Recycling may seem like an issue officials and experts can handle but on a local level it’s starting to hit the wallets of residents.
“Recycling is getting to the point where it’s getting expensive,” said David Magnant, director of operations for the Virginia Peninsula Public Service Authority. “Now it’s cheaper to throw it out than it is to process it.”
After new bans from China have prevented localities across the nation from processing their recycling at a low cost, a new contract between the City of Williamsburg and Tidewater Fibre Corporation Recycling will cost the city significantly more, according to the City Council agenda from Jan. 10.
This new contract will increase the cost by approximately $34,000 more a year than previously.
It’s a trend that Magnant said is being seen across the board and some cities have decided not to shoulder the cost and suspend recycling altogether.
“Americans have thought for the longest time that recycling was this huge money-making thing,” Magnant said. “And that as American citizens we’re doing a favor by putting it in. But in reality that’s going to cost us more now where as we could just be reusing these items.”
Now, local communities will have to consider how recycling will tie into their local economies.
In the past, most of the recycling in the United States was being shipped to China. Now, however, it’s staying on American shores and impacting taxpayers on an individual level in unexpected ways, such as buying produce at the local grocery store.
Plastic bag collection has picked up in the few years and in doing so, more money goes back into the economic cycle, said Phil Rozenski, senior sustainability director of Novolex. Novolex is a company that collects plastic film items, like shopping bags and bubble wrap, and recycles them into more plastic bags.
To do this, a retailer gathers all of their plastic film waste into a trailer. When that trailer is full, Novolex comes and buys all of the plastic film for 5 to 10 cents a pound.
And with more than 100 million pounds last year, that can add up.
What this does, Rozenski said, is make the cost of groceries and other products go down because retailers are off-setting their costs with the payments from Novolex. However, part of the problem is that people are only recycling 15 percent of their plastic bags.
The more plastic bags collected, the more jobs are created and the more fuel goes back into an economic system on a local level.
But what about all of the other types of plastic?
“Recycling is changing the economy,” said Lisa Fernandez, an associate professor of environmental economics at Virginia Commonwealth University. “There’s maybe some glitches in the process of getting the recycling to go somewhere and that’s trade related.”
Fernandez said part of the solution might be to rethink the cradle to grave process, where an item is made, used, and then tossed.
Instead, people should be considering reuse more, said Calandra Waters Lake, the director of sustainability at William and Mary.
“The phrase is ‘Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle,’” she said. “Recycle is last in that. We’ve become a disposable-based society right now…and that’s probably going to hurt us.”
