30/2018 Your Recycling Gets Recycled, Right? Maybe, or Maybe Not - The New York Times
Wigan Ang for The New York Times
Mr. Spendelow said companies in rural areas, which tend to have higher expenses to get their
materials to market, were being hit particularly hard. “They’re literally taking trucks straight to
the landfill,” he said.
Will Posegate, the chief operations officer for Garten Services, which processes recycling for a
number of counties in Oregon, said his company had tried to stockpile recyclables but eventually
used a waiver to dump roughly 900 tons. “The warehouse builds up so much that it’s unsafe,” he
said.
In California, officials are concerned that improperly stored bales of paper could become hazards
during wildfire season, said Zoe Heller, the policy director for the state’s recycling department.
While China has entirely banned 24 materials, including post-consumer plastic and mixed paper,
it has also demanded that other materials, such as cardboard and scrap metal, be only 0.5 percent
impure. Even a small amount of food scraps or other rubbish, if undetected, can ruin a batch of
recycling.
Some waste managers say that China’s new contamination standards are impossible to meet,
while others are trying to clean up their recycling streams by slowing down their processing
facilities, limiting the types of materials they accept or trying to better educate customers on what
belongs in the recycling bin.
https.//www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers html 5/8
