And driving 8 miles to Newark in your car burning fuel and contributing to traffic congestion to drop off a couple pounds of plastic, extra crazy. The gallon or two of petroleum you’re burning to do that could have made all the plastic you’re dumping and you’re causing air pollution.

By the way, organic figs transported half-way around the world from Turkey and sold at a big Whole Foods supermarket have a huge carbon footprint … the tiny container is nothing comparatively.

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The Department of Sanitation asks residents to recycle plastic bottles and jugs, and not other types of plastic, in curbside recycling. We do not accept plastic tubs, trays, cups, bags, crates, flower pots, Styrofoam, toys or any other type of plastics besides bottles and jugs. An easy rule to remember is: if you would not call it a bottle or a jug, and it’s plastic, don’t recycle it with your curbside recycling. No exceptions.

We understand, and appreciate, that many residents are confused, frustrated and even angry that our curbside recycling program allows them to recycle only plastic bottles and jugs, as opposed to other types of plastic. If we could make the program simpler and take a wider range of plastics, we would. As will be explained below, we do however have very good, well-studied reasons to insist only plastic bottles and jugs at this time. The reasons take a while to explain, so have patience as you read on to understand.

Like with Like: The First Basic Concept
Unlike metal, glass or paper, different types of plastic cannot be recycled together. Each individual type of plastic must be kept separate in the recycling process. The type of plastic reflects what resin it is made of, as well as the specific plastic molding process used to produce it. If different resins and/or molding methods mixed together for recycling, the result is a useless glop that is unsuitable for the production of any new product.

Numerical Resin Codes: Don’t Tell the Whole Story
On the bottom of many rigid plastic containers you can find a code number from 1 to 7, surrounded by “chasing arrows”, the international symbol for recycling. These code numbers identify seven separate types, or resins, of plastics. (You may be interested in the section of our website that addresses recycling symbols

.)

It would be nice if the code numbers on plastic containers specified what type of plastics could be combined in the recycling process. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The numbers are misleading when it comes to recycling. The code numbers were adopted by the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI) in 1988 to provide an industry-wide standard that would make it easier for manufacturers to identify different types of plastic they produced. The code numbers indicate the general type of chemical compound used to make the product. But as the SPI points out on its web site, (http://www.plasticsindustry.org/AboutPlastics) “The code was not intended to be — nor was it ever promoted as — a guarantee to consumers that a given item bearing the code will be accepted for recycling in their community.”

In fact, the codes cause more confusion than clarity. They give the impression that anything with a “chasing arrow” can and should be recycled in any municipal program. In reality, the numbers do not guide recycling fully, because they do not reflect all of the different features of any plastic item that we need to know to recycle it. In particular, the numbers do not distinguish between different types of plastic molding. So, for example, a #1 blow molded bottle cannot be combined with a #1 injection molded tub, and so on.

Why Molding Method is Important
Molding is the process by which molten plastic is turned into a container or other rigid object in the factory. Plastic bottles are blow-molded, which means that the plastic is extruded by blowing air into it much as a glass bottle is blown. Plastic tubs and trays are injection molded, which means that the plastic is extruded into a fixed mold to form its shape. Blow molded and injection molded plastics have different melting points and cannot be combined in the plastics recycling process, even if they are of the same resin. This is why you cannot mix bottles and jugs with tubs and trays together, even if they share the same code!

Different Quantities of Differently Molded Resin in NYC Waste
In 1994/1995, we conducted a detailed and in-depth study of the contents of New Yorkers’ trash and recycling. We sorted through thousands of randomly selected samples Because of the complexity of plastics, we made sure to categorize each of the seven resin codes and molding types. As shown below, #1 and #2 bottles and jugs (which are by definition blow molded) constitute the majority of numbered containers in what New Yorkers consume. They are also the materials that have the strongest secondary markets.

[img]http://www.inhabitat.com/wp-content/uploads/2b33fa76c2a2e9f7413f00044ba46d6b.jpg[/img] | back

Secondary Markets: Why They Are Important
The most plentiful varieties of numbered plastic containers – #1 and #2 bottles and jugs –are also the ones that have strong markets. For any material to get recycled into a new product, it has to find a buyer – a company, known as a “remanufacturer” that is willing to buy the discarded material after it has been collected, sorted, cleaned and baled. Otherwise, we pay to collect and sort discarded materials, but we cannot recoup our costs, and the materials either sit around, or have to be disposed of.

Recycled #1 and #2 bottles are traded heavily on what are called secondary materials markets. In other words, there are always buyers and sellers. Other types of plastics may have markets that are not as strong. For example, #5 Polypropylene Tubs (such as yogurt tubs) sometimes find buyers, and sometimes don’t. While there are a few companies that buy sorted #5 PP tubs, demand is limited and distance to markets may be too great to be worth the cost of shipping.

