The "three R's" — reduce, reuse, recycle — are the most highly recommended ways of repurposing or disposing of numerous items, yet some Americans may not know what that means. Or even, according to a recentpoll, their local recycling initiatives.
Not so in Onondaga County, it seems, where residents are less prone to "contaminating" their blue bins than the national average. Contamination is industry talk for adding non-recyclables to the recycling, sometimes also known as ‘wish-cycling.’
A 2019 Waste Characterization study by the Onondaga County Resource Recovery Agency (OCRRA) found that contamination in the county was approximately 14%, while the national average is between 20% and 25%.
So what does that mean on a larger scale?
First, a quick primer. In Onondaga County, recycling is “single-stream," meaning many paper, plastic, metal and glass products are collected together, by companies like Liverpool-based Waste Management, which then sorts the items and sends them on to manufacturers, to be turned into new products.
OCRRA spokesperson Tammy Palmer says the less sorting that needs to be done, the better it is for everyone.
When companies notice a lot of contamination, “they can reject a load and that slows down the process, and also could give a certain community a bad reputation,” she said. “If they're consistently sending loads that have a lot of contamination — who wants to work with those communities?"
Palmer says manufacturers trust Onondaga County because it consistently has loads of “good recyclables” that rarely sent back to be re-sorted, or rejected (dumped into the trash), “which helps reduce the cost of recycling overall."
Another reason local recycling may be better than average, says Palmer, is that Onondaga County tries to maintain a list of reliable items that manufacturers want, and doesn’t include items that have little or no market value. However, that doesn’t mean that what is recyclable today will remain so in the future. Recycling in a community fluctuates, she says, because markets do.
“If we really want to optimize recycling in the future, people have to change the way they think about it,” Palmer said. People shouldn’t think, “‘Okay, these are the items that I'm supposed to recycle forever, and this is how it's going to be, and if there are any changes, I'm going to be frustrated and not open to it.’ That is not going to work.”
According to Palmer, “We have to get into the mindset where people get used to reviewing the latest recycling rules if we really want to grow in the future.”
Those rules, and other recycling information, can be found on OCRRA's website.
