Do you trust plastic recycling? What really happens to the plastics Boiseans recycle

At the Republic Services Recycling Center on Cole Road, waste whirs on a conveyor belt past workers who scramble to pull contaminants off the line. Trash goes in barrels at the workers’ sides, and cardboard and paper head to a heaping pile of boxes, mailers, magazines and newspapers two stories tall. A giant magnet separates steel cans from milk jugs, soda bottles and other plastic scraps.

Once isolated, each material will be compressed into bales and taken to its next destination. But while recycling experts say paper and metal products are fairly easy to recycle, plastics — even the No. 1 and 2 items Boiseans separate from Styrofoam and plastic film — pose more of a problem.

In recent years, reports from environmental groups have challenged the idea that plastic is easily recyclable, spurring a growing skepticism about the reality of plastic recycling. Data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency shows the amount of plastic manufactured each year keeps growing, while the vast majority of it is sent to landfills rather than recycled.

Recycling is big in Boise. About 97% of city residents have recycling carts, and the city last year recycled 17,500 tons of commercial and residential waste. But just a small fraction of that is plastic, and nearly twice as much plastic ends up in the Ada County landfill.

According to the EPA, those statistics are on par with national numbers. Experts say Boise has a more effective system for recycling than many U.S. cities, but its challenges reflect a bigger issue with a plastics recycling industry that is opaque at best and broken at worst.

Here’s how much plastic is in Boise landfill

The vast majority of waste in the U.S. heads to landfills rather than recycling facilities, EPA data shows. In 2018, the most recent data available, the agency found 23% of the country’s 292.4 million tons of waste was recycled. About 68% was landfilled, and the remainder composted.

Comparable 2023 statistics from Boise show an even lower recycling rate. Of the roughly 230,000 tons of waste collected last year, about 8% — the 17,500 tons — was recycled. About 80% went to the landfill, and the rest was composted.

EPA data shows that plastics make up about 18% of all waste in landfills. In Boise, the percentage is slightly lower.

City public works spokesperson Melissa Stoner told the Statesman in an email that the city commissions a third-party consultant every five to 10 years to analyze the waste Boise brings to the landfill. The most recent analysis, in 2021, found that 13% of the city’s landfilled waste was plastic. Stoner told the Idaho Statesman that based on that analysis, city officials estimate about 2,500 tons of plastic that could have been recycled ended up in the Ada County landfill last year.

In contrast, plastics made up about 7%, or 1,260 tons, of the 18,000 tons of Boise recycling last year. That means Boise residents are still throwing away about twice as much recyclable plastic as they’re recycling.

Once the recycled plastic is baled up, it’s shipped out of Boise to various end users. Republic Services announced late last year that it opened its own polymer recycling plant in Las Vegas. The company told local TV news stations that it would begin sending Boise-area plastics to the plant in February, but that hasn’t entirely materialized.

In an email to the Statesman, Boise-based Republic Services spokesperson Rachele Klein said the company is sending “test loads of plastic” to Las Vegas and plastic bales to end users in Utah, Oregon and Las Vegas.

“Initially, when the polymer center opened, the plastic was too contaminated to use without significant cleanup,” Klein told the Statesman.

She said Republic transitioned to full-time workers at the Cole Road sorting center, which it purchased from Western Recycling late last year. Previously, Western Recycling hired temporary workers to run its sorting line. Klein said the full-time employees are better trained to separate recyclable items, and the company saw an immediate increase in the quality of its plastic bales.

Klein said the Boise recycling center is also looking at new technology to improve bale quality. An optical sorter, called PlasticMax, would target select plastics for baling.

According to Klein, when the plastics at the Boise sorting center meet quality expectations, the Las Vegas polymer center can sort and wash them before processing them into plastic pellets or flakes. Republic sells those plastic pieces to buyers, like Coca-Cola, to turn into new bottles.

“The intention is to send all plastics from Idaho to the polymer center,” Klein said.