Curbside Recycling and Drop Off Recycling Have Different Secondary Markets
Markets are not the same for commingled residential collections as for other kinds of collections. Curbside collections are commingled – cans, glass bottles and jugs, foil, metal and beverage cartons are mixed with plastic bottles and jugs when collected, with sorting and cleaning taking place later at a materials recovery facility. To justify sending trucks and collection labor out, we need economies of scale and commingling is part of that economy.

Drop-Off Programs such as the Park Slope Food Coop or Whole Foods accept, store, and periodically transport clean, pre-sorted plastics that residents bring in to the store voluntarily. This is a very different model of collection, because the sorting and cleaning is done ahead of time by the consumer. This “free labor” changes the economics of recycling, and allows weak markets to find buyers for recycled plastic that are not available for NYC’s commingled residential recycling.

Both strong and weak secondary markets fluctuate. Sometimes certain materials are worth a lot, other times very little. In contrast, commingled collections don’t fluctuate. The material put in the recycling bin day in, day out has to be collected, no matter what. This means that only markets that are strong in the long term can work reliably with commingled collections.

Making Sure What You Recycle Actually Ends Up Being Recycled
If we allowed people to recycle their plastic yogurt tub, # 1 tray, Styrofoam cup, or beach ball in their curbside recycling program, many would probably be very happy. But this happiness would have a false basis, because in most cases these additional plastic items would be sorted out at the recycling plant and sent to the trash. The reason we ask residents to recycle only plastic bottles and jugs – and not other types of plastics – is to make sure that most of what residents put in the recycling bin actually ends up being made into new products, instead of being sorted out later and disposed of as residue.

NYC’s Curbside Program vs. Other Cities’ Programs
As mentioned above, strong secondary markets only exist for #1 PET Bottles and #2 HDPE bottles. These two types of plastic bottles make up 95% of all bottles, so the vast majority of plastic bottles recycled in NYC do end up being made into new products. The remainder (5%) are currently discarded as residue – this is a pretty low rate of residue. In fact, this rate is far lower than residue plastics discarded from programs in other cities that accept a wider range of types of plastics in their municipal recycling.

If you look at what other cities are doing with regard to plastic recycling, you’ll find that some ask for anything plastic in the recycling bin, others any plastic container, and still others any plastic with a resin code. In reality, these cities are all recycling #1 PET and #2 HDPE bottles like NYC, but are not necessarily recycling any of the other plastics.

There are two reasons why these cities ask for a wider range of plastics than NYC. On the East Coast, other cities ask for all numbered containers because this will maximize the chance for people to properly recycle #1 and #2 bottles and jugs that have well-developed recycling markets, technologies, and remanufacturing processes. Other types of plastic are disposed of as refuse after the most valuable plastics are sorted out.

On the West Coast, the economics are different. Proximity to Asian markets with low wages and high appetites for plastics mean that it is economical to ship unsorted loads of plastics to China and countries. There, the costs of sorting are lower and environmental laws less restrictive in remanufacturing and disposal practices than in the US. The proximity of West Coast cities to these markets means that a container full of mixed bottles, tubs, bags, and even toys will be worth something in Asia. Not everything in this mixed load will necessarily end up recycled, but Asian buyers find it worth it to buy the whole load because some of the mixed load will command a price.

Conclusion
By now the logic behind asking for only plastic bottles and jugs in our commingled curbside recycling should be coming into focus:

- All plastic bottles and jugs are blow-molded.
- The vast majority of plastic bottles and jugs are #1 or #2.
- Strong secondary markets only exist for #1 and #2 blow molded plastics when collected in commingled form

We are currently in the process of updating our website to convey this information, and more, on the very complex subject of plastics and plastics recycling. If you have any comments or questions on this response to your inquiry, I would be interested in hearing from you. Please submit comments via the Wasteless website: http://www.nyc.gov/wasteless.

Don’t be too disappointed with NYC though. Last year when I was in Japan, I found out that Tokyo doesn’t recycle either. And coming from such an ‘advanced’ society as Tokyo’s I was shocked.

http://blog.dcdomain.org/2008/03/weekend-in-tokyo-part-1-of-2.html
“Odaiba
The island the Big Sight sits on has an interesting history that I won’t bother repeating here. I’m not sure if garbage was used as landfill material, but there is mention on the web of landfills nearby Odaiba. I’ve made a big deal about how clean Tokyo seems and how much they recycle, but I was disappointed to find out that they bury their plastic rather than washing and recycling it. If you care enough to read about Tokyo’s garbage treatment, check out this informative Japan Times article.”

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fd20071007pb.html

If you want more reasons not to use plastics like these check out my latest blog post, reasons to stop using plastic bottles.