The myths and costs of recycling waste

At the end of a freewheeling and lively discussion of waste management and recycling, town and state officials found themselves in agreement on only one thing: Waste management is expensive and complex and the headaches it creates are not easily solved. 

Twenty-one first selectmen from Litchfield County towns convened on Thursday morning, Oct. 10, for their monthly meeting of the Northwest Hills Council of Governments in Goshen. 

Near the top of the agenda for the meeting were two presentations on waste and recycling, both of which are enormously expensive and both of which connect to ongoing concerns about climate change and planetary health.

Kevin Budris is an attorney with the Conservation Law Foundation, which is based in Boston, Mass. He works in the organization’s office in Rhode Island. 

“Waste and recycling costs have spiraled out of control,” Budris told the 21 selectmen, all of whom have experienced those cost increases in their own towns.

At this point, Budris noted, towns are still largely struggling to keep up with what’s brought in to their transfer stations (from which their waste is “transferred” to facilities that will burn the waste or recycle it). 

“We need to focus on turning off the waste spigot, so that less ends up in the transfer stations and landfills,” he said.

As an out of state resident, he was not fully informed on Connecticut laws. He strongly urged the group, for example, to lobby state legislators to ban plastic grocery bags and to have stores charge a fee for paper bags.

That law was passed this year. Single-use plastic bags will be fully banned statewide by July 2021; towns are allowed to enact their own bans sooner than that.

Get a better bottle bill

He also urged the town leaders to try and get more types of glass bottles out of single stream recycling bins.

Glass is very heavy, he said, and increases the per-ton hauling fees that towns pay. 

Glass is also fragile and bottles often break; when that happens in the single stream bin, the glass shards get embedded in the cardboard in the bin. This contaminates the cardboard so that it can’t be recycled. 

If there were a deposit on more types of glass bottles, such as liquor and wine bottles, those bottles could come out of single stream and go into bottle deposit bins. 

He noted that Connecticut charges a very low fee for bottle deposits, at 5 cents; and the state has one of the lowest return rates of any state, at 48%.

By comparison, Michigan has a 10 cent bottle deposit and a 92% return rate.

Redemption centers in Connecticut are losing money. A higher bottle deposit rate could give them an incentive to stay open and would give consumers an incentive to recycle; that would take heavy glass bottles out of the municipal waste stream, which would decrease costs and which would reduce the chances of recyclable cardboard getting contaminated.

Budris also talked about shifting responsibility for recycling costs onto manufacturers, a program called extended producer responsibility (EPR). 

A great deal of packaging is labeled as recyclable when in practical fact it is not, he said. While it might be possible to recycle, for example, corks and the boxes used for selling water and some other liquids that is known as tetra-pack they are extremely expensive to recycle and are not recyclable at most area facilities. 

Products that are labeled as number 1 and 2 are widely recyclable; anything that is from 3 to 7 is “very hard to recycle,” he said. 

Styrofoam is extremely problematic he said, noting that it is used often for takeout hot foods and beverages. He said businesses should be encouraged not to use Styrofoam (also known as polystyrene).

“There is no meaningful way to recycle polystyrene,” he said, in response to a question from one of the selectmen, who said his town struggles with an abundance of Styrofoam packaging at its municipal waste center.

“You can reuse polystyrene,” Budris said. “But you can’t break it down.”

He said that many products are labeled as recyclable and consumers feel good about tossing them into the single stream bin. But, he said, all those numbered 3 to 7 have to be removed and returned to general waste. If people could be educated about what actually can be recycled it would help; and if companies would use more recyclable packaging, especially paper, it would help. 

“Take these products out of the waste stream and it makes it easier to recycle what is left,” he said.

Pay as you throw plan

Next to speak was Kristen Brown, who was there representing the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. 

She was there to try and pitch a “pay as you throw” waste program to the towns. These programs have been wildly unpopular here and have not been adopted in local towns when they have been proposed. 

Brown had worked with nearby Torrington; the selectmen at the meeting agreed that if it was going to work anywhere, it should have worked in Torrington, where taxpayers would actually have experienced a cost savings. In pay as you throw, consumers purchase plastic garbage bags and pay at their transfer station for each bag of trash they dispose of.

The plan, which is popular in other parts of the country including in nearby Dutchess County, N.Y., towns, was turned down by Torrington voters. 

Brown said that the state feels if it tries to implement a “unibase pricing” program statewide it will fail. She tried to convince the selectmen at the meeting that they should do a regional unibase pricing program, with one central waste center that serves all 21 towns in the Council of Governments coverage area.

The selectmen unanimously agreed that their voters would not be in favor of the program.