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Nov. 9, 2023 - Epoch Times
25:20
The Untold Truth of California's Recycling | Heidi Sanborn #californiainsider #recycling
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That's called wish-cycling.
Putting it in the bin and hoping somebody is going to find something to do with it, but really we can't.
Many Californians care about recycling, but you may not know a lot of what you're recycling ends up in the landfill.
We used to rely on China to take our recyclables, but they're no longer taking them.
What we found out was we didn't have enough infrastructure to compensate for that and so now we're in a place where there were landfills that were taking some of the stuff that used to get recycled and had no home anymore because we had let our infrastructure erode while we were exporting the materials to other countries like China and Southeast Asia.
My guest today is Heidi Sandborn, Executive Director at National Stewardship Action Council.
Today, she'll discuss California's recycling infrastructure and why some plastics and batteries and other products aren't being processed properly.
If you go and buy a bottle of bleach or a pesticide, we don't want that plastic in the recycling stream.
What if it gets into a food-grade line?
We want that in the trash.
But right now, you'll see chasing arrows on there.
And you might, being a good person, you're trying to put it in the right bin, and that's very dangerous.
If you'd like to stay up to date on California issues, consider subscribing to our channel.
I'm Siamak Karami.
Welcome to California Insider.
Oh, thank you so much.
So good to be here.
We want to talk to you about recycling and the state of California and recycling.
We have big issues in this space.
Can you explain to us, give us a recap of what's happening with recycling here?
We have very big issues.
That's why the state actually created the Commission on Recycling Markets and Curbside Recycling, which I chair, because we needed stakeholders to help give the legislature input to what was actually happening.
As you know, China dropped what they call the sword and stopped taking our imported recyclables a few years ago, and that was the big market for us.
To recycle what we thought were our products.
What we found out was we didn't have enough infrastructure to compensate for that.
And so now we're in a place where there were landfills that were taking some of the stuff that used to get recycled and had no home anymore because we had let our infrastructure erode while we were exporting the materials to other countries like China and Southeast Asia countries.
Can you explain how China get into this?
I understand we buy stuff from China, it's cheaper, but how did they get into the recycling?
About 20 years ago, when I was advisor to the chair of the Waste Management Board here in California, I was actually telling the chair I was very concerned because we saw more and more of our waste hauling companies Literally start, they were getting higher prices to sell the material to China.
And China was trying to build their own infrastructure to handle recyclables and create feedstocks for manufacturing.
And what they did was they took our material long enough to really build their own infrastructure and then realized, we don't need this anymore.
We don't want it anymore.
It's too contaminated.
And so they just cut us off.
And in some way they did us a favor because we were really exporting jobs and materials that we need here to make our own next generation of products.
And now we're really revisiting, you know, we should make some of these products at home.
And some of these are essential products.
So it's a good thing, but we're in a transition period long term to rebuild our infrastructure to manage our own material.
So the infrastructure we had was competing with China's infrastructure for recycling, and we couldn't compete because of the cost, right?
That's right.
So we mothballed our paper plants, we mothballed our remanufacturing plants, and everything started getting shipped overseas.
And then we did start finding out before the China store had happened that some of this material wasn't getting recycled properly.
And that should have been alarm bells going off.
And it really wasn't, because everybody, it was just kind of an inconvenient truth.
But what we did at the commission was we identified this as a big problem.
And we said, we've really got to stop exporting things as calling it recycling unless we can verify it's getting recycled.
And we should be complying with the Basel Convention.
We're one of the only industrialized countries in the world that hasn't ratified that treaty, so that we're part of the international world's monitoring of plastic waste as a hazardous waste, really, and making sure that we're treating it as such, because when it ends up in the wrong place, it does a lot of damage.
So what would happen to the things that wouldn't get recycled?
So what pieces wouldn't get recycled that we found out when it was going to China?
Well, for example, there was an expose done on electronics that were being found literally on the side of riverbanks in China that had the state of California on the top.
