Experts wary of SSC single-stream recycling pilot, but it could have climate benefits
CORRECTION: Northwest Recycling recently stopped accepting residential recycling. The status of the business operations was corrected Feb. 4, 2022.
Single-stream recycling will soon be tested in Bellingham. But not everyone is on board.
One of those people is Mark Peyron, an associate professor of chemical engineering at Western Washington University.
“It certainly will result in more contaminated waste,” said Peyron, who specializes in biodegradable plastics. “Without question.”
Recycling and garbage hauler Sanitary Service Company is launching a single-stream pilot program for 700 customers in south Bellingham, in an effort to control costs and keep rates down, SSC General Manager Ted Carlson told Bellingham City Council’s Public Works and Natural Resources Committee on Jan. 10. The company is considering the switch as it plans to buy new equipment.
Whatcom is one of the few areas in the state where residents are still expected to sort their recycling before putting it on the curb.
“That’s something the community has a right to be proud of,” Peyron said. “The fact that we are different than other localities doesn’t mean we are wrong. It might just mean we are better.”
A contamination crisis
Contamination happens when residents put materials that can’t be recycled — food, liquid, garbage — into their recycling bins.
It jacks up the processing costs for recycling facilities and results in otherwise reusable materials being sent to landfills, where plastics can take hundreds of years to decompose and pollute nearby soil and water. High contamination rates prompted China to stop accepting the world’s recycling in 2017, leaving municipalities to deal with the plummeting value of recycled goods.
“It used to be that you’d get paid for those commodities,” Carlson said in his Jan. 10 presentation. “Now, you are paying, and you are paying pretty significantly, to have them recycled.”
SSC is required in its contract with the city to re-examine practices when the collection cost of recycling exceeds that of garbage, Carlson said. That’s been the case for a while now: Recycling collection rates are currently about double the cost of garbage collection.
Washington knows it has a contamination problem that is “crippling the recycling system,” according to the Department of Ecology website. Following 2019 legislation, the agency published the Recycling Contamination Reduction and Outreach Plan in 2020.
Whatcom County got a shoutout in this document: “In 2018, Northwest Recycling reported an impressively low contamination rate of 1%. They attributed this to Whatcom County’s three-bin collection system that requires residents to separate paper from glass, metal, and plastic containers,” it read. (Northwest Recycling recently stopped accepting residential recycling, and SSC now works with Lautenbach Recycling in Mount Vernon.)
The state’s action plan acknowledged there was a significant increase in contamination rates following the massive shift to single-stream recycling, which was intended to boost collection efficiency, reduce worker injuries and get more people to recycle. Dual- or multi-stream systems had a contamination rate 5% lower than single-stream ones, Washington’s plan highlighted, citing a 2019 survey from The Recycling Partnership.
WWU engineering professors John Misasi and Nicole Hoekstra were also wary of bringing single-stream recycling to Whatcom, citing the same contamination concerns as Peyron.
“Any level of contamination reduces the performance of that next product,” Hoekstra said.
Potential climate benefits
The environmental impacts of the potential switch to single-stream recycling aren’t cut-and-dry. While it may increase the amount of garbage in the world’s landfills, it could also reduce the planet-warming emissions from SSC’s trucks.
SSC trucks use biodiesel, a type of fuel made from vegetable oil or animal fat. This fuel pollutes less than traditional petroleum diesel refined from crude oil, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. But it still pollutes.
Multi-stream recycling is incredibly labor- and truck-intensive, Carlson told Bellingham councilmembers. Drivers need to get in and out of their vehicles between 600 and 1,000 times a day. Since the current system doesn’t compact the recycling, drivers must return to the company’s Slater Road facility three to four times a day to empty their trucks.
All those extra trips mean that recycling accounts for 70% of SSC’s truck miles, Carlson said.
Carlson hypothesized that a single-stream system with compaction could allow the drivers to do the same job all in one run. Recycling collection could even be reduced to every other week, he said.
“That’s the balance we need to weigh as a community,” Carlson said. “It’s an environmental benefit from drastically cutting the vehicle emissions, but what do we see on the side of recycling in terms of contamination rates?”
SSC will present a progress report on the pilot program to the city in about six months.
This story was originally published February 3, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
