Understanding the Recycling Process (And Why It’s a Gamble)

While Northeast Ohio has introduced several measures to help facilitate post-consumer recycling, there is still often confusion about what products can be disposed of, where they end up, and how exactly they get there. When an object like a plastic bottle gets placed into a recycling bin in Portage County, what does the path it follows after that look like?

Waste Management, Inc. handles commercial recycling for most parts of Portage County, not residential. However, the recycling process appears to be the same for both commercial and residential recycling across vendors.

“You’ve got your 96-gallon cart out by the curb, and everything’s commingled,” Kurt Humes, the manager of materials procurement for Waste Management, Inc., explains. “Cardboard, paper, aluminum cans, plastics.”

What should go in the bin depends on each local area’s guidelines for recycling, which consumers are expected to follow. “We have a lot of people that don’t do that,” Humes says. “You should always be following your local guidelines to find out what’s recyclable.”

According to WM customer service, cardboard, junk mail, office paper, paper boards, plastic bottles, containers, and food and beverage cans can all be recycled by WM’s commercial clients in Portage County.

Once collected, everything is then transferred to a Materials Recovery Facility. Akron is the closest location to Portage County for a facility like this, and this is where a company’s recyclables are sent. Large items are removed to sell on their own and prevent the line from being blocked.

Paper is then filtered out, and soon glass is crushed and disposed until only plastic products are left. However, there are several different types of plastic bottles which are primarily categorized by their chemical makeup.

The process of sorting through these recyclable plastics is carried out in large part by machines, depending on the facility. This is a double-edged sword when it comes to filtering out unwanted materials, since the equipment requires constant maintenance to stay in working order.

“The auto-sort equipment is looked at, inspected and tweaked daily so they’re doing the right thing. We have technicians who recalibrate the equipment and keep it functioning daily,” Humes says.

Ideally, according to Waste Management Inc., plastic products are sorted and bundled into 1,200 pound bales. Once properly packaged, they are processed and sold. Unfortunately, despite significant efforts by both consumers and waste disposal companies to properly dispose of them, plastic products often end up in landfills due to a lack of a market for them.

Companies often have to mitigate and prevent contamination of recycled products, which can be a difficult process and creates additional barriers to effective recycling or successful sales of recycled product.

Plastic films, like the ones used in grocery bags, often have to brought back to the grocery store in order to be properly recycled because they can’t be processed with other plastics. In fact, Humes says, they even get caught in the machines and cause delays and mechanical difficulties.

According to Julie Gaglione, Technical Service Coordinator for WM, contamination is often an issue when it comes to international markets for recyclables. “A lot of the product used to go to China. Since China has more strict guidelines for contamination of product, we have found more sources within the United States that will take it.” 

These guidelines for China, Gaglione noted, require that products contain less than two percent contamination between the intended plastic and other materials, while American clients are presumably more lenient.

When there is not enough of a market for these products — due to contamination or any other reason — it becomes difficult to successfully recycle the materials. “We can’t just hang onto the stuff and keep it, and hope that a market comes. If we don’t have that, then unfortunately we’ve got to landfill it,” Humes says.

It is unclear what the solution to this problem is. While recycling is a very rigorous and deliberate process that ensures that materials are efficiently organized, the actual reusability of the materials all depends on what exactly gets brought to the facility, and what the demand is for those materials.

“That’s where a lot of our bottle manufacturers and brand name owners need to keep aware, if they want to recycle they need to keep their product in a 1, 2, or a 5,” Humes says. He is responsible for the sale of all of WM’s natural-colored Type 5 plastics across the United States.

He also emphasized again the importance of proper recycling on the part of the consumer. Products labeled with a 1, 2 or 5 recycling symbol are currently the easiest to recycle in a domestic market. Type 6 recyclables, which include Styrofoam, coffee cups and packing peanuts, have virtually no market and almost always end up in a landfill, he says, and cautions the public to remember this.

In short, whether not a bottle that is tossed into a recycling bin in Portage County (or anywhere) actually gets recycled depends completely on the market for the kind of plastic it is composed of, and on how well the facilities are able to prevent contamination.