People putting out their recycling have a right to know where it will end up, Gina Dempster writes.
Recycling usually has a high feel-good factor: but it's been all bad news this month for recycling companies in Wellington.
At the end of March, EnviroWaste Services had to pay more than $150,000 in fines, legal costs and compensation after an inquiry into the death of one of its workers in a recycling truck hoist accident.
WorkSafe chief inspector Keith Stewart said EnviroWaste Services had failed to keep Junior Hunt safe by providing adequate training and properly managing the hazards on the recycling truck, resulting in "devastating and irreversible consequences for the victim and his family''.
Less than a week later, TV3 filmed a smaller waste removal company, Daily Waste, dumping recycling at the landfill.
When a Dominion Post reporter attempted to do a story on where your recycling goes, Oji Fibre Solutions, the company running Wellington's recycling sorting plant, refused to talk to the reporter let alone let her inside the plant.
The Dompost subsequently discovered that Wellingtonians had been misled into thinking that plastic bags were being recycled, prompting an apology by the council.
Recycling is not the most transparent industry, because much of the sorting is done behind closed doors and a lot of the final reprocessing happens offshore.
Neither is it a highly regulated industry. And it is in a downturn, which is putting a lot of pressure on recyclers.
Recycling is a commodity-based industry. Recyclers sell paper, plastic, glass and metal to manufacturers, competing with virgin materials. Like all commodity markets, the prices are volatile.
When oil is cheap (as it is now), virgin plastic becomes very cheap, and the demand for recycled plastic drops.
The downward pressure on prices for recycled material has been increased by the slowdown in China.
The scrap-metal market is feeling the impacts of the Chinese economic slowdown especially hard, with scrap dealers saying it is the toughest conditions they have seen in 30 years.
When it is a buyers' market, the thing that keeps selling is quality.
If you have a guaranteed clean product line with minimal contamination, recycling brokers will buy it.
Having a manual low-tech system is worth money to community recycling centres like ours at the moment: not only do you carry little debt to service but you end up with a very clean recycling stream.
At Wanaka Wastebusters, we have found that one way to keep selling into a slow market is to club together with other community recycling centres.
We are all dedicated recyclers who produce a very clean product but in low volumes.
By pooling our product, we can fill containers more quickly and sell them to brokers who are looking for clean uncontaminated recycling.
Wanaka Wastebusters also recycles as much as it can onshore, including colour-sorted glass, which is made into new bottles in Auckland, and HDPE plastic, which is made into resin for irrigation pipes in Christchurch.
Recyclers do not have magic wands.
If glass is broken and ground into cardboard on the way to the recycling centre, then it is pretty much impossible to separate it.
Community recycling centres in New Zealand have always argued strongly against comingled collections for that reason.
Comingling, collecting all recyclables in one bin and compacting them during collection, is like scrambling an egg. It's not a reversible procedure.
Although co-mingling has been heavily promoted within the recycling industry over the past decade, the system is not standing up well to the market downturn.
Even past advocates for comingled collections are now changing their tune.
David Steiner, chief executive of Waste Management, the biggest recycler in the United States, told the New York Times in February that "recycling is in a crisis''.
The company has closed nearly a quarter of its recycling centres in the United States in the past two years.
Waste Management pioneered comingled recycling back in 2001.
But Steiner told Fortune magazine last September that it was "probably fair'' to say Waste Management created some of its own problems by leading the single-stream recycling trend.
"I wouldn't say that we shot ourselves in the foot, because it created more recycling,'' he told the magazine.
"But we need to think about how to create more recycling at a higher profitability.''
Steiner went on to suggest possible solutions to the recycling crisis, including laws requiring recycled content in packaging, removing glass from the recycling stream and "extended producer responsibility'' that shifts some of the costs of recycling on to the prices of the products themselves.
As a small community enterprise, Wanaka Wastebusters has been advocating for similar policies for years (although we believe the solution for glass is to keep recycling it but to collect it separately, as is done in Dunedin, Alexandra and Wanaka kerbside collections).
For once we are on the same page as one of the biggest waste companies in the world.
There are incentives for recycling companies to do a good job.
The first is of course reputation, which is very hard to resurrect once customers lose trust.
The second is ethics. Many recyclers believe in the benefits to the environment of what they are doing, so they will do it to a high standard.
And the third motivation is money. Clean bales of recycled material are worth more, especially when times are tough.
It is time for recyclers to become more transparent about what happens to recycling once it is collected.
Recycling is not just about what recycling companies are doing, it is about what people are doing at home and at work.
It takes a bit of effort to put your recycling out, so you want to know that your recycler is doing the job properly.
If you have doubts or you want to be sure, why not ask them?
Here are some questions to get started:
• Do you recycle all the materials you collect?
• Do any of the materials you collect for recycling end up in the landfill?
• How much of your recycling is done onshore?
• Which materials?
• Where does the rest of your recycling go?
• Is your recycling on-sold through a reputable broker or company?
• Is your glass colour-sorted and made into new bottles?
• Are you part of a reputable recycling network?
• Do you collect mixed materials (plastics and polystyrene) in the same bin or skip? If yes, how do you separate them out again?
• Ask for a copy of the company's mission, vision and values, and check that it reflects what you value in recycling.
• Ask for a document recording what has been collected from your business over the past year and a guarantee that all materials were recycled.
- Gina Dempster is communications officer at Wanaka Wastebusters. Each week in this column, one of a panel of writers addresses issues of sustainability.