So we thought those things were getting recycled properly, and they weren't.
And then sometimes, you can talk to Jim Puket at the Basel Action Network.
He did a whole bunch of tracing where they would literally put chips in the materials and find out all the way through the product chain where it went.
And then video those facilities in other countries.
And it was quite horrible, some of it.
You know, children, women who were pregnant breathing fumes from, you know, open soldering, taking metals out through acids and open walks right next to a river and then dumping it in the river.
It was just a real eye-opener.
And then, of course, there's all the African countries that were getting some of this material.
And a lot of people have said, well, you know, all that plastic in the ocean, it's coming from Southeast Asia.
Well, where do you think we've been shipping it all?
We have a responsibility to know exactly what's happening and we shouldn't be shipping material to countries who are not prepared to handle it correctly.
And we need to verify if it is recycled, it's recycled correctly without human rights abuses and without environmental destruction.
And we haven't been doing that.
So now the Commission has spoken.
We've asked the administration, in fact the state legislature took it up and passed a bill and said we're not going to call it recycling anymore in California unless we can verify it's truly getting recycled.
So they were recycling, they were taking the pieces they liked and the pieces that they could use, and the hard pieces, they would just dump them.
And it wasn't done to standard.
It wasn't safe the way they were doing it.
So what's the plan for us?
So we were in delusion that this was happening.
And now that they are not taking our materials, what have we been doing with them?
Well, companies are really rethinking, you know, and building infrastructure back in the United States.
But as you know, it takes a while to get permits and build plants.
It doesn't happen overnight.
So we're in this place of, we're verifying now where things are going to make sure they're truly getting recycled if we are shipping them.
And we're rebuilding our infrastructure in the United States.
It's taking time.
And the good news is the brands that sell products are now very interested in building the infrastructure because they've realized they can't meet their sustainability goals, like Coca-Cola saying that they wanted to, you know, reuse bottles across their Product line in the world.
I think it's 30% by 2030.
Or have recycled content of PET by a certain amount, certain date.
You can't meet those standards if you don't build the infrastructure in the United States.
We don't collect enough.
We've only got 10 states that have a bottle bill.
We have 40 states that have no infrastructure just to collect bottles and cans.
And so there's not enough RPET or recycled PET for us to even feed the market right now.
The demand is much higher than the supply.
And that shouldn't be the case because we still are throwing, I think Texas is throwing away still 88% of their bottles and cans and they don't have a bottle bill.
But they're importing, companies are importing in that state from Southeast Asia waste plastic to feed the plant, which is down the street from the landfill that's getting the same material.
It's just crazy.
So we've got to really build our own infrastructure, and the companies like Coke are joining groups like the Recycling Partnership to help build the recycling infrastructure and then also to help build plants that can properly manage the material.
So when China stopped buying from us, what did we do with those materials?
Did we put them in the landfill?
Well, companies were desperate.
I mean, they literally just had things on the dock and there was no ship coming to take them anymore.
Some of them just stockpiled and stockpiled as long as they possibly could to see if there was a market that developed.
Some of them were able to find places for it to go, but many of them didn't.
And so in the short term, some of it was landfilled.
And that's where people started to hear, wait a minute, why am I sorting all of this?
And it's ending up in the landfill anyway, which is an excellent point.
So one of the things that we did in California last year that came out of the commission was to pass a bill, SB 343, which our organization was a co-sponsor of.
That actually identified, took that chasing arrow label that people think is, oh, it's recyclable or recycled.
And then they put it in the recycling bin.
But we set a standard that it has to be at least 60% collected and recycled or else we're not going to let you use that label anymore, that moniker.
By July of 2025.
So that's putting another, you know, marker in the sand for the companies.
You better properly label things.
If you call it recyclable, it's got to be recycled.
And we're going to check all the way through the system to make sure it is.
