ENVIRONMENT A Time To Repurpose Recycling
A Chinese policy has Connecticut rethinking how it recycles
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n 1971, an actor playing a Native American looked at America’s littered landscape and wept in a now infamous commercial created by Stamford, Connecticut’s own Keep America Beautiful. The non-profit organization, which counted Philip Morris and CocaCola as founding members, wanted to show the effects of pollution and littering. The tagline was “People Start Pollution. People Can Stop It,” but today is more remembered for the single tear that streamed down the actor’s face.
be felt in Connecticut.
This commercial might not be the first call to action in the war on litter, but it certainly fit in well with the post-60s pro-Earth revolution. People bemoaned the “hippies” with their Earth Day — first celebrated on April 22, 1970 — but something clicked in the American psyche.
Getting right to the heart of the matter, Blake said that recycling went from a positive to negative.
By 1971 Oregon had introduced the bottle deposit on soda and beer bottles to incentivize recycling and the program finally had a logo, a Mobius strip instantly recognizable by people all around the world. That was the tipping point. Municipalities around the country began to offer curbside recycling and even mandate it. By 1990, the theme of the 20th Earth Day was recycling, and curbside programs in the United States are exploding. Americans recycle and want to recycle. 1991 was the year that Connecticut mandated recycling, and many young Nutmeggers have never known a world without it. Left out of the discussion is where the recycled waste went. For years, recyclers could ship their recyclables to China at a profit. The market for recycled goods in China made sense because the processed products would stay in country to be made into new raw consumer goods. Then in 2017, the Chinese Government announced The National Sword, a policy that limits the kind of recyclables the country accepts. No longer will the country take on what it terms “foreign garbage,” limiting the amount of impurities in recyclables in order to protect its own environment, which is the world’s most polluted (rated by CO2 emissions, America is number two). Like America in the 1970s, China is having a moment where pollution and belief in global warming are incentivizing green investment, but it is having far reaching effects from Europe, to Oregon, and it is beginning to
30 | INNOVATIVE IDEAS 2020
“Everything’s been flipped on its head.” “It’s collapsing right before our very eyes.” Those were just some of the things Milford Mayor Ben Blake and Bethel First Selectman Matt Knickerbocker had to say in a phone call to CT&C about the implications of China’s new policy. It was a theme that was threaded through every town official or recycling expert’s comments on the situation.
The Mayor isn’t saying that recycling is a bad thing (he has some good ideas to turn this back into a positive, but more on that later); he’s referring to tipping fees. Those responsible for the disposal of recycling waste will know what a tipping fee is. Waste Management defines it as the “fee charged for the amount of waste disposed of by customers at a landfill,” but this process goes one step further for recycling. Once the products are sorted, they could then be sold to another party who would use them downstream. That revenue gets shared back to the municipality. But that’s not true anymore because of China’s National Sword Policy. Tim DeVivo, owner and operator of Willimantic Waste Paper with his brother Tom, a Windham Board Member, said to the Hartford Courant that markets for certain recyclables are “the lowest [they’ve] ever seen.” Put into hard figures, Tom Gaffey of the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority (MIRA) which is in charge of 70 towns and cities in the Hartford area said that just two years ago you could expect a return of $170 a ton for old newspaper, which is down to just $30 today, leaving little margin or no margins for the municipalities. In many cases it’s cost them money. Seeking out a reason for this cost difference, CT&C contacted Jennifer Heaton-Jones, the executive director of the Housatonic Resources Recovery Authority (HRRA) located in Brookfield. She explained “the root of the problem is contamination cost money. “The poor markets have increased tip fees and forced
