The Recycling Economy
I recently had the opportunity to learn about the recycling industry at a level slightly deeper than the average person might encounter. I thought it was absolutely fascinating, and I wanted to put it in writing to turn a bunch of random facts floating around in my head into a cohesive picture.
Full disclaimer: I heard about all of this from one source, and I haven’t corroborated any of the details and figures for myself, however this came from an expert working within the industry, so I believe the details are reasonably accurate. It’s also very possible that I’ve muddled some of the details, but I did my best to keep everything straight. I’ll be sure to correct any errors that are brought to my attention, as well as add new information that I am made aware of.
Currently, the recycling industry in the United States seems to be losing much of its vitality and is in serious need of some shaking up. The good news is that there are some players in this field aiming to inject a whole lot of life into it, and I think they have the ability to do so. I sincerely hope they can succeed!
First, let me describe the basics of how the recycling economy functions:
Virgin material is extracted from natural resources and used in products. This can be plastics, metal, wood, glass, etc.
Those raw materials are refined and then purchased by manufacturers to be turned into useful products: cars, smartphones, sporks, takeout containers, bottles, and beyond.
The products are bought and used by the consumers for some amount of time -- sometimes 10 seconds, sometimes 100 years. It depends on what the product is.
Once those products reach the end of their useful life, they are disposed of, either by being thrown in the trash, where they end up in a landfill, or by being placed into a recycling bin. We’ll be focusing on the recycling stream for now
Those recycled materials get picked up and moved to a recycling center. Contrary to what the name might suggest, the recycling center doesn’t actually do any reprocessing of materials. The recycling center simply sorts materials by type and bundles them into bales of like-materials. One bale might contain paper, another aluminum cans, yet another plastic bottles. You get the idea. There are about 10 types of bales that all recycling waste gets sorted into.
The recycling center then sells those bales to a processing facility, which cleans and melts or refines the baled material into some form that can be used by a manufacturing facility to make new products.
A manufacturer will purchase this cleaned-up material, whether it be plastic pellets, metal ingots, paper pulp, or glass, to subsequently produce new products.
Steps 2-7 then repeat themselves. Sometimes this can go on indefinitely, however other times this process can only happen only a limited number of times because the materials degrade each time they are reprocessed and the mechanical properties may no longer be suitable for use again.
So why is the recycling industry diminishing in the US these days? It should be noted that currently the US really only does sorting on its home soil and hands the job of reprocessing to other countries that have more heavy industry like China. There are a couple of factors that are the cause of the decline in the US:
Sorting all of the materials is actually a very difficult, unpleasant, and dangerous job.
First, recycling centers are filled with heavy, noisy, and dangerous equipment.
Most facilities are not climate controlled. There is often a lot of material to process and all of that material needs to be brought into the facility from outside, then exit the facility on the other end through big openings in the building. This exposes the workers to extremely hot or cold temperatures inside.
The job of sorting requires the workers to maintain a high level of focus for many hours straight in order to effectively sort materials. Imagine day after day of distinguishing polypropylene from polystyrene from PET, all of which can be clear plastics. Or remove plastic-coated cardboard from regular cardboard because one can’t be recycled and one can. Maybe you can begin to see why sorting all of the different items is non-trivial.
The general public often is poorly educated about what can or cannot be recycled. There can be biohazards mixed in, like hypodermic needles, diapers, hygiene products, razor blades, rotting food, and so forth. This puts the workers in pretty serious danger of bodily harm or contracting disease.
Sorting is very physical. Long hours of standing, reaching over conveyor belts while picking materials out for a week straight will take its toll.
Aside from the challenge of doing the actual sorting, the economics of recycling make it pretty tough for a facility in the US to be profitable. Like any business, a recycling center needs to get paid for its service. This comes from selling the sorted 1-ton bales to someone else, who thinks they can make a profit after refining/reprocessing them. There are several factors at play that make profit a difficult proposition:
Because the work is so dangerous and unpleasant, it is very difficult to keep the facilities staffed year-round. The turnover of employees can be as bad as a few weeks, even with pay rates reaching as high as $25/hour. The high pay rate cuts into profit pretty severely, but without employees, there is no business. Some facilities may choose the ethically questionable route of using prison labor to operate to mitigate the pay expense as well.