Otherwise, you take that off and stop telling people that it's recyclable, and then they throw it in our recycling bin, and then we have to hand pull it all out, and its contamination adds cost to the system, which is why rates have been going up.
Now, when we are picking things to put them in the recycling bin, can you explain to our audience what happens to it?
Does a percentage of it get recycled here?
How does it work?
What was going to China that is going to the landfill, and how long does it take for us to build this infrastructure?
A lot of it was paper and plastics.
Glasses mostly handled here.
In the United States, there's lots of, it can be made into fiberglass, glass fault, put in roads into new bottles and cans.
In fact, right now we have a shortage of glass To even feed the wine industry is not able to get enough bottles right now to bottle in wine country.
So we were sending a lot of plastics overseas and a lot of paper.
They had big mills over there that were taking the waste paper and then the plastics.
So plastics, there's resin coats on the containers, one through seven.
The first two, one and two, are highly recyclable.
We can recycle those pretty much all day, according to the commission's evaluation, which includes waste haulers, local governments like L.A. County and others.
Can you explain what items they are?
Is it like the water bottles or things like that?
Right.
So like the clear PET soda bottles, they're the highest value, the clear plastics that are PET number one.
The number two are the high-density polyethylenes.
Those are like your...
Soap for your laundry detergent, things like that.
And then the other ones are the lower grade plastics.
And seven is just a catch-all.
It's other.
And that one really is a junk plastic.
We can't even identify what it is.
So five is okay, polypropylene, but most of them are really like styrene and some of the others.
There's nothing we can do with them.
So those are contaminants.
If you throw those into the blue bin, we have to sort them all out, and it's just a longer, much more expensive trip to the landfill.
So it's better not to put those into the...
That's right.
That's called wish cycling.
Putting it in the bin and hoping somebody is going to find something to do with it, but really we can't.
And so it's much higher labor costs, and all that stuff contaminates the other things, so it draws our markets down, and then we can't sell them for as high a price.
And it's causing the cost to go up dramatically.
Now, there needs to be a lot of education on this because most consumers have no idea.
They just want to throw as much into the recycling bin as much as possible.
But there's only so much you can educate.
So this is what we've talked about at the Commission, too.
If we've made the system so complicated that people...
For example, if you buy something and it has a chasing arrow and you think it's recyclable, And then you, with good intentions, put it in the recycling bin.
That's not your fault.
We allowed you to be misinformed.
And that's why we think truth in labeling is the very beginning of straightening this very complicated system up to the point where it's easy for us to communicate to the public.
This is what you do.
The label is accurate.
It tells you exactly what you should do with this at the end of life, if it's recyclable, if it's compostable, or if it's hazardous.
We don't want hazardous, like for example, if you go and buy a bottle of bleach or a pesticide.
We don't want that plastic in the recycling stream.
What if it gets into a food grade line?
We want that in the trash.
But right now, you'll see chasing arrows on there.
And you might, being a good person, you're trying to put it in the right bin.
And that's very dangerous.
So one of the discussions we're having at the commission is, do we want to make sure that those kinds of containers are just a totally different color, like black, or something where we can literally see them very quickly with or without a label and get them out of the line?
So there's a lot.
We've made it too complicated.
There's no way to educate our way out of this.
We have to get back to starting with the label and then simplifying the system.
So if we get it down to one or two or maybe three resins of plastic, that'll be easier.
And then make sure they're clearly labeled and then putting them in the right bin and then letting our systems work.
But this seven different resins and one is a catch-all of other.
It's too many, it's too complicated, and it's not working.
So how long do you think it will take us to build this infrastructure?
So right now, if we're putting things in these bins, are they going to the landfills, some portion of them?
Well, and there's some areas you are seeing the recycling of some of these plastics.
Like number five, in some areas is getting recycled.
But then in other areas it's not.
And that's why you see a difference between L.A. County and Del Norte County as far as what are they accepting in their curbside program.
And is it getting recycled or not?
And re-educating the public is really hard.
