China, not landfills, destination for recyclables

SANDPOINT — You can stop wondering what happens to the items you place in the green tub and leave curbside on garbage day. None of them are being dumped into the landfill.

As a matter of fact, nearly all of the metals, plastics and paper you placed there are being recycled — in China.

“China is a huge consumer of our recovered materials,” said Ken Gimpel, who is in charge of municipal relations for the landfill division of Waste Management, Inc. “The majority of the Northwest’s pulp and plastic goes to China.”

That includes the things collected in Sandpoint’s curbside recycling program. The Asian nation is not only snapping up milk jugs, newspapers and magazines, but pop cans and tin cans, too.

“A large part of those metals goes to China, as well as India and Pakistan,” said Michael Rice, of Pacific Steel & Recycling in Sandpoint.

Gross National Product

In an expensive and travel-intensive fashion, the things we throw away are entering a recycling stream. Remember the little circle of arrows that make up the recycling logo? Place our planet inside that circle and a picture is formed of how the same cycle is being realized on a global, economic level.

It works this way — we sell China all the stuff we don’t want and they sell it back to us as stuff we do.

The metals might end up in the electronics we buy. The plastic becomes the low-priced toys and baubles we crave. And all of it is shipped back to us in boxes made from the same paper we tossed out.

According to the federal government, the U.S. trade deficit with China hit a new record in 2007, climbing 10.2 percent to $256.3 billion. But all of those cargo ships full of Chinese products aren’t going back home empty. Many of them are now loaded with containers stuffed with our own recovered materials.

Although the amount is paltry when compared with the size of the trade deficit, America’s junk does manage to raise some money. The Chinese have recently paid approximately $8 billion-a-year for our recyclable items, making refuse one of our key export items to that country.

Where Garbage Goes

Forgive me, Mother Earth, for I have sinned. I honestly believed that my efforts to recycle were making a difference in the health of the planet. Could it be that I was increasing my carbon footprint instead?

In Bonner County, that might be the case.

“When it comes to recycling in a place like Bonner County, it’s more difficult because no one is using it for re-manufacturing — it all has to be shipped out,” Gimpel said.

“There’s a big lack of information,” he added. “People don’t realize that even your garbage is being exported.”

In 2006, Waste Management hauled 36,919 tons of garbage away from the curbs of local residents. Last year, the company carried off 38,428 tons of our trash. Less than 1 percent of that total — about 270 tons — was collected in Sandpoint’s curbside recycling program.

The remaining 99 percent is shipped off to Waste Management’s Columbia Ridge Landfill site in Arlington, Ore. — a 290-mile trip that burns fuel and creates emissions. The garbage goes away, but is there a potentially higher environmental cost that comes with the bargain?

The same question can be asked about how we handle our recycled items. Contrary to rumor, neither glass nor any of the other items are being dumped in Bonner County landfills. The image of recycling trucks dumping their loads at the landfill persists, however, even inside City Hall.

When questioned about the status of the city’s recycling program, one senior-level employee responded: “The glass goes in the landfill, the plastic goes in the landfill and I don’t know what else ends up there.” Not the case, according to Waste Management.

“None of the recyclables that we collect curbside are being disposed of,” Gimpel said. “It doesn’t make sense for us to run a truck around town, collect and sort all those commodities and then put them back into the disposal system.”

Where then, do they go? For the most part, onto trucks and off to the ports that will ship them to Chinese buyers. More fuel, more emissions and more of a quandary about environmental impacts.

“In a metropolitan area, the fact is that there is less carbon emission to recycle than to place it in the landfill,” Gimpel said. “The problem in an area like Sandpoint is that you have to add another level of transport and fuel consumption to accomplish the recycling.”

Pain in the Glass

The recent revelation that glass is being stockpiled rather than recycled created a stir in Bonner County. Residents who dutifully sorted their bottles and placed them in recycling bins were surprised to learn that the glass was not being melted down and reused. But, in the world of recycling, glass is odd man out. Even the Chinese aren’t interested.

“The definition of recyclable is that somebody wants it,” said Sandpoint Mayor Gretchen Hellar. “Here’s the problem — according to Waste Management, there is no market for recycled glass.”

The company had tried regrinding bottles for use as “aggregate” for use in local road base mix, but discontinued that process when some county residents worried that glass fragments might damage their tires. Based on a Department of Environmental Quality ruling that glass can no longer be stockpiled at county sites and faced with no “beneficial use” remaining for the material, the bottles are now trucked across the border, where Spokane Recycling, which also has no market for the glass, charges $70-per-ton to take it off our hands.

“But at what environmental cost are we doing that?” Gimpel asked. “Now we’re burning a lot more fossil fuel and leaving a bigger carbon footprint just to move glass around. It costs about $800-a-week to haul that glass from, in essence, one pile to another.”

Take it Away

The magic of curbside garbage and recycling collection is that we can generate all the junk we want to and set it out on the street where, one day a week, it disappears. But things haven’t changed all that much from the time when our ancestors dumped their trash in nearby streams and rivers. A handy, if unenlightened disposal process, that technique was especially effective for those who owned property located upstream from the rest of their neighbors.

Today, we continue to throw stuff into the stream, figuratively speaking, and it still flows somewhere. And, apparently, we’re still just as happy not to know exactly where it winds up.

“We’re not very careful about generating waste,” Hellar said. “We put it in these big cans and little green buckets where it’s out of sight and out of mind and we think everything is fine.”

Gimpel said Waste Management’s job is to make the process of garbage removal invisible. Maybe they have done their job so well that we, as a community, have forgotten that everything we throw out ends up someplace downstream. But don’t tell us, for God’s sake, that we can’t pile up huge mounds of trash once a week. And more important, definitely don’t let us know what happens to it once it disappears.

“So we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t,” said Gimpel. “If you don’t make the process invisible, people get upset. And if you do make it invisible and people start to learn about what happens after it leaves the curbside, they get even more upset.”

Still, the whole prospect of using less — and, in turn, throwing less away — seems to be an attack our inalienable right to consume. There is light, though, at the end of this tunnel. We can perhaps rest easier knowing that the consumption-disposal cycle remains safely in place because much of the trash we produce — except for those pesky glass bottles — will be bought by China and sold back to us in time.