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Single-Stream Recycling: Simple for Residents, Complex for the City

7 Comments

  • EnergyJustice
    Posted May 21, 2015 at 9:17 am

    If you captured 100 percent of recyclables and 100 percent of your compost, you’d be closer to 90% diversion from incinerators and landfills, not two-thirds. A real zero waste system would get over 90%, unlike the “zero waste to landfill” sham the mayor is pushing, which relies on burning trash in a heavily polluted, impoverished black community in Chester, PA, causing asthma, cancer and more, and then pretending that the toxic ash isn’t then dumped in a landfill near Reading, PA. To see what zero waste plans in other parts of the country look like, visit https://www.energyjustice.net/zerowaste

  • EnergyJustice
    Posted May 21, 2015 at 9:25 am

    You know single stream (mixing papers in with recyclable bottles and cans) is a bad idea when the CEO of the world’s largest waste corporation (Waste Management, Inc.) — which operates single stream recycling facilities — explains why it’s not economic to recycle the paper because it ruins the paper’s value. Here it is from the horse’s mouth:

    11/15/2013 Interview with David Steiner, Waste Management CEO on CNBC
    https://finance.yahoo.com/video/waste-management-ceo-didnt-educate-125200599.html

    If you look at what’s happening to us with recycling over the last two years, it’s not been a pretty story. We lost about 100 million dollars last year. It’ll be about 100-110 million dollars this year. The primary cause is that – you know, it’s one of those unintended consequences, right? So, we went out and we developed technology – we bought technology – that allows us to take what you throw away and we sort it for you, right? But then we didn’t educate the consumers to say: “let’s tell you what’s recyclable and what’s not recyclable.” So, when you say “throw it all into one bin,” you end up throwing some things in there that are not recyclable, it wears down our equipment, it makes our processing costs go up by 15 or 20% and all of a sudden recycling gets unprofitable. So, we’ve got to do a better job of educating the consumer to say “here’s what goes in and here’s what doesn’t go in.”

    The two things that cause us the most problem – first is glass. As it breaks up, it’s very rough on the equipment, and there’s no outlet to sell the glass, so you don’t get money for it on the back end and it’s a high processing cost, so it’s not economic to recycle.

    The second thing that ends up is a lot of organics. Organics are recyclable, but when you mix them with other recyclables, it makes them not recyclable — like paper and cardboard.

    We won’t be making additional investments [in recycling… until there’s a profitable business model for them].

    • Peter Raymond Hamilton
      Posted July 13, 2015 at 2:17 pm

      I share your viewpoint, I feel without proper education the public may feel that single-stream recycling is just another trash bin because the items allowed in it are so varied.

  • Steve Spacek
    Posted May 23, 2015 at 10:31 am

    Currently: New York State, along with Texas, the largest states WITHOUT mandated Recycling and Plans for all Counties and Cities. New York City still rated TRAVEL+LEISURE’s #1 “Dirtiest City” for widespread waste, smog and “other” forms of illegal, unchecked pollution.

  • T. Caine
    Posted July 22, 2015 at 11:03 pm

    Agreed with the statements below. Singe-stream recycling is a step backwards, not forwards. Continued data may point towards increased participation rates, but the percentage of material that gets recycled ultimately drops. Contamination is an unavoidable side effect of single-stream collection, not only decreasing the value of resource streams that are created, but increasing the amount of “recyclables” that are discarded straight into a landfill.

    Municipal systems, especially ones and concentrated as New York, should be adding levels of separation rather than increasing them. Food waste is a prime target for this. European countries like the UK are breaking down collection into a number of different bins, which means they can get extremely clean and consistent resources to sell to industrial sources at higher prices for higher quality.

    As Steve mentioned, in order for recycling to be taken seriously NY has to create laws that galvanize its commitment to the practice and the industry at large. Recycling should be the law for both residents and businesses.

  • George Todorovic
    Posted November 28, 2015 at 2:01 pm

    SIMS is not equipped to process paper in their glass/metal/plastic stream.. Single-Stream would require expensive upgrades to their current facility.

  • Paul
    Posted June 8, 2016 at 5:55 pm

    This article failed to discuss the alternative, separating material on site. Businesses in NYC should be required to separate on site, as opposed to throwing everything in one container, for the following reasons: 1) we need to teach people that you can’t just throw anything away, 2) single stream allows for significant contamination of recyclables, causing paper and cardboard to be damages beyond recyclability, 3) do we really want to make other people do our separating?, and 4) Let’s stop being lazy, learn how to recycle and what it means and take control of how we destroy the Earth.

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