I’ve spent all morning trying to track down trash—namely, the single use plastic bags that Portland is considering banning.
The American Chemistry Council (which represents the plastics companies that make the likely-to-be-blacklisted bags) fights bag bans across the country by saying that cities should focus on recycling the bags instead of banning them outright. Okay. So is recycling plastic bags actually a good option for Portland?
Stats from local plastics recyclers point to one answer: HELL NO.
- These gum up machines. The bags, not the hippies.
When you put a plastic bag into your curbside recycling bin, it’s picked up by a hauler (if you live in inner SE or NE, for example, it’s Cloudburst Recycling) and the goods are taken to a sorting company like Far West Fibers, who organize all the mixed recyclables into like groups and then ship them out to the companies who actually melt, chop or shred the trash into new material. Just a note for the curious: About 20 percent of Far West Fiber’s plastic goes to China, meaning your orange juice bottle could soon be reincarnated as a sexy anime action figure.
Far West Fiber’s VP of Business Operations Jeff Murray says that plastic bags are a plague in the recycling business. They plastic bags get stuck in their giant sorting machine, gumming up the works so bad that a four to six crew person has to completely stop the machine and clean it out four times a day. Each cleaning takes half an hour, bringing the total cost of cleaning plastic bags out of the machine to $60,000 a month.
More info on this—plus, what Murray can tell about our lives by sorting our trash—below the cut.
National recycling company SP Recycling reports similarly insane costs in this presentation (pdf), reporting that though plastic bags are .1 percent of the material coming into their recyclers, they suck away 20-30 percent of labor costs.
The reason you should care about the high cost of plastic bag recycling is that the pricetag is passed along to consumers. The recycling companies who shell $30-60,000 a month to recycle the bags set rates for the local haulers who in turn set the rates for how much they charge each Portlander for curbside pickup.
I asked Murray if he’d be in favor of a plastic bag ban, then, to save on his costs. He pitched two alternate ideas: either a statewide ban, so that the material his company gets from Salem and Bend is consistent with Portland’s trash, or a rule that stores could not give out plastic bags unless they had a program in the store to recycle them. The plastic bags Murray gets from official recycling depots are much easier to recycle, since the bags are already sorted out (rather than mixed in with all the other curbside stuff).
But if there’s a statewide ban, I asked Murray, wouldn’t that cut into your business?
“No, we’ll just adapt,” says Murray. Right now, they’re getting into the next big thing: carpet recycling.
Meanwhile, Murray’s job of sorting through Portland’s trash gives him and the Far West Fibers crew an interesting glimpse of life in our city.
Two things Murray can determine from our trash:
• We’re eating at home more often. The recession has led to more tin cans and paper from boxed meals in the recycling mix.
• We’re reading less on paper. Two years ago, 70 percent of what came into Far West Fibers was newsprint, magazines and high grade paper. Now that’s down to 50 percent.
The false assumption is that bags made out of plastic will cease to exist under a bag ban. The ban does not apply to small businesses, not to mention garbage bags, ziplocks, sandwich bags, produce bags etc.
@ D: I don’t think anyone has that false assumption (aka straw man). This is a ban that is targeting the main offenders. I don’t think there’s any rule that says a law has to completely and utterly fix a problem forever to be legal.
D,
You’re right that the ban would only apply to stores with annual sales over $2 million and there would still be all kinds of plastic bags, like garbage bags, floating around. The draft of the city ordinance also exempts stores under 10,000 square feet.
I’m scrupulous about recycling plastic bags and take them all to the local grocery bin. Is this any better or just a drop in the ocean?
By far most of the plastic bags that come into my house do so because I still get home delivery of the Oregonian. Funny how the O never mentions that in its support of the ban.
Q. “I’m scrupulous about recycling plastic bags and take them all to the local grocery bin. Is this any better or just a drop in the ocean?”
A. HELL NO!!!
Or… actually… the article didn’t adequately discuss that except to say that it takes 60,000 dollars to unjam a machine…as if that made any sense. All those ‘unjam the machine’ people and truck drivers are taxpaying people with jobs, right?
