“It’s been a gut punch,” said Steve Burgos, head of Boise’s Public Works Department.
It was a gut punch, too, to Boiseans and other westerners who had had been paying for curbside pickup for years, many with no idea that authorities were sending their dutifully recycled cardboard food boxes and thin-plastic water bottles to China, not recycling them domestically.
Republic Services, which collects both trash and recycling for most of Ada County, banned plastics numbered 3-7 at the start of the year. Boiseans received an exemption after city leaders said they’d found a business in Salt Lake City that would turn the plastics into diesel fuel, but until that begins this spring, even the Boise plastics are just being landfilled.
And the paper? Boise’s Western Recycling, which sorts and packages the recyclables Republic collects for shipment elsewhere, says it has found customers in India, Malaysia, Indonesia and other countries that still accept and recycle it. But the company doesn’t know if that will last.
For Boise and neighboring cities, China’s decision to just say no has forced a reckoning.
Curbside recycling will continue, because there are still domestic customers for our high-quality plastics (most plastics numbered 1 and 2) , metals and certain paper. But it will change. Boiseans will sort recyclables again, though in a different way than they did before 2009, when they began tossing everything into one big plastic bin. And they might pay more for the privilege.
How did it come to this?
Recyclable materials can be divided into two categories: those that make money and those that don’t.
Prices vary, but profitable materials generally include metals, corrugated cardboard and high-grade plastics such as milk jugs and soda bottles.
Less-valuable items include low-grade plastics and mixed paper, which includes newspaper, magazines, noncorrugated cardboard and junk mail.
In recent years, the U.S. market completely dried up as the Chinese paid more than domestic recyclers could afford. As its economy grew at an astounding rate, China exported goods and imported raw materials as fast as it could so it could build and manufacture more stuff.
Sometimes, Burgos said, the Chinese market for recyclables was weak, but shippers bought the recyclables anyway because they needed weight to make their ships more stable for trips to China, and they weren’t carrying much in the way of U.S. exports.
Recycling cities in eastern states mostly sell these materials to buyers in Montreal. Shipping materials from Boise and other western cities to Montreal would be too expensive, Burgos said.
To read the full story, visit http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/community/boise/article207096584.html.