Laconia has joined the growing list of New Hampshire communities that no longer recycle glass because the cost has gotten too high, and it’s unlikely to be the last.
“I expect all towns currently using single stream will be required by their vendors to remove glass from the bin, or at a minimum pay a much higher fee,” Michael Durfor, executive director of the Northeast Resource Recovery Association, said Friday.
“Glass is trash” is the slogan being used by the city, according to news reports. On Monday, the Laconia city council voted to stop letting people put glass in the towns’ recycling bins, telling them to throw it away instead.
Laconia pays $102.57 a ton to process recyclables collected through the single stream system, and $83.25 a ton for trash that is sent to an energy-from-waste incinerator, according to the Laconia Daily Sun. The issue came up because Laconia’s contract with Casella Systems ran out, and all the bids it received for new contracts had costs based on the resale value of the materials.
Glass has long been a problem in single-stream systems where consumers put all material into one bin, because it can break and the pieces can get mixed in with other materials. This was not much of a problem until China began a crackdown a few years ago and refused to accept other recycled material such as cardboard and plastic that included any broken glass.
Since then, processing centers that separate material collected in single-stream systems have increasingly told their clients not to accept glass. In March, Hooksett became the first area town to tell its residents to stop recycling their glass.
Glass isn’t the only material facing a problem. Plastic bags and film can tangle themselves in machinery that separates out different materials from single-stream collections. Concord began telling residents in January to throw those bags away, or leave them at recycling centers that take only plastic bags commonly found in grocery stores.
These changes are part of severe economic pressure being placed on town and city recycling programs. These programs have expanded in recent years lured by money that could be made sending such recyclables as cardboard, paper and certain plastics over to China, which bought it as raw material to fuel its economic growth.
But China has gotten much pickier about what material it buys, via programs called Green Fence and National Sword. In late 2017 , it said it would stop accepting several types of material altogether, including unsorted paper and some types of plastic, and in early April it expanded that ban to dozens more typesof materials, including steel and used auto parts.
Glass has been particularly hard hit because a bottle manufacturing plant in Medford, Mass., shut in March following a decline in sales of national beer brands and craft beers increasing use of cans. The factory, owned by the Ardagh Group, annually bought some 2,000 tons of “cullet,” the industry term for old glass that can be made into new glass, and was by far the largest customer for recycled glass in New England.
This has caused a domino effect, with recycled glass piling up at transfer stations and dumps around the region. There is a push to find other uses for recycled glass, such as grinding it up so it can be a replacement for gravel under roads and in construction projects.
At the Science Cafe New Hampshire discussion Tuesday in Concord, Durfor, of the NRAA, said the economic pressure caused by China might force America to rethink how it makes and uses all products.
“We’ve got to start paying attention and fix this. Don’t make materials that we have to throw away. Don’t make materials that can’t be reused,” he said, adding that the recycling industry is “the last line of defense.”
Michael Nork, an environmental analyst with the state Solid Waste Management Bureau, told Science Cafe that part of the problem is a change in products, such as different types of plastic replacing other materials such as glass or cardboard.
“Single stream was invented at a time when we were recycling the stuff we recycled 20 years ago – cans, bottles, cardboard paper. But now the packaging industry has expanded … it’s a little bit grayer about what is or isn’t recyclable, because the packaging industry has expanded faster than the infrastructure established to handle it,” Nork said.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