Kate O’Neill, a plastics recycling expert and associate dean of the College of Natural Resources at University of California-Berkeley, said the plant is “very promising” and a big step up from the intense pollution and abysmal labor conditions at comparable Chinese processing plants, where many western U.S. plastics were sent until the country stopped accepting them in 2018.

“Those plastics are the ones for which there is a real market for the recycled product,” O’Neill told the Statesman.

Skepticism over plastic recycling grows

There are still some plastics Republic collects from Boiseans that won’t make it to Las Vegas.

Boise has had “orange bags” for plastics other than Nos. 1, 2 and 3 since 2018, when China announced it would stop accepting those items from the western U.S. The decision threw American recycling companies into disarray as they tried to find new buyers. It was also the first time Boise residents had been told their recyclables ended up in Asia.

The program, now officially known as the Hefty ReNew program, gave residents a new destination for their hard-to-recycle plastics like Styrofoam, pet food bags, packing materials, plastic food-storage bags and plastic shopping bags.

Boise rolled out the program with fanfare: free bags for residents, educational events and coupons. The orange bags were trucked to Salt Lake City, where a company called Renewlogy was turning them into diesel fuel.

At least, that’s what Boiseans were told. In March 2020, the city quietly acknowledged that Renewlogy had hit some snags with equipment to process the plastics. Instead of becoming diesel fuel, for about a year Boise’s orange bags had been incinerated to fuel concrete factories.

The revelation shook some locals’ trust. A Meridian woman who participated in the orange bag program told Reuters that she felt “lulled into complacency, believing that we are having a positive impact on the environment, when really we aren’t.”

Nationwide, trust in recycling has been plummeting, according to confidence research conducted by the nonprofit Recycling Partnership. Less than half of survey respondents said they trust their recycling is actually being made into new items. A 2022 Greenpeace report showed those concerns were well-founded as plastic recycling rates hit a low of around 5%.

Other reports have estimated about half of the world’s annual 400 million tons of newly manufactured plastic is meant to be used once, not recycled.

While the United Nations struggles to reach a plastics agreement by the end of 2024, some environmental groups have denounced recycling entirely in favor of drastic cuts to plastic production. O’Neill, the UC-Berkeley plastics researcher, told the Statesman the tensions have created even more upheaval in the industry.

“(Activists) have really decided to throw down and said, ‘Recycling is useless, there’s no point and it’s not changing anything and possibly making things worse,’” O’Neill said.

In contrast, plastics and recycling industry leaders have said we’re at a turning point and need to learn to recycle better. In 2018, when China announced it would stop accepting America’s recyclables, the industry’s landscape shifted. Some smaller recycling companies stopped accepting many plastics, since they had nowhere to sell them.

Republic Services, which is one of the largest waste management operations in the country, was still able to find “end users” — buyers who would turn the compressed bales of plastic into something new — for its No. 1 and 2 plastics, the ones it plans to send to Las Vegas.

No. 1 plastics are often called PET or PETE, an abbreviation for polyethylene terephthalate. This plastic is one of the most common types and is typically clear. This plastic is used for beverage bottles and clamshell containers.

No. 2 plastics are made of high-density polyethylene, abbreviated HDPE. Another common plastic, No. 2 is usually opaque or colored. Common No. 2 items include milk jugs, detergent bottles and children’s toys.

Plastic scrap prices fluctuate depending on the market and type of plastic, usually hovering between 5 and 10 cents per pound of material for Nos. 1 and 2.

Davis Allen, a researcher with the Center for Climate Integrity, told the Statesman in an interview that most No. 1 and 2 plastics are recycled into lower-quality materials. A Scientific American article on plastic recycling explained how the complex polymer chains that make up plastics are damaged slightly each time the material is melted down and reformed. In addition, contaminants and myriad plastic additives, like coloring, can combine in unpredictable ways, resulting in weaker plastic.

That means your recycled cola bottle likely isn’t coming back as another beverage container. Its next life – which Allen said is probably its last – is more likely to be turned into something like carpet or synthetic clothing insulation.

“Even if they are (recycled into the same product), it tends to be a one-time thing, not something that’s happening over and over, despite industry advertising and presenting it that way,” Allen said.

