When the assignment came across this writer’s desk to report on how recycling works in these parts, memories oddly rushed in of one summer vacation at a house on the water just outside Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Not that trash disposal was the highlight of the trip; It was just the realization of how seriously the natives take it and how second-nature it is to them. In fact, so meticulous and strict are the regulations for waste disposal in that province, the only uncategorized items legally left behind were disposable razor blades. If only it were like that here.
Living as we all do in such proximity to the Chesapeake Bay and its quiet creeks and inlets is what drew many of us here in the first place. Unfortunately, that same magnetism also presents a rather easy temptation to dump stuff into the water that will presumably, eventually, “wash away.” But out of sight does not necessarily mean the trash has disappeared.
The images just last summer were stark. No event in recent memory more vividly drove home the value of recycling. A record 16 inches of rainfall had forced opening the floodgates of the Conowingo Dam—the terminus of a watershed that runs mostly through New York, Pennsylvania, and northern Maryland and drains into the Susquehanna River. The torrent it created unleashed a wide array of debris (mostly uprooted trees) that followed the current down the bay and into many of its nooks and crannies. It was the volume of inorganic material risingto the surface that caused the greatest concern.
Scientists and government officials quickly ascertained that much of it should have been disposed of properly instead of being allowed to pollute everything in its wake downstream. Volunteers and public and private workers spent weeks cleaning up the trash, including everything from old tires and plastics to tree trunks and old appliances.
Before the Flood...of Recycling
all household waste was once fair game for mixed placement on city and municipality curbsides the morning of trash-pickup day. Most receptacles were either steel cans with removable lids (the iconic picture of the traditional trashcan survives to this day) or discarded oil drums. What’s more, there were no pull-tie plastic bags to help contain the mess.
1/3 of recycling gets trashed because consumers just don’t know or care that they’re just not doing it right
Residents of rural areas, with limited or no access to regular trash removal, had “burn barrels” or other homemade incinerators in their backyards for eliminating most of the waste—hidden aerosol hairspray cans being an insidious explosive-missile hazard. The notion of separating certain unwanted items that could be transformed into still useful material was completely foreign to everyone.
In the 1960s, folksinger Arlo Guthrie built a career around a song about garbage. Titled “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” it was, in part, his long-playing comical tale of being arrested for littering after setting out to discard the remains of “a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat.” Having found the local dump closed for the holiday, he spotted a pile of garbage off the side of a road nearby and thought that “making one big pile was better than making two little piles.”
Mixed Outcomes
Recycling wasn’t even in the national vocabulary at the time. Today, it’s an entirely different story—and one with mixed outcomes. In Anne Arundel County, the “local dump” is the 564-acre Millersville Landfill and Resource Recovery Facility, opened in 1975 and now projecting the last of its nine “disposal cells” to be filled by 2043. Putting information together from various sources, recycled material west of the Chesapeake Bay funnels through not only the Millersville facility, but also at similar operations in West River, Columbia, and Jessup. On the Eastern Shore, recycled-material handling centers are based in Easton, Ridgely, and Stevensville. Most of the sorted recyclables from these facilities are then transferred to WM Recycle America in Elkridge, where they are transferred to ships that transport them to destinations a hemisphere away.
This is where the recycling trail gets a bit twisted, which is understandable when considering that the commodity is random bundles of trash, measured in tons. In 2013, America’s erstwhile favored destination for its unwanted or unusable recycled items, China, began imposing bans on “low-quality” scrap materials, which, according to the April 2018 article “Five Myths About Recycling” in The Washington Post, “caused some U.S. recyclers to divert collected plastics to landfills.” But the author of the story, Brian Clark Howard, a digital writer and editor at National Geographic, says that “the fear that everything we painstakingly sort will just end up in the same place as the rest of our garbage is overblown.” Is it really?
In January, Reuters reported that China is starting new recycling initiatives in the wake of its international trash ban and a boom in that country’s own building and manufacturing. Its own glut of millions of tons of waste “is buried in sprawling landfill sites or dismantled by hand in polluting backstreet workshops.” Consequently, according to Drewry Maritime Advisers, recyclable exports from other nations have been diverted to India, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Taiwan, with “almost 80 percent” of the waste being transported from the United States and Canada.
The Enemy Is Us
In June 2018, The Baltimore Sun ran a story titled “People Are Throwing Too Much Garbage in the Blue Bin—and it’s Upending the Economics of Recycling.” Here, the onus went to the source of what is the biggest snag, right at the recycling trailhead—us. No matter how well-intentioned, we often make the wrong assumptions about what constitutes a recyclable item and what doesn’t. According to the Sun report, “For every six tons that pass through Elkridge, one ton doesn’t belong.”
Separating your trash may sound like a mundane task—and it generally is—but we must make some simple, common-sense decisions as we determine what’s recyclable and what isn’t. The processes at waste facilities for separating “the wheat from the chaff” (to use an old crop-harvesting metaphor) has become much more sophisticated than it used to be; paper, metal, and glass products can now be sorted and confined to separate containers. But that half-consumed jug of holiday eggnog you tossed in your recycling bin could gum up the works and often defeat the whole purpose of the exercise. By several accounts, as much as 1/3 of recycling gets trashed because consumers just don’t know—or care—that they’re just not doing it right.