The facility makes its money by selling bales, so it needs to generate bales at a rate high enough to make the operational costs worth it. The average going rate for bales (as of August 2020) is about $80/ton. Thinking about it from another angle, the facility needs to be able to sort a ton of material for less than $80 to make a profit. Things work out to mean that a sorting facility needs to generate about 40 tons of sorted material per hour to remain profitable. That requires a lot of waste, which brings us to our next point.
In order to sort 40 tons of material an hour, there needs to be more than that coming into the facility every hour (since not everything that comes into the facility can be recycled). This means there needs to be enough people nearby the facility throwing their bottles, cans, copper, steel, paper in their recycling bins. It works out that about 250,000 people need to be living within a 50 mile radius of the recycling center for it to remain profitable. Ultimately this limits the number of locations that a sorting facility can exist at all -- they all need to exist around metropolitan areas with high population densities. The result is that much of rural America cannot be served effectively by a recycling center. The numbers just don’t work.
Finally, there is the matter of the purity of the bales. You may recall that a few years back there was some kerfuffle about how China was no longer going to accept our recycling, and the US was scrambling to find someplace to take our trash. What actually happened was that China raised the purity requirements for what they would accept, and the US wasn’t meeting those standards. From what I understand, China now will only accept bales of 98% purity. A bale of, say, PET bottles can’t have much polypropylene or polystyrene thrown in by mistake. You can see how this ties back to why the workers need to be extremely vigilant while doing their work. The increased purity requirement forced a lot of US-based recycling centers to find processing facilities in countries with less stringent rules, or to develop methodologies to improve their sorting abilities. I believe that this event led to the opening of some foreign-owned, US-based paper mills. Opening home-soil processing facilities could prove to be a positive outcome, but it will take time.
You may have noticed that earlier in this post, there was some bolded text. Each time that appeared there was an exchange of money for materials or service. And each time, the price of the recycled material goes up. So by the time the material reaches the manufacturer, the price has increased well beyond the $80/ton that the recycling center gets. I’ve seen figures as high as $200/ton. When a company hires the manufacturer to produce their product, they have the option of choosing between recycled material or virgin material, and these days, the recycled material is significantly more expensive than virgin material. Nine times out of ten, companies will opt to use virgin material over recycled material so they can have better sales margins, and higher profits. This is the way business has been done forever, but unfortunately this method doesn’t take into account the environmental costs.
Certainly there are companies who choose to use recycled materials out of a sense of responsibility and to support their brand image, however there needs to be a paradigm shift that causes the majority of companies producing products to be economically incentivized to utilize recycled materials over virgin ones.
While a lot of this may make the US’ recycling economy sound rather bleak, it would seem there is some hope! There are some people hard at work developing robotic systems that employ computer vision and machine learning that address most of these issues.
These robots can sort more accurately than humans, leading to higher purity bales. They are also not put in danger from sharp or unclean objects. They can operate 24-hours a day, regardless of the conditions, resulting in much higher throughput. Between the reduced operational costs, and not having to pay wages, a recycling center can recoup the initial cost of these systems very rapidly. Because of the improved throughput, and reduced cost, these robots once again make it viable to operate recycling centers in more rural areas with lower population densities. Finally, the dramatically increased efficiency that these robots provide have the potential to drive the cost of recycled material below that of virgin material, which can completely flip the economics of manufacturing on its head.
I, for one, think this would be a huge boon to humanity and am extremely excited by this idea. I expect there will be people who are concerned about good, hard working people losing their jobs to robots, and I’d imagine that will occur on a very small scale, but considering the horrid working conditions and hazards, I can’t imagine these sorting jobs will be sorely missed for long.
Here’s to making a better world!