You’ll probably throw that water bottle sitting on your desk into a recycle bin at some point. But if you imagine that bottle gets recycled locally and stays close by in Santa Barbara County, or even in California, you’d be way off. About 10,000 miles off, to be more precise.
After Noozhawk published a story about a pair of scientists studying plastic that ends up swirling around in the North Pacific, we had some requests to look into where our plastic goes. Sure, you do your best to keep those recyclables out of the trash and in the right bin, but once you haul it out to the curb the night before a noisy truck lumbers by, do you know where it really ends up?
We talked to Leslie Wells, a program leader for Resource Recovery & Waste Management with Santa Barbara County, who shed a little light on the journey of our water bottles, and other bin-bound items.
But first, a little context.
The county’s recycling program started in 1989. Residents may remember hauling 12-gallon boxes to the curb, one for paper, glass and plastic. In 1997, a program was implemented that allowed greenwaste to be picked up curbside and for recyclable items to be put inside a single container, which was picked up and taken to the South Coast Recycling and Transfer Station, 4430 Calle Real.
Nearly three-quarters of recyclables sent to the station were diverted and didn’t end up in landfills, according to transfer station supervisor Tom Wackerman. California mandates that 50 percent of the material that comes into the station be diverted from the landfill, putting the transfer station way ahead of the game.
The station had its own sorting line, where items were dumped on an old broccoli belt, and a line of workers would manually separate cans, glass and plastic. Once the county introduced a system in which recyclables were mixed together in curbside bins, it was too much for the facility to handle, Wells said.
So the county began to look at four options, and eventually settled on Gold Coast Recycling in Ventura, where about 2,000 tons of the county’s recyclables are transported per month.
The process is much more sophisticated since the days workers in Santa Barbara would manually separate the items. At Gold Coast, all of the recyclables from Santa Barbara County are put through a processing system. On the front end, workers pull out things that can’t go through the sorting machine, such as carpet, wheels and cardboard, Wells said. What’s left goes through a machine designed for sorting large amounts of the mixed recyclables. It’s a complex machine, complete with magnets to attract cans and large metal fingers to sift out beverage bottles.
After the materials are sorted, the items are crushed into large cubes and shipped to Los Angeles, where they’re loaded onto empty barges and shipped overseas.
Since large cargo ships bringing imports into the United States are often empty when they head back across the Pacific, the hulls can be filled with recyclables and shipped for very little cost.
Wells couldn’t say how much South Coast’s recycling ends up in China, but she said the “vast majority” of it ends up there.
“It’s the primary destination for this stuff, for paper and plastic,” she said, adding that Asia is a huge consumer of paper. “Unfortunately, California and the U.S. do not have processing facilities.”
Once the plastics and papers arrive overseas, often in China, the plastics get washed and are turned into pellets, where they are sold to plastic manufacturers. They then turn the material into wheels or curb stops or whatever the company is making, Wells said.
A lot of that manufacturing occurs overseas as well, so as items are built, they are shipped back to the United States for sale.
“It’s considered a dilemma for folks in the recycling industry,” she said. Once the recyclables leave Santa Barbara County, everything down the line for those products is handled by private companies. Paying for storage, water and labor to convert the products into commodities that can be sold to manufacturers is cheaper overseas. As a result, Wells said the private sector has yet to express interest in seeing these functions stay in the United States until they can be made cost-effective.
“We’re limited in that ability because we don’t have the resources,” she said.
One group of recyclables that does stay in the United States, at least to be recycled, are electronics. Whenever you take a keyboard, computer monitor or TV screen to the South Coast Transfer Station, it’s taken to a company in Fresno that pulverizes the machine, disposes safely of the lead that is found in cathode ray tubes and salvages any material that can be sold.
People worried that their plastic containers aren’t clean enough to recycle needn’t worry. Wells said that traditionally, they’ve requested that people rinse their containers, but since water is scarce and the containers are eventually washed or heated to a point that food is removed, they’re less strict about it now.
“We just don’t want a half-full container of spaghetti sauce,” she said. “That container should be empty but some residue is acceptable.”
For Wells personally, she does her best to use less, so that fewer bottles and cans end up in the bin, even if they are recycled.
“Whatever you can do to reduce what you’re buying in the first place helps,” she said, including infrastructure available to reuse things, such as exchanging used items with neighbors.
— Noozhawk staff writer Lara Cooper can be reached at lcooper@noozhawk.com.
