After West Lafayette’s recycling drop-off center closed earlier this year, local officials struggled to find a way to meet demand from residents. Despite being a landlocked state that didn’t do much work with China, Indiana has also felt the impact. China’s decision has created a glut in the market – so even if facilities process materials, they may not have any buyers.
“No commodity put in a recycling bin was untouched by that oversupply that then caused the value of those materials to plummet,” says Allyson Mitchell, executive director of Indiana Recycling Coalition.
Mitchell says the recycling sent to material recovery facilities – businesses responsible for sorting and selling product – are often contaminated, and can’t be processed.“As a country, and probably as a global society, we got pretty lazy about enforcing what to put in the bin and, even more importantly, what not to put in the bin,” Mitchell says.
And in Indiana, that lack of recycling education is hurting the entire industry. Tippecanoe County’s recycling program will cost the county $70,000 next year, according to county commissioner Tom Murtaugh, in part because the materials being processed and sold aren’t worth enough to cover operation costs.
“We’re hopefully going to receive a little bit of revenue back, but it will nowhere, in no way offset the cost of actually running the recycle program,” Murtaugh says. Following the West Lafayette closure, residents not enrolled in city curbside pickup plans must go to a site on Lafayette’s north side if they want to recycle, or travel to satellite pickup stations.
“When we compare numbers, there hasn’t been a drop-off in the amount that they’ve been seeing,” Murtaugh says. “So we’re very excited about the fact that people have not stopped recycling.”