Commenty – no argument with you here – but my point being that (yet another) ban in Portland is about intentions versus results. And the ‘offenders’ are the same ones who banned paper 20 years ago.
Some cities require that stores charge 10-15 cents per bag. It creates an economic incentive to conserve them, and helps generate funds for the New World Order where Everyone Has To Ride Bikes Everywhere.
I mean, to recycle the problematic leftovers.
But yeah, I’d prefer that to an unfunded prohibitive measures like this (I assume it’s unfunded anyway), but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
Bath Time and J Renaud,
Murray addresses that issue below the cut. If the place you’re dropping the bags off at separates them out (like, you’re going to New Seasons and placing them in the “plastic bag recycling” box) then yes, that helps the recyclers a lot. Sorting the plastic bags out from the rest of the recyclables is what gums up the machines and drives up labor costs.
Less than $2 million in annual sales is a surprisingly small business. That’d only return about $65,000 net income in the grocery business, with the standard 3% profit margin they’re supposed to enjoy.
@Renaud – A quote in the article says that bringing your bags back to the grocery store makes it a lot easier on the recycling machine. So good job!
@Smirk – $60,000 a month to unjam his machine four times a day. So…how much would it cost to fix the damn machine? Sounds like there isn’t anything intrinsically wrong with plastic bags, we just have a threshing machine that can’t handle the stuff we need it to thresh. Don’t we have ANY engineers left? Can we come up with something that doesn’t jam every couple of hours?
Plastic bags (along with a number of other things) are not supposed to placed in curbside recycling boxes anyway.
http://www.oregonmetro.gov/index.cfm/go/by…
I think the real problem is lazy people who don’t read.
On a slightly related note, take the tops off of plastic and glass bottles before recycling. They, like the plastic bags, can’t go through machines not meant for them. The entire bottle just gets thrown away at the recycling facility if it still has a lid on it.
plastic shopping bags are completely unnecessary. humans managed to survive without them until the very recent past. there’s no reason to produce more of these things.
yeah, what Beer Batter said. who the heck is putting them in the bins anyway?
also, yes to Jocie’s comment! i hate seeing tops still on in recycle bins.
As mentioned above, plastic bags in the recycling bins is a no no. That said, a lot of people don’t bother recycling their plastic bags at all because they don’t take the time/effort to bring the bags to the recycling centers. I know many people who are typically fastidious about recycling that don’t take the time to recycle plastic bags. While I know this piece is focusing on the financial setbacks of recycling plastic bags, I have to mention the environmental setbacks (& political) of making and recycling plastic bags. It takes 12 million barrels of oil to make the plastic bags used in the US each year, and many more to transport them to stores, then to recycling facilities (if they’re recycled) for sorting, then possibly overseas for recycling, etc.
60,000 dollars isn’t the cost of recycling plastic bags, it is the cost of putting plastic bags in the curbside bins, which, as beer batter pointed out, isn’t where they are supposed to go. As has also been mentioned, there is actually a lot of shit that isn’t supposed to go into those bins, some of which looks a lot like stuff that is supposed to go into the bins. As both Jocie and this post alluded to, it is counter-productive to fill the curbside bins indiscriminately, including putting in plastic bags.
Another noteworthy ramification of putting the plastic bags in the bin, according to the metro website, is that the majority of the work related injuries at these facilities occur while jams caused by plastic grocery bags are being fixed.
I just moved back home to pdx from San Francisco, where they implemented a plastic bag ban a couple years ago. We should be looking to those who have already done this and see how they have benefited. For me and all my friends it means that we have nylon grocery bags that weigh nothing and condense to smaller than the size of an egg in our purses and trunks.
Also, my family has a farm outside of Portland and we have biodegradable plastic bags that people can compost or throw in the trash. It may cost a couple cents more- but our future is worth it. Stop being lazy and care about yourselves America.
A verry nice and useful blog telling you something about all kinds of bags
A verry nice and useful blog telling you something about all kinds of bags.