Maryland’s “Ten Year Solid Waste Management Plan, 2013–2023” has a wealth of information on the subject, and even though the information in it is almost seven years old, much of it still applies. The state passed the Maryland Recycling Act into law in 1988, authorizing its Department of the Environment “to reduce the disposal of solid waste...through management, education, and regulation.” Since that time, all the state’s jurisdictions have had recycling programs. According to the department’s frequently asked questions section of its website, the law requires that those with populations of more than 150,000 people must recycle 35 percent of their waste, while jurisdictions with fewer people are mandated to recycle 20 percent.
Jurisdictions that fail to meet these goals face prohibition by state and local authorities of “the issuance of building permits for all new construction.” For this report, however, we were unable to find any evidence that this step has ever been taken. Additional legislation is in place that addresses yard and wood waste, composting feasibility, the proper safe disposal of mercuric oxide batteries and other rechargeable products, and an executive order that requires state agencies to “divert or recycle at least 20 percent of the waste they generate.”
On the Local Front Lines
With several outside forces at play that impact the local recycling effort, we went to Richard Bowen, recycling program manager for the Anne Arundel County Department of Public Works’ Waste Management Services to help clarify the challenges he faces and the importance of the work his team does. Does recycling pay for itself? “Generation of revenue should not be considered the main reason or benefit to continued participation in recycling programs,” Bowen stressed. He emphasized that some of the programs he manages “come at a cost” and “many generate revenue,” including scrap metals, cardboard, electronics, automotive batteries, textiles, motor and cooking oil, and vinyl siding.
Acknowledging the “reduced value in single-stream collected recyclables [mixed paper, plastics, metals, and other containers we all set out curbside, eds.], due in large part to lower demand created by overseas policy changes,” Bowen still emphasizes that “recycling conserves natural resources and preserves landfill capacity to be used for items that cannot be recycled.”
According to the Department of the Environment, the law requires populations of more than 150,000 people must recycle 35% of their waste // while jurisdictions with fewer people are mandated to recycle 20%
How much does recycling add to the county’s bottom line? According to Bowen, the “solid waste enterprise fund” comes from “a number of revenue sources,” including resident “user fees” and “landfill disposal fees charged to non-residential customers.” But he does acknowledge that “the sale of recyclables accounts for less than 5 percent of the annual operating budget,” adding that “it helps with keeping user fees low and affordable.”
Bowen went on to re-emphasize that the county’s ongoing recycling efforts continue to be beneficial, citing collected yard waste and composting as savers of landfill space and stressing that “recycling is a core strategy of modern waste management and has proven to be beneficial to Anne Arundel County,” saving natural resources, using less energy in manufacturing, and preserving landfill capacity. “We will continue to educate and motivate residents to recycle all that our program allows.”
Current and Future Priorities
At this writing, Anne Arundel County Councilmember Lisa Rodvien (District 6) is proposing legislation that would force businesses to stop using polystyrene foam (known commonly as Styrofoam) as containers for carry-out food. Newly elected County Executive Steuart Pittman supports the legislation, saying. “Litter from foam pollutes our communities and continues to be a problem in Anne Arundel County.” He supported the Council’s foam ban in 2018 and “was sorry to see it vetoed [by his predecessor, Steve Schuh]...I look forward to signing Rodvien’s bill once it passes so that our county can do our part to keep this harmful material out of our waterways.” The State Senate passed the polystyrene bill on March 5th.
Another piece to the recycling puzzle is the disposition of glass bottles and other beverage containers. Public Radio station WYPR aired a segment of its “The Environment in Focus” program in July 2016, lamenting the fact that Maryland has not joined the nine other states that impose five-cent refundable deposits. The program, titled “The Dirty Secrets of Maryland’s Recycling Programs,” cited Baltimore Democratic Senator Bill Ferguson as the sponsor of Senate Bill 367, “which would have imposed a five-cent fee on cans and bottles that people could recover by returning their cans to reverse vending machines or recycling centers.” So far, with only 25 percent of the state’s beverage containers being recycled out of a total of 4.8 billion in circulation throughout a year, no such deposit is yet required by state law.
So, what do the collectors of the recyclables think? The final piece of information gathered for this story came from a recent short chat with two recycling collectors from Bates Trucking, the contractors hired by the City of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County to dispose of neighborhood waste. Their names are Ronnie, who was working the pickup operation, and Belinda, driving the Bates truck. What is the worst trend they see in weekly neighborhood curbside pickup? “Boxes. Delivered boxes,” they chimed in quickly. What type of boxes? “Mostly Amazon boxes,” they shouted over the noise of the truck’s engine. “How can anyone have that many deliveries in one week?” Ronnie wondered. That is likely another question that will need to be addressed in the near future, as the number of home deliveries, of nearly every commodity, continue to rise.
