Innotex Group 
I sank to the back of the group. People’s instinct for bunching closer to the guide and my purposeful slow pace combined to offer me time and space to better experience the focus of our visit. I have been on two other tours like this one. One in Albany, New York and the other in Napa, California. These two visits dispelled the notion that the subjects we came to see did not exist. News stories of the subjects being pushed aside with no apparent value or worse buried alive were not hard to find. Going to these two places restored my confidence that at least some of the subjects had more life in them and were being saved. This tour in Austin, Texas was different.
I had never been this close. At certain points, I could reach over the railing to touch them as they zipped by. The signs to keep hands inside the guardrails and cameras scanning the facility were enough of a deterrent for my eyes to be the only ones to breech the restricted area. The guide walked and talked us through the half mile maze. We had all been exposed to a common narrative of the subjects being neglected, mislabeled, and thrown away like they had no value at all. The tour revealed the opposite. A place that valued the subjects, helped them find their own kind where they could combine to create something new.
We witnessed how the innovative processes and employees stationed along the path helped each individual subject find their way through the labyrinth. The tour guide said about 85% of the subjects are recovered. Those too damaged, too contaminated, or worse not designed to be recovered comprise the unsalvageable 15%.
As we exited the network of pathways, we saw the successful result. The subjects had found their own kind and sat in warehouse bays awaiting pickup by someone who wanted them. Subjects were loaded onto trucks and routed to a new owner, a new life, hoping to return one day to a facility like this one.
The tour was of a material recovery facility and the subjects were recyclables. After picking up from community curbside bins and local businesses, truck after truck unloaded mixed recyclables in a cavernous warehouse. The drop off point quickly becomes a growing mountain of material. The pyramid shaped pile extends ninety plus feet wide to about thirty feet high. Metal cans, plastic milk jugs, glass pickle jars, plastic sacks, butter tubs, egg crates, cardboard boxes, tissue paper, ketchup bottles, peanut butter containers, plastic paint trays, juice pouches, pasta boxes, jelly jars, yogurt cups and newspapers are some of the pieces that make up the jumbled pile. The amount and variety of materials was overwhelming. My awareness of our consumptive society has never been more acute than watching the massive heap balloon in size with every drop off.
As the trucks add to the pile, front loaders take from it and drop materials onto conveyor belts to feed the sorting system. The conveyors provide a controlled, constant flow of material into and through the sequenced sortation process. The system consists of manual pickers, trommel screens, disc screens, magnets, air jets, optical sorters, glass breakers and robotics all used to separate like materials as they weave through apparatus in the 100,000 square foot building. The facility processes 165,000 tons of material each year.
By the end, the unsorted mound of material is transformed into neat bundles of uniformity ready for sale. The experience reminded me of a shuffled deck of playing cards. Sorting fifty-two cards by suit and then in ascending order gives structure to the deck making it easier to determine if any cards are missing. Every card is valuable. In material recovery facilities, hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds are plastic, metal, glass, and paper. Just like each card in a deck, every piece of material is treated as valuable in the facility.
Recycling is happening — the three trips in three states to material recovery facilities provided experiential evidence. There are over one thousand similar facilities across the United States.
My confidence in mass recycling gained from my trips is crushed by statistics of the larger mosaic. A recent study from The Recycling Partnership finds the United States residential recycling rate is approximately 21%. Five states — California, Connecticut, New York, and Oregon — have rates of 30% or above. Five states — Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Nebraska — are below 10%.
The report stated seven out of ten cardboard boxes, three out of four milk jugs, four out of five steel cans, three out of four tons of mixed paper and seven out of ten glass bottles, aluminum cans and PET plastic bottles are in trash bins in homes.
The truth hurts. The twenty-one percent statistic provides the vociferous recycling critic ammunition to downplay its long-term viability.
What? How can this be? I witnessed the process. Three facilities in three states all recycle roughly 85% of what they receive and many more do the same.
In short, most recyclables never get to a facility to be processed. The report points to a lack of access to recycling services, lack of education and communication as primary causes for the low overall recycling rates. Of the 73% of all U.S households that have recycling access, 59% use the service. The goal is to provide more access to those without and to have those with access to use it.
Government policy for access and funding like extended producer responsibility (EPR) and industry investment are two solutions in the report.
What cannot be lost in the potential solution set is the role of the individual. The tour guide’s final words provide a hidden path for individuals to contribute.
“If you’re not buying recycled content, you’re not recycling.”
The comment personalized recycling on both the supply and demand side. I have mostly viewed my ordinary participation in recycling from the supply side. Our household creates a supply of recycled materials by filling our weekly curbside pickup bin and hoping an unseen infrastructure collects it, sorts it, and sells it to make something else.
I now realize I also create the demand. When I buy recycled content in pants, packaging, toys, furniture, carpets, bikes, appliances, paper, shirts, napkins, car parts, fencing, bags, delivery boxes, hairbrushes, sneakers, and shampoo bottles, I increase the demand for recyclables. The demand pulls the recyclables through the system. The recyclables I witnessed racing by on conveyor belts are sorted and sold to fill a demand. A demand I in part create when I buy recycled content items.
Recycling is an interdependent system and thus will never be perfect. Alignment of government policy, corporate actions, and consumer behavior leads to greater awareness, education, and behaviors to support the whole. More access to the system for those without and higher participation for those with results in more material to recycling facilities to let them do what they do at a high rate of success —- sort material to re-sell. It is less a sorting issue and more of a collection issue. Get the facilities more material while driving the economics in what is purchased.
Imperfections in the interdependent system and the low overall recycling rate headline can call into question the effectiveness of recycling, particularly to the individual. Is recycling worth the effort? The EPA website outlines the many benefits of recycling including reducing the amount of waste to landfills, conserving natural resources, preventing pollution by reducing the need to collect new materials, using domestic sources of material supply, reducing the environmental impacts of materials across their lifecycle, supporting American manufacturing, and creating jobs in recycling and manufacturing industry. Jobs in facilities like the three I visited.
While better alignment of policy and business is much needed and hastens progress, the individual will always be a critical piece. The truth is we each affect the supply side and the demand side of recycling in our daily decisions on every item we dispose of and purchase. The truth is material recycling facilities all over the United States recover 85% of what they receive.
These truths help to ditch the malaise, to counter the low overall recycling rate statistic to provide each of us motivation to act. Act by giving extra attention to those ordinary decisions to view them as important, not inconsequential.
Resources:
Number of recycling facilities in the U.S: https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/number-of-businesses/recycling-facilities-united-states/
Texas recycling facility: https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2020/02/14/facility-focus-balcones-resources/
Recycling statistics: https://recyclingpartnership.org/residential-recycling-report/
Benefits of recycling: www.epa.gov/smm/recycling-economic-information-rei-report
