Who Takes Care of Our Trash? Adirondack players in recycling and disposal - Adirondack Explorer

Who Takes Care of Our Trash? Adirondack players in recycling and disposal | Adirondack Explorer

Tracing the afterlife of recyclables in the Adirondacks

By Richard Figiel

Depending on where you are in the Adirondacks, you can toss the household stuff you think is recyclable into one bin and put it out by the curb, or you may need to carefully separate the bottles, cans, paper, etc. and cart them off to a collection center. In either case, everything then proceeds to … where exactly?

Various entities play a part in that throwaway afterlife: municipalities, private corporations, nonprofits, the state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), followed by a slew of “end markets”—glass factories, paper mills, grinders, assorted melting pots, all ending in new products on shelves—or, if things go wrong, the dump.

End markets (and prices they pay for recycled materials) are constantly changing. When China abruptly stopped accepting waste from the U.S. and Europe in 2018, container ships were paralyzed on the high seas for months all over the world, with nowhere to go. A well-meaning but desultory recycling effort suddenly had to get serious. It has taken years to figure out and implement what to do with our refuse.

The benefits of recycling are compelling. Aside from drastically reducing the pile-up of landfills, reprocessing materials takes much less energy, and emits much less greenhouse gas and other pollution, compared to virgin production from raw materials. As a result, recycling can help the state achieve goals set to confront climate change.

The importance of recycling rose in 1998 when the last public landfill within the Adirondack Park was closed near Elizabethtown, under Gov. George Pataki’s watch.

Breaking down plastics

There are many challenges for the public and the industry to “get things right,” but clearly the thorniest has to do with plastic—and all those little numbers inside imprinted triangles of chasing arrows.

The numbers signify different chemical compositions derived from petroleum resin, designed for different functions. They can’t be mixed. Many of them cannot be recycled—they have no end market.

The chasing-arrows recycle symbol is untrademarked and unregulated; manufacturers can put it on whatever they please, according to a report on plastic recycling by Greenpeace cited in U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) documents. That can give the impression that plastic is generally recyclable, which in turn promotes public acceptance and growth of the petroleum-based plastic industry, the report stated.

The EPA has urged the Federal Trade Commission to set “a very high bar” for use of the symbol and ban it from plastics with no viable end market.

The rise of ‘zero sort’ recycling

We are left to struggle deciphering which plastic containers can be recycled, and recycling facilities struggle with drop-offs of mixed-up materials. To try to make things easier and encourage more participation, about a dozen years ago some operators started accepting “single-stream” drop-offs of mixed glass, metal, paper, cardboard and plastic, to be sorted at specialized facilities.

“The most successful, most environmentally and economically sustainable recycling program is single stream. It is more efficient for customers and participation rates are much higher than sorted collection,” said Jeff Weld, director of communications of Casella Waste Systems, one of the largest recycling companies nationwide. “It is safer, cleaner, and more efficient for our employees as well.”

In Old Forge, Scott Gaffney, superintendent of public works, calls it “one-and-done.” Mixed-together materials go to the Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste Authority’s sorting plant in Utica.

Herkimer is the only Adirondack county with a facility to handle single-stream sorting.

Todd Perry, executive director of the Franklin County Solid Waste Management Authority, says: “I’d like to get to zero sort, that would be a blessing for me, but volume-wise we don’t have enough to get to that point.” (The entire population of Franklin County is less than three-quarters than the city of Utica.).

Related reading

In the 1960s and ’70s, nearly every town in the Adirondack Park had its own dump or landfill.

Gov. George Pataki and his administration decided in the 1990s that the Adirondack Park was not the place for trash.

No landfills remain in the park, yet counties face rising costs for hauling waste

Casella: A leader in waste management

Some of Franklin and Clinton and most of Essex and St. Lawrence counties fall within the sphere of operations of Casella Waste Systems, active in nine northeastern states.

A family-run company based in Rutland, Vermont, Casella operates independently from counties and local governments but sometimes also jointly.

Division Manager Joseph Soulia says before they introduced single stream recycling in 2012, Casella processed 400 tons per month at their facility 30 miles east of the Blue Line. Soon thereafter, they were up to 3,000 tons per month. In the past year Casella trucked-in more than 3,000 tons of material from the Adirondack region alone, most of it collected as zero-sort.

The $6 million Rutland plant encloses 125-foot-long conveyor belts mechanically separating materials with blowers and various magnets. Seven men and women also manually comb the line followed by three robots snatching plastic containers with lightning speed.

Casella says 10% to 12% of the material brought in for recycling is rejected and diverted to a landfill in Coventry, Vermont. The national average is close to 25%. Another recycling company active in the Adirondacks and based within the park near Elizabethtown, Serkil L.L.C., has no website and did not respond to inquiries.

Don’t miss out

This article first appeared in a recent issue of Adirondack Explorer magazine.

Subscribe today to get 7 issues a year delivered to your mailbox and/or inbox!

A 20/80 rule to recycling

A common public belief that most recycled material just goes into landfills is untrue. Most eligible material does end up in landfills because most people don’t bother to recycle it. “You have people who say ‘oh that’s too much work,’” says Franklin County’s Perry. “‘I’ll just throw it away.’”

DEC issues permits and regulations for waste treatment, conducts audits and inspections and collects data from annual reports. In the department’s Adirondack Regions 5 and 6, the rate of municipal solid waste that is recycled (from residential and commercial sources, businesses and schools) has been stuck around 20% since 2008. Statewide, the figure is about the same.

The trash not recycled—that remaining 80%—represents the fourth largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions created in New York, roughly on a par with the amount produced by the cars, trucks and buses in the state.

The next generation of plastic

Unlike glass and metal, plastic degrades each time it is melted down and reformed (some new plastic is usually mixed in). Only a small percentage is recycled for food-grade packaging. More can be used to make non-food containers like shampoo bottles; still more reappears in carpeting, clothing, decking, toys and other items.

Plastic may take hundreds of years to break down—no-one really knows, since plastic has only been around for about 100 years. Alternatively, some plastic waste goes to incinerators, producing electricity along with toxic emissions and ash. An incinerator for Adirondack waste is in Hudson Falls, just outside the park.

Maine has passed landmark legislation requiring producers to pay into a fund based on the amount and recyclability of packaging. The fund will be used to reimburse municipalities for costs of waste management and to make investments in recycling infrastructure.

Greenpeace and other environmental organizations are campaigning to do away with plastic packaging altogether. They argue that plastic recycling is a public-relations charade, a petroleum-industry gambit to perpetuate its products. Recycling companies and agencies may be complicit, but they stress that since plastic packaging is ubiquitous, it’s imperative to send as little as possible into the waste stream.