Allen said the number on a plastic item – typically encircled by the three-arrow symbol synonymous with recycling – does not actually indicate an item is recyclable. Instead, the numbers are resin identification codes used to denote what type of plastic the item is. In 2023, the EPA called the use of the chasing-arrows symbol around a resin code “a misrepresentation” and urged the Federal Trade Commission to prohibit its use with the codes.

According to Allen, fossil fuel companies, whose natural resources are primary ingredients in plastic production, used the symbol to try to conflate plastic’s recyclability with more easily recyclable materials like paper and metal.

Plastics industry officials tell a different story. Patrick Krieger, vice president of sustainability with the Plastics Industry Association, told the Statesman the resin identifier symbol came about as a necessity to differentiate the codes from other information on plastic containers. He said his organization supports a move away from the recycling symbol to a neutral triangle, but he said 29 states require the symbol on plastic items. (Idaho is not one of them).

Krieger said the association is working on ways to improve recycling. That includes reducing the complexity of plastic packaging, limiting the type of materials in packaging and improving recycling collection systems.

“We’ve already invested billions of dollars, and we’re doing billions more to make sure that we are able to recycle more, because that’s ultimately our goal,” Krieger said.

A 2020 Pew Charitable Trust study said urgent action is needed to lessen plastic’s impacts — from massive plastic debris piles contaminating the ocean to tiny “microplastic” pieces found in our bodies that damage our cells.

The study said recycling helps mitigate such problems, but it isn’t happening on nearly a large enough scale.

The Plastics Industry Association is also combating recycling skepticism. Its Recycling is Real project highlights recycling programs and successes around the country.

“We recycle billions of pounds of plastics every year,” Krieger told the Statesman. “We really want to make sure that we’re telling people and showing them that recycling is real.”

‘Less recycling can be good’

It’s hard to know exactly where trust in recycling stands in Boise. Recycling tonnage has stayed fairly consistent in recent years, even as the city’s population booms. Since 2021, commercial and residential recycling tonnage have both decreased slightly from a combined 18,000 tons in 2021 to 17,500 tons last year, according to city data.

That’s not necessarily a sign of problem. Stoner, the city public works spokesperson, said Boise officials don’t know why recycling tonnage has seen a plateau. She said it could be due to a number of factors and could indicate a reduction in plastics usage and more lightweight materials.

“We’d rather see less material come in to all our programs,” Stoner said in an interview. “Less recycling can be good.”

O’Neill said Boise is doing a better job of recycling than many major U.S. cities, where recycling and trash all end up in a single stream destined for landfills.

But the biggest solutions are out of Boise’s hands. O’Neill and Allen said plastics companies are the ones who will need to change. Though big companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have committed to using more recycled plastics (and partnered with Republic Services at its Las Vegas site), the plastic industry is still churning out far more new or “virgin” plastics than items made from recycled materials.

O’Neill said consumers can push industry — including fossil fuel companies, which benefit from the creation of new plastics — to change their ways by demanding less plastic packaging and reducing their plastic consumption. She also encouraged citizen pressure at the city and county level, urging officials to ensure plastics are truly recycled.

“Local governments who make these recycling contracts are in a better position to say (to waste managers), ‘Hey, we need a full report,’” O’Neill said.

Allen told the Statesman that his organization, the Center for Climate Integrity, is working to hold fossil fuel companies accountable. Its research shows huge corporations have long been aware that their plastic products aren’t as recyclable as they were made out to be and could have devastating environmental impacts due to fossil fuel usage and plastic waste buildup.

“I think that broad accountability effort is is really important,” Allen said. “We need to force these companies to stop making deceptive claims that give them social license to produce ever-growing amounts of plastic.”

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Come to Idaho Statesman recycling event

Idaho Statesman reporter Nicole Blanchard and audience engagement expert Dana Oland will join officials from the city of Boise and the Hefty ReNew orange bag program to answer your questions about plastics recycling starting at 9 a.m. Saturday, July 20, at the Boise Farmers Market, 1500 Shoreline Drive.