Waste to value
In 1987, the Mobro barge carried six million pounds of New York garbage, got turned away from its destination in North Carolina, and spent the next five months adrift – rejected by six states and three foreign countries.
The plight of the “Garbage Barge” was covered by the main stream media throughout the summer. This unprecedented attention to trash generated a heated national debate about landfill capacity and recycling to reduce the waste stream, which served as a catalyst for transforming recycling in the U.S.
That dialogue did indeed create change. Between 1988 and 1992, the number of curbside recycling programs increased from 1,050 to 4,354; and today, 49 U.S. states ban at least one recyclable from landfill disposal. Since the Garbage Barge, the U.S recycling rate increased from 16 to 35% and by 2017, the U.S. annually collected over 62 million tons of recyclables.
While the U.S. was becoming increasingly proficient at collecting recyclables, our performance in domestically remanufacturing this supply chain into valuable commodities was less than stellar. For most of the early twenty-first century, China was the main destination for U.S. recyclables. This resulted from a combination of factors, including the growing need for metal, paper and plastics in China's expanding industry, lax environmental regulations, cheap labor, and inexpensive shipping using containers that would otherwise be returned to China empty.
By 2018, China was the top importer of U.S. recycled paper, buying 2.73 million tons of U.S. corrugated cardboard during the first half of 2018 and 1.4 million tons of all other U.S.-sourced recovered fiber. This dependency on China contributed to the closure closed 117 American mills and elimination of 223,000 jobs since 2000.
Sending plastics to China also impeded the progression of advanced, plastic recovery technologies, such as gasification and pyrolysis, in the U.S. These technologies convert plastics into products that have the potential to generate revenues that exceed the cost of collection and process. This was not always the case when selling plastics to China as the market as it could be highly volatile. Even with unpredictable revenues, recycling companies perceived China as an eternal end market for their plastics. With China basically locking up the plastic supply chain, advanced plastic recovery technologies could not secure sufficient quantities of feedstock and consequently, demonstrating financial viability for commercial-scale facilities was compromised.
In the short term, there is no question that the “National Sword” severely disrupted recycling in the U.S. The Chinese market was greater than the next 15 markets combined, leaving the U.S. with little in the way of backup.
Not only did China enthusiastically accept our recyclables, but they turned a blind eye to that large quantity of trash the loads contained. This lenient policy validated the U.S. preoccupation with collecting as many recyclables as possible without really considering their quality, potential to become a valuable commodity or the carbon footprint created by using fossil fuels to transport them half way around the world. Some in the environmental community began to question the net ecological impact associated with transporting recyclables to developing countries for remanufacturing, especially with their limited environmental regulations on processing them into a new product. However, state recycling goals are based on the quantity of materials collected rather than if they actually become a marketable product and local recycling programs were close to breaking even economically or even to turn a small profit. Thus, no one wanted to “rock the boat.”
In 2018, China introduced the “National Sword” that for the most part; almost sunk the U.S. recycling boat for the short term. The “National Sword,” China banned many scrap materials and stopped accepting others unless they met an extremely strict contamination rate of 0.5%. To put in perspective, contamination rates of U.S. recyclables before processing can reach 25% or higher. After the “National Sword,” U.S. recycling companies started looking for new markets in other SE Asia countries. But one by one, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and India also shut their doors by introducing new restrictions on waste imports. So far, there are few signs that any of these countries intend to relax their standards for contamination again.
In the short term, there is no question that the “National Sword” severely disrupted recycling in the U.S. The Chinese market was greater than the next 15 markets combined, leaving the U.S. with little in the way of backup. Thousands of tons of material that would have been recycled have been going into landfills instead. Some municipalities have stopped collecting items that used to be recycled and others have been stockpiling them.
In the long-term, the “National Sword” may be the may be most significant catalyst to transform recycling since the “Garbage Barge” started its journey over 30 years ago. In 2019, seventeen North American paper mills announced an increase in their capacity to process recycled paper. Also, and somewhat ironic, Chinese paper companies have begun investing in North American mills because they couldn’t import enough fiber feedstock. Experts anticipate the domestic market for fibers mills to improve for at least another three years.
Chemical companies have also begun investing in advanced, plastic recycling companies, improving recycling systems, and creating bio-based polymers since 2018. And in April 2019, Brightmark Energy announced the closing of a $260 million financing package to construct the nation’s first commercial-scale plastics-to-fuel plant, which will be located in Ashley, Indiana. Now, rather than using fossil fuels to ship plastics to China, plastics from Indiana will now become a renewable energy.
Thus, the “National Sword” may have been exactly what the U.S. needed to make recycling more environmentally and financially sustainable for the next 30 years.
