YORK, S.C. — At the end of September, the sole employee responsible for recycling pickup drove through the streets of York for the last time.
The community of less than 10,000 is the latest in the Charlotte area to end curbside recycling, joining places like Mount Holly, Kings Mountain and Gastonia.
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According to Chris Wallace, the city’s public works director, York’s decision came shortly after the nearby town of Clover dropped their program back in July. The two municipalities previously shared the cost of the service. With the entire responsibility on York, the city council had to decide whether to pass the cost onto residents or drop the program altogether.
“The city council decided they didn’t want to have to do an increase for the low participation and make everybody have to pay,” Wallace said.
For those still interested in recycling in York, Wallace said they can drop off their materials at one of the county’s recycling centers.
“They’re not going to stop if they truly want to do it,” he said.
The true cost of recycling
Jeff Smithberger, Mecklenburg County’s Solid Waste director, York’s story sounds familiar but disappointing.
“Inflation has wracked havoc on all parts on our economy and the costs of recycling has gone up and the cost of landfilling has gone up,” he said. “But if those items are not recycled they’re gonna go in the back of that garbage truck and they’re going to go to someone’s landfill somewhere, and that cost will eventually be borne by the community by the need to need a new landfill.”
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Even in a community the size of Mecklenburg County, Smithberger said recycling has its challenges.
“We process around 350 to 380 tons of materials every day,” he said.
Those materials are dropped off in large piles of cardboard, bottles and cans, which are then sorted by machine and hand to separate out into the specific recyclable components, plastic, aluminum, paper, and glass.
“Then those get shipped back out to market to make new recycled products,” Smithberger said.
Yet, while the county is able to sell those materials, recycling is a net loss. According to Smithberger, each ton is about $50-$60 to process, due to cost of collection, labor and the growing cost of separating out all of the materials that can’t be recycled.
“Unfortunately, people have somehow come to the conclusion that anything made out of plastic is recyclable and that’s just not true,” he said. “It’s a time-consuming expense as well as a monetary expense.”
Every day, solid waste has to discard about 20 to 25 percent of the material they collect through recycling because it’s unable to go through their system, either due to the fact that it’s collected in plastic bags, still full of food or liquid or it’s simply something that should never have gone in the bin to begin with.
“Manufacturers are ones that really put us behind the eight-ball and make products that we have no chance at recycling,” he said. “They don’t make things for the second or end-of-life product.”
Barriers to recycling right
At the Innovation Barn, Amy Aussieker and Envision Charlotte are looking for creative ways to find a second life for those hard-to-recycle materials, said that’s the crux of the problem. Most things aren’t made to be recycled and even those that can be recycled lack an easy path.
Products need to go from point of use to a recycling center to a specific materials re-use facility and Aussieker said taking away curbside recycling makes that first journey much less likely.
“The majority of people just out of convenience are not going to do it,” she said.
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If it does get to a recycling center, Aussieker said the lack of a universal collections process drives up those high sorting costs, which materials buyers rarely if ever make up for when they purchase items for re-use.
“Every municipality is different, so if you move from here to there you might be recycling different things so education is a huge problem which causes contamination,” she said “Then you have to have buyers on the backside. It’s just a whole huge mess.”
On top of that, most plastic can’t be recycled at all, and even when it can, it’s rarely worth the cost. Making new plastic is much cheaper.
Critics often point to this reality to accuse corporate recycling initiatives of greenwashing or giving a false sense of environmental benefits. For example, Coca-Cola faces a lawsuit for allegedly deceptive marketing practices related to its plastic recycling efforts, despite being the single-largest producer of plastic waste.
Opponents argue recycling campaigns can make it seem like we can sustain our current levels of consumption and therefore plastic producers can continue to operate, business as usual.
Are there any benefits to recycling
Despite doubts about its effectiveness, polls show one in six Americans consider recycling a way they can personally combat climate change.
While Aussieker agrees recycling barely scratches the surface of environmental impact, she believes there is a place for the practice in climate discourse.
“It is a piece of the puzzle and it is the easiest gateway into sustainability,” she said. “You take recycling then you move to composting organics, then maybe you look at your home for better efficiencies around energy and water.”
Aussieker said reducing consumption and reusing what we have has to be top priority as well as advocating for producers to consider where their products will a month, a year or even longer after it leaves the store.
“We need to take accountability for when we buy something we should have a say and a responsibility in where it goes at the end,” she said. “The people who are making the products need to design things differently so that it’s easier to break things down and reuse them.”
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