plastics engineering. “Virgin plastic sells for very cheap.”

Most recycled plastic is melted into pellets and used to make carpeting, clothing, outdoor furniture, and decking materials. Those items have two things in common: They can be made out of mixed plastic types, and they work with drab colors.

Pushing back on this grim view of plastic recycling, the team at the Ocean County center posited that the low EPA percentages were driven by counting all plastics on the market rather than focusing on disposables.

The EPA’s recycling rates for PET and HDPE, which cover most single-use items, are both at around 30 percent. It’s the durable items that bring down the numbers.

“These chairs are plastic. Are they getting recycled? No,” says Mr. McLaughlin. “But in terms of bottles and containers, most of what’s coming into these plants is being recycled and finding markets.”

Synthetic Solutions

With America producing over 35 million tons of plastics each year and most of it going to landfills, experts are eager for better solutions.

Ronald Mersky, professor emeritus of civil engineering at Widener University in Pennsylvania, holds the somewhat unconventional opinion that burning plastic is the way to go.

“The most environmentally friendly way to deal with a material may not always be recycling — sometimes the economic or energy costs just aren’t worth it,” he says. “Plastics are high in energy, and in many cases, burning them and harnessing that energy might be the best option. It’s cleaner than burning coal, and it’s better than sending it to a landfill or transporting it thousands of miles away.”

One idea that might help plastics find new lives is to implement advanced methods that use chemicals and heat to reduce plastics back to their basic elements. They can then be turned into an oil, which is then transformed into types of raw plastics most used by manufacturers.

“The technology has proved out in no uncertain terms,” says Professor Castaldi, whose research contributed to chemical recycling methods for industry. “Now, it’s more about getting the supply chains to become more robust and attracting more investment.”

Presently, Eastman-Kodak is operating the largest chemical recycling operation processing around 200,000 metric tons of plastic garbage annually.

Some, however, question how much chemical recycling can really help in the near future.

“The fact that it hasn’t been commercialized yet on a large scale tells you that it’s not really viable yet,” says Professor Mersky. “If someone does find an economically and environmentally sound way of doing this, that would be wonderful because then we’re no longer using natural gas and petroleum to make plastic, but using old plastic to make new plastic. For now, though, I don’t see the plant capacity out there.

Here to Stay

While pessimism over recycling is parroted by some climate skeptics, most of their arguments originated from far-left activists as part of a campaign to ban or radically reduce the amount of plastic used.

Last year, the Center for Climate Integrity grabbed headlines with its report, “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling: How big oil and the plastics industry deceived the public for decades and caused the plastic waste crisis.” A similar report in 2022 by Last Beach Cleanup and Beyond Plastics claimed that only five percent plastic is recycled.

These activists allege that recycling is merely a decoy peddled by industries to deflect efforts to ban plastic use.

But industry experts say the opposite.

“These people are either misguided or misinformed,” says Professor Castaldi. “Every rigorous analysis demonstrated that use of plastic as a replacement for materials like metal and glass have a better environmental footprint.”

Researchers point out that the same factors that make plastic popular with consumers carry environmental advantages.

“People like plastic. It’s lighter, and that means you’re also saving energy on transportation,” explains Professor Mersky. “Granted, plastics have their problems, but we have to consider those harms versus other factors, such as a lot more broken glass and the cost of transporting heavier packaging.”

Amid pressures created by skeptics on all sides, militant activists, and the corrosive influence of politics, ground zero at the recycling center still seems to hold the most wisdom.

“I think there are people out there who hope that if they convince everyone that you can’t recycle plastic, we just won’t use it anymore. I do think that plastic is a real environmental problem, but the fact is it’s not going away anytime soon,” says Mr. McLaughlin. “So, while we’re dealing with all this plastic, we need to deal with it responsibly and the right now, recycling is the only way to do that.”

Trash or Treasure

Not that it makes much difference to you, but the cleaner your trash is, the more money it will fetch from buyers. How good a sorting job the center does is equally important.

“They usually come with moisture gauges, they look at the commodities and grade them, and the purer it is — let’s say it’s all newspaper or all cardboard — the better price we’ll get,” says Mr. Kuhne.

Until around a decade ago, most recyclables were sold to China, which accepted higher levels of contamination. Over time, though, China became more selective and then exited the market fully as trade wars heated up.

“China would actually send inspectors here who would point to the bales they wanted. But then it went from taking a couple of bales to taking nothing,” says Mr. McClaughlin. “When that happened, the whole world had all this material and no market. Prices tanked to nothing, and we were paying to get rid of material. But, over time, new markets developed.”

Ocean County’s recyclables are bought by over a dozen different companies. A good deal of paper is exported to Germany, which boasts many paper mills. Most cardboard finds its way to countries with cheap labor, such as Sri Lanka, where they can again be turned into boxes and the like.

The highest ticket items are aluminum cans.

“Aluminum gets melted down and comes back as what it is — it’s infinitely recyclable,” says Mr. McLaughlin.

The only commodity the center fails to turn a profit on is glass, which operators say has no buyers on the east coast. Their glass is ground down and used to cover layers of garbage in the landfill.

Other centers have found glass buyers, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that a full 31 percent of America’s glass gets recycled.

And despite foreboding statistics showing the low amount of plastic actually recycled, Ocean County says it beats the odds.

“We sell every bale we make,” says Mr. Kuhne.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1088)