Most Onondaga County residents might not give a second thought to where their old papers, milk jugs, or glass bottles go after they’re placed in the blue bin. They’re just trying to do their part to make sure the material is recycled.
And the Onondaga County Resource Recovery Agency wants to keep it that way. But there's a bit of a problem: OCRRA and its partners have been struggling to manage a recycling depression.
If you’ve always wondered where your recyclables end up, here it is.
"This particular piece of equipment is removing our glass. It's a shaker table. There are holes in the bed, it shakes back and forth, like a beach sand sifter when you were a kid."
Kevin Sutton is plant manager at the Waste Management/Recycle America facility in Salina. There’s an almost constant stream of haulers dropping their loads to be sorted and processed through a maze of noisy equipment before it’s baled and sent away. Sutton says most of it is automated, but there are a handful of workers need at certain points to intervene where machines just aren’t enough.
"We have guys that are pulling the smaller pieces of cardboard, then the remainder of that material will go to a paper screen. The vast majority of that material goes to our partner WestRock in Solvay. It stays local, it's a good story. It's a closed-loop local recycling program. If people are familiar with WestRock, they make various liner board, packaging material used in cardboard boxes."
Executive Director of OCRRA Dereth Glance says carboard is just one of the streams that stays local.
"We are very fortunate to have such a large consumer of cardboard and a recycler in our own community. Then you look at where the metal is going. The metal markets remain very strong domestically. We have many metal processors right here in the county. Then you've got plastics, and they're processed domestically as well. There are many mills turning your plastics into new containers, into carpeting."
So, that’s the good news. A significant portion of your recycled material actually stays right here to support local businesses, jobs, and the economy. The bad news?
"It's the paper," Glance says. "That mixed paper is 50 percent by weight of what is contained in the blue bin. China was just insatiable for this material for a very long period of time."
Not anymore. Glance says it was around the latter half of 2018 when China began to get a little picky about quality, which favored Onondaga County and softened the initial blow.
"But then the markets closed. It's your basic principle of supply and demand. When you lose about 50 percent of your market, and there's no outlet for your material, regardless of how great your stuff is, the prices just bottomed out."
Kevin Sutton at Waste Management says fortunately, the large company has industry connections:
"We were able to make sure we still had good movement of material. At no point of time, did we lack for an outlet. We were always able to move the paper products collected in our community to an end user."
And, it turns out India became that primary customer. Sutton says some of their secondary markets in south Asia also absorbed the material, in addition to some domestic outlets. Still, the cost differential meant that OCRRA had to restructure its contract with Waste Management/Recycle America. For more than a decade prior to the recycling crash, Glance says there was a net zero cost for processing. Traditionally, the OCRRA shelled out a maximum of $10 a ton when the markets were considered bad.
"Under our new reality, that's about $50 a ton. We've seen other communities looking at $100 to $120 a ton for processing and marketing those recyclables. We have a really strong partnership with Waste Management/Recycle America. And the folks in Onondaga County are just phenomenal in terms of the quality of their recycling. What's really saving the day is quality, and keeping the stream as clean as possible."
Plant manager Kevin Sutton agrees.
"The more contamination that's in the inbound stream, the more we have to remove. There's a cost associated with having to dispose of the material that should have gone into the trash stream initially. The more people can keep their recycling bins to the program and not wish-cycle, the better off we'll all be."
Sutton and Glance say Onondaga County residents are among the best recyclers, with contamination rate of less than five percent. The average is 25 percent. That takes us back to the plant, where that five percent or so becomes very clear…
"You can see the plastic bags, wires, and chains wrapped around that equipment. We have to go in there four times a day and clean all the bags, ropes, cables, and chains out of that equipment to keep it working properly and efficiently."
Sutton and Glance say recycling only what you’re supposed to helps the plant, and keeps the quality of the stream higher so it’s more marketable. Glance says recycling markets will likely be in a recession for the next one to three years, according to the experts. But, she doesn’t want that to change anyone’s habits.
"Recycling is still here, it's still going to be here. Keep recycling. Keep recycling. All of the stuff is living another useful life."
More information on what can and cannot be put in the blue bin, and how to recycle other items is at OCRRA.org.
