Like states all over the country, Oregon is struggling to deal with the excess recyclable plastic and mixed paper that have accumulated since China banned U.S. imports of these materials at the beginning of the year.
But recycling businesses are hopeful the ban will turn out positively for their sector.
Nicole Janssen, president of Denton Plastics in Gresham, hopes the disruption will start a conversation about how the U.S. tackles recyclable materials domestically.
“It is opening up opportunities for figuring out how to deal with post-consumer waste,” she says.
Her business, which turns plastic waste into usable products, has yet to benefit from the China ban because Oregon does not have a facility that separates plastics she can use for her business’s own processing.
The state’s material recovery facilities (MRFs), private businesses that sort recyclable materials, discard most of the waste that comes to them after they separate it for high-value materials, such as cardboard, milk jugs and soda bottles.
This waste, often contaminated with non-recyclable material, such as yard debris and food scraps, used to be shipped off to China, which sorted the waste and used it as feedstock for its manufacturing base.
In 2018, China banned the imports of post-consumer plastics and unsorted paper because of the high rate of contamination, which polluted their environment and harmed public health and safety. The low cost of oil also means it is less economic to recycle plastic since it is cheaper to produce virgin plastic.
Janssen says her facility could use about 50% of the recyclable plastic that is discarded by the MRFs and used to get sent to China. But few domestic organizations are willing to sort that material.
“We have had more people cleaning up the waste stream. But it is not a huge amount. People feel they do not want to pay for the extra labor to separate the material. They are just taking it to the landfill,” says Janssen.
Pete Chism-Winfield, chair of the Association of Oregon Recyclers, says 40% of Oregon’s recyclable materials that used to go to China are now being exported to other countries, such as Vietnam and India. A portion of it is also now going to the landfill because MRFs are overwhelmed with the amount of waste material piling up at their facilities.
The Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) reports that 5-6% of co-mingled material collected in the blue trash carts for recycling is going to the landfill. The actual amount going to the landfill is probably higher because several counties outside of Portland are no longer collecting recyclable material and are sending it straight to the landfill.