Recycling direct to landfill…

I’m pretty religious about recycling. Oh, every once in a while I’ll sneak a pair of worn out shoes into my trash bag, knowing full well and guiltily that those worn out shoes will gradually – very gradually – rot away in a landfill somewhere in Upstate NY. Sure, there’s the best case scenario that those worn out shoes will be incinerated in some incinerator with the temperature of the inner circle of hell. But that leather isn’t getting repurposed, that’s for sure.

The odd shoe aside, I’m mostly an avid recycler.

Most recently – i.e., Tuesday afternoon – I went to H&M on Newbury Street to recycle two bags full of clothes that weren’t good enough to bring over to St. Francis House. I had finally done a more-ruthless-than-usual culling of my stores of clothing (including plumbing the depths of an ironing basket that had last been empty in ought-four), and was searching for a place to dump them (other than the dump). Online, I found that H&M has a recycling program which has these three components:

• Rewear – clothing that can be worn again will be sold as second hand clothes.
• Reuse – old clothes and textiles will be turned into other products, such as cleaning cloths.
• Recycle – everything else is turned into textile fibres, and used for things like insulation. (Source: H&M)

Plus, for each bag your surrender, you get 15% off your next purchase. Now I just need to find someone who shops at H&M…

Anyway, clothing from now on will go to H&M. Just as magazines, junk mail, catalogs, pasta boxes, tuna cans, jam jars and just about everything that can and should be recycled goes out back, Monday or Friday, in a clear plastic recycling bag.

And I assume that, from out back, it all decamps to some recycling center, from whence it will find its glorious way back to me at a later date in some transmogrified new form.

But I may be living in a recycling fools paradise.

In recent months, in fact, thousands of tons of material left curbside for recycling in dozens of American cities and towns…have gone to landfills.

In the past, the municipalities would have shipped much of their used paper, plastics and other scrap materials to China for processing. But as part of a broad antipollution campaign, China announced last summer that it no longer wanted to import “foreign garbage.” Since Jan. 1 it has banned imports of various types of plastic and paper,and tightened standards for materials it does accept…

“All of a sudden, material being collected on the street doesn’t have a place to go,” said Pete Keller, vice president of recycling and sustainability at Republic Services, one of the largest waste managers in the country.  (Source: NY Times)

Unfortunately, some of it’s finding a place to go: landfill.

Another outcome of the China policy change is that some of the items that had previously been allowable recycling matter, like egg cartons, are no longer recyclable. (They must mean those god-awful plastic egg cartons, not the old-school cardboard ones. Surely, those are still good to go.) I’m guessing Boston hasn’t been especially impacted by the Chinese change of recycling heart – most of the areas caught up in it are in the West. In any case, the city hasn’t sent out info on changes. In fact, the last communication I recall is the one letting us know that pizza boxes are okay if you pick the goop out of them.

In reading the article in The Times, I also learned a new term: aspirational recycling, which means putting stuff in the recycling bin (or, in the case of Boston, those clear recycling bags) that you’re hoping is recyclable. Some of those aspirational items were pretty wild.

Mr. [Brent] Bell, the Waste Management executive, said he had seen everything from Christmas lights to animal carcasses to artillery shells come through the company’s recycling facilities. “Most of our facilities get a bowling ball every day or two,” he said.

I do believe that, had I one or the other in my possession, I would have been able to figure out that artillery shells and bowling balls don’t belong in the recycle bag. But I must confess that I have probably been guilty on occasion of some aspirational recycling, slipping in the odd frayed power cord, assuming that, surely, this can be reused somehow. Guess I’ll have to figure out something else to do with the yards and yards of bright orange Ethernet cabling occupying cabinet space in my office.

While the Chinese situation is mostly hitting the West, we haven’t been exempt locally.

Ben Harvey, the president of E.L. Harvey & Sons, a recycling company based in Westborough, Mass., said that he had around 6,000 tons of paper and cardboard piling up, when he would normally have a couple hundred tons stockpiled. The bales are filling almost half of his 80,000-square-foot facility.

Wonder if some of my old Economists and LL Bean catalogs are biding their time out in Westborough. Hope not.

I hate to see my faith in recycling undermined, my hopes dashed.

But I should know better.

I once worked at a company that equipped each office with a regular wastebasket and a bright blue recycling container. One day, when I was working late, I watched as the cleaning person rolled her trash barrel down the aisle, stopping at each office to grab both the wastebaskets and recycling containers and dump them in to her barrel. Single stream trash vs. single stream recycling?

I have observed our guys often enough to know that the trash guys pick up the black plastic bags and the recycle guys take the clear plastic bags. So I’ll keep on recycling, managing my waste the best that I can.