$/30/2018 Your Recycling Gets Recycled, Right? Maybe, or Maybe Not - The New York Times
Other communities, like Grants Pass, Ore., home to about 37,000 people, are continuing to
encourage their residents to recycle as usual, but the materials are winding up in landfills anyway.
Local waste managers said they were concerned that if they told residents to stop recycling, it
could be hard to get them to start again.
It is “difficult with the public to turn the spigot on and off,” said Brian Fuller, a waste manager
with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.
The fallout has spread beyond the West Coast. Ben Harvey, the president of E.L. Harvey & Sons, a
recycling company based in Westborough, Mass., said that he had around 6,000 tons of paper and
cardboard piling up, when he would normally have a couple hundred tons stockpiled. The bales
are filling almost half of his 80,000-square-foot facility.
“It’s really impacted our day-to-day operations,” Mr. Harvey said. “It’s stifling me.”
Recyclers in Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany and other parts of Europe have also scrambled
to find alternatives.
Still, across much of the United States, including most major cities, recycling is continuing as
usual. Countries like India, Vietnam and Indonesia are importing more of the materials that are
not processed domestically. And some waste companies have responded to China’s ban by
stockpiling material while looking for new processors, or hoping that China reconsiders its policy.
Republic Services collecting recycled materials in Kent, Wash. Wiqan Ang for The New York Times
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