The Palo Alto City Council has extended a pilot program launched in the spring that sharply curtails international shipments of plastic. The move follows two years in which the City Council has tried, with little success, to determine which countries the city’s recyclable goods get shipped to. While its contract with its hauler, GreenWaste Palo Alto requires the hauler to report the destinations of local waste, the company’s reports offered only vague and incomplete information.
Its most recent report, which was issued in July, argued that the commodities market is unstructured and that the brokers it deals with have only limited information about the ports to which local products get shipped. “Once at the ports, materials are sent to various plants, making the full life cycle of commodities extremely difficult to track,” the report states. “Furthermore, with the current state of the markets, recyclables brokers are not in a position to place requirements on customers.”
The lack of information has been a long source of frustration for local environmentalists, who urged the council last spring to seek domestic destinations for local waste. In May, the city amended its contract so that mixed paper would now be sent to a pulp and paper mill in Louisiana, where the material would be combined with other wood products and turned into paper products. Mixed rigid plastic, meanwhile, will be processed into bits of plastic called “nurdles,” which will be sent to various plants in southern California to create items like bags and rope, according to an announcement the city released last week.