If my memory is correct, just about every community in this country participated in curbside recycling some thirty years ago. Things have certainly changed since then. Over the years, communities have been dropping their recycling programs due to cost issues. Yet some communities continue to do it. That leads to a question I am guessing a lot of people in such communities ask from time to time: what happens to all those recyclables I put out to the curb?

In 2018 alone, The Recycling Partnership tracked nearly 481,000 municipal recycling programs that had been cut due to finance’s. While the data is six years old, it is hard to believe that much has changed since then. Local communities are not racing against one another to see who can recycle more plastic, paper, and glass. Instead, they are fighting just to keep their programs alive.

The fact is that curbside recycling is still costly and inefficient. Whereas companies like Seraphim Plastics can recycle post-industrial plastic waste at a profit, municipalities struggle to make money on curbside recycling. Most actually lose money on the deal.

It Starts With Residents

Curbside recycling begins with individual community residents. It is their job to separate paper, glass, and certain types of plastics from their trash. The separated items go into a recycling bin that gets put to the curb on trash day. Simple enough, right? Before you agree, there are a couple of things to consider.

First of all, your local community expects that you won’t put any contaminated materials in your recycling bin. This means you are rinsing out food and beverage containers. It means you are not putting soiled pizza boxes in the recycling bin. It means you’re only putting plastics with the right numbers in the bin while discarding the rest.

Recyclables Are Hauled Away

The second step in curbside recycling is hauling away the contents of so many bins. Some trash haulers have abandoned the practice of manual curb pickup in favor of automated trucks using mechanical systems that do not require any human intervention.

Automated systems work well for normal trash. They don’t work so well for recyclables. Why? Because all the recycled materials end up in the same truck compartment. That means they need to be sorted on the other end. Therein lies the first big and costly problem with curbside recycling.

Sorting and Decontamination

Recycled materials are delivered to a materials handling facility by the trash hauler. The next step is to sort them. Automatic sorting is now a thing, so that much is good. But automated equipment cannot do everything. It also doesn’t do the job perfectly, so some human intervention is still required.

Paper and glass are separated out and put by themselves. Plastic is then sorted by type. Along the way, both automated equipment and human sorters are looking for contaminants. Anything they find must also be pulled out.

Minor contamination can be addressed on the sorting room floor. But if a load with major contamination comes in, the chances are pretty high that it will be scrapped in its entirety. Facility staff will not even bother trying to sort and clean it. They will just send it to the trash.

What makes it through sorting and decontamination is then sold to recycling companies. From there the material is broken down before being sent to manufacturers for transformation into new products. Unfortunately, a lot of what goes to the curb never makes it to this final stage. At least that is the case with post-consumer recycling. Post-industrial recycling is another matter.