They get into habits.
And they don't keep checking, you know.
They're busy.
So you can't put things on and off that list.
So typically what we find is if they're hoping a market is going to come back, they aren't going to change that list.
They're going to have you keep, and they'll sort it out if they can't find a market for it, but that adds cost.
The cost of picking up recyclables and trash has gone up significantly in some areas in California.
Can you explain the root cause of this?
Well, we did pass a law a few years ago, 1383, which really is important.
We're trying to get organics out of landfills.
When organic materials like food waste end up in a landfill, there's no oxygen, so it's an anaerobic digestion which creates methane.
Methane is a huge greenhouse gas.
And we have collection systems on the more modern landfills, but they can't collect at all.
So we're trying to keep those.
And plus, that's dirt.
That's the next generation of dirt.
So we want to keep that out of a landfill where it's contaminated.
The problem with this was there was no plan really on how to do it.
And there wasn't enough funding.
The cost of buying the land and getting the permits and getting the facilities up and running is quite high.
And local governments did not have it.
So they had to raise the rates significantly.
In our county in Sacramento, they went up $10 a month.
A lot of that was due to the fact that they hadn't been raising rates over years.
That's a different problem.
But a lot of it was the organics.
And then again, you know, the cost of fuel has gone up.
The cost of the trucks has gone from a quarter of a million to a half a million.
And you've got, you know, more fires than we've ever had in the system.
We think it's because of more lithium ion batteries.
So please don't throw your lithium ion batteries in the trash.
They're starting fires in our trucks and we have to dump the loads.
So the truck doesn't burn up and all of that.
But these are all adding costs.
Insurance costs are going up because of the fires.
So there's lots of reasons the costs are going up.
We have made a push to go towards the electric cars and batteries.
We're changing the way we're using energy.
Have we thought about the impacts?
They look greener, you know, when you look at a Tesla.
Are we going to have challenges that we will face with batteries and different types of technologies that we're investing in right now?
Oh, I've said for a long time, green tech is not green yet.
We've got a lot of things like solar panels, the batteries.
We still don't even have a recycling system for household batteries, let alone auto batteries.
I mean, for auto batteries, the old combustion, you know, lead acid batteries, We've got a very high recycling rate.
It's like 98%.
But the reason is that there's been a core charge of like $25 on those batteries for many years.
The industry wanted the lead back to make the next generation of batteries.
They wouldn't have enough lead if they didn't.
We never did that with solar panels or the auto batteries.
They're still trying to figure it out.
And one of our discussions at the Commission, and I've said repeatedly, is companies should never again think that they can put something on the market Where they've not thought about end of life at all.
The day is coming when every single product is going to start boomeranging back to the manufacturer.
We call it producer responsibility.
It's the policy that I've been working on for over 20 years trying to bring to the U.S. and we've gotten it here in California for Mattresses, carpet, mercury thermostats, and we passed it in 2018 for medicines and needles.
That is just starting to roll out by the end of this year.
It takes years to kind of get this infrastructure built up and plans in place on how to do it by the manufacturers, but the manufacturers should be responsible.
They can't just sell things into the market and then somehow local governments and local waste haulers are supposed to just be, you know, with a big catcher's mitt, like trying to figure out, what do I do with this?
What do I do with that?
What is coming at us?
You know, because that's really what it is.
And they're very frustrated.
And so I was excited.
I talked to two conferences this week.
Where manufacturers were in the room with the recyclers and the haulers talking about how do we make sure we're not blindsided at the back end anymore.
We know what's coming.
And you guys talk to us before you put it on the market so we know it will go through the system and end up recycled and in the right place.
For our audience, Californians, what do you recommend to do when it comes to recycling?
So some people might be shocked by the fact that they hear this today, that some of the things, all the work that they've been doing to separate these items and put them in the bins, it hasn't really ended up recycled.
What do you recommend them to do?
Be very careful about what you buy, because that's voting with your dollars.
