With this New York Times article, about recycling not always being able to be recycled, I wanted to talk about some of the principles of re-use, re-purposing and reducing and some of the challenges and opportunities I’ve experienced in working to create sustainability and environmental polices in business.
Before starting Book Driver which recycles 500,000 books and re-uses most of them, I also worked at a tree service which believed in recycling and in particular re-using and re-purposing.
Recycling Wood
Recycling wood product isn’t easy in Denver. But there is a large incentive to since the fees to just throw away logs and twigs is very high. At the tree service I work with, we bring tons of tree material to Mountain State Recyclers every single working day. Mountain States Recyclers turns it into gardening mulch. Other material that ArborScape uses has been given away for re-use whether to customers, a nearby barbecue restaurant or selling it for a small fee.
The company looked at selling it to bio-fuels factories but none are close enough (let alone in) Denver to be able to make it feasible. In this industry wood is milled into pellets and sold to consumers and larger bio-mass factories. This source of energy when done at scale seems more popular in rural areas and there is significant debate whether burning biomass is a good long term strategy for creating renewable energy.
Untreated wood ends up being used in soil amendments and other landscape material. However, painted or wood with varnish is not a good candidate for recycling as that can just pass on toxins through landscape material.
Recycling Books
Book recycling is difficult, especially for the hardcovers which use a particular glue that is hard to remove from the batch. In a typical recycling option, there is an automated sort and then a second manual sort. Even this process will enough foreign material to be above a lot of new standards being implemented in China. Our method has an element of kicking the can down the road. We use a lot of books but we give away a lot more to individuals and organizations.
It’s unlikely that all those books eventually get used. But it extends the life of those books in the now. We view it as a journey without a destination as while we won’t save every one of the million books that got thrown away today, we do make the best contribution we can make.
Plastic, Paper and Other Materials
Nationally the recycling industry itself is finding new sources in India, Vietnam and Malaysia to send recycled material, typically formed in bales and sold at about $60 a ton, it is processed and turned into other commodities such as paper, packing material and shipping boxes
Aluminum recycling, which was pioneered in 1905, is a nominally easier process, if consumers stick to sorting and cleaning the cans.
The New York Times article discusses aspirational recycling which is when people try to recycle things that aren’t recyclable. Greasy pizza boxes are on example. Disposable coffee cups are another non-recyclable that I personally thought was ok. Turns out that the thin inner film to protect from heat also makes it hard to break down during the heat intensive process.
Unwashed plastics are another challenge to maintaining contamination standards. China has banned imports of various types of plastic and paper and tightened standards of other materials it does accept. The standards measure the amount of non-recyclable material in a given shipment.This has resulted in a 35% drop in exports of scrap material to China through the first two months of 2018.
Typically curbside recycling is hauled by a private company to a sorting plant where marketable material is separated out. This is what’s sold to domestic or overseas processors. In short recycling companies are now having to pay to have material hauled off that they use to count on as a revenue stream.
Even in the best times, the return on recycled material isn’t great. Approximately 25% of all recycling picked up by Waste Management is contaminated to the point that it is sent to landfills.
So whether it’s wood, books or something else, recycling faces significant headwinds this year but has always been a complex process. We can help by only recycling materials that are acceptable to our local trash company.