If companies are making money off of telling you fibs on what's on the label and calling things recycled when they're not or recyclable, they will continue to do that and be rewarded.
Now, with some of the legislation I've helped pass, We're going to not allow some of this misbehavior.
But I can tell you, I have literally seen an ice box sold right here in Orange County just a few months ago that had, it was polystyrene, one of the lowest grade plastics.
It was labeled biodegradable, no microplastics, recyclable.
It was like everything you could possibly put on a label and all of it was wrong.
So number one, we've got to change the laws so that they cannot lie on the label.
So that the consumer can truly, we can truly use the free market so the consumer can have an informed choice about what they're choosing to buy.
But they have to be very careful now because they are not being told the truth on the label or by the companies about what's safe and what's recyclable.
And they're going to have to ferret through that and help us make good decisions and give money to the companies like Dr.
Bronner's, Amy's Kitchen.
There's so many good companies out there that are working so hard.
Numi T. I was just on a panel with all three of them yesterday at the PacWest Expo here in Orange County, trying to ferret through what can we do as brands to help get better packaging.
And give our consumers the truth so they know what to do with it.
Is it compostable?
Is it recyclable?
But that's the first thing they can do is buy smart.
Buy less plastic.
If you can buy something in glass, do it.
If it's a one in two plastic, that's fine.
We've got markets for that.
But all the others, don't be fooled.
They are not recyclable.
And if you can buy something that's a metal or a glass versus one of those lower grade plastics, always choose the metal or glass.
You mentioned greenwashing, and as I've seen in the state, one of some of the things, we are all pro the environment.
Californians, we care about the environment.
This is a beautiful state.
We want to keep it as it is.
We want to make it better.
But I've seen that in the name of making things green, certain companies or products come in, it looks green, but then they take advantage of our desire to be green.
Just like that example I gave you of the icebox that had all those labels on it.
That's what we call greenwashing.
So it's trying to communicate to the consumer, I'm green.
This is a good product.
You can recycle me.
I'm biodegradable.
I don't have microplastics.
And what we've said at the commission, one of our commissioners, Jandell, says this, you know, when it comes to recyclable labeling, This is the Wild West and there is no sheriff in town.
And so our commission actually asked the Attorney General of California to please start enforcing existing labeling laws.
And then we passed two more labeling laws last year, one to define what is compostable and what is recyclable so that the labels are clear by 2025 and the consumers can make good decisions.
Now what about the infrastructure?
So you mentioned that we're building this infrastructure and it's hard for us in California to build infrastructure.
We've been very slow.
Do you think we should do something about that?
We've talked about that at the Commission too.
We actually made some recommendations on how to expedite permitting, how to make sure the system is talking to each other, one hand is talking to the other.
So yes, we have made some recommendations and working with the Governor's Office of Business and GO-Biz, they call it, and CalRecycle, we're hoping that there will be in the future expedited permitting and just being able to bring the facilities here.
I have to say though, our cost of labor is higher and our cost of energy is higher than in many other states.
So that is a big, if they use a lot of energy or it's a lot of labor, they often will not cite here unfortunately.
Now, do you have any other thoughts for our audience?
Just that, do understand you have the most power when you buy.
Smart.
Because if you're really looking at what you're buying and who you're buying from, know your companies.
Know the companies that are trying.
Know the ones that are greenwashing.
And don't fall for it.
And I know that's really hard to ferret out.
But we're, through the laws we're passing, we are getting there.
So it will be easier for you in the future to identify what is recyclable, what is recycled.
Content.
And what can we do something with?
And help us bring the jobs home and get legislators, vote in legislators that care about these issues.
Because if we are successful, we will be able to get more companies here, create more green jobs, and be much more self-sustaining.
And I think after what we just went through with COVID and all the supply chain issues, I think it's become more important than ever that we understand keeping certain infrastructure at home makes a lot of sense.
Well, thank you.
Thank you so much.
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