The Recycling and Sustainability Committee has been organizing its thinking around the Maine Solid Waste Hierarchy, which nicely lays out the priorities for waste disposal. In that hierarchy, reducing the amount of trash we generate is clearly our best option; reusing products ourselves, or repurposing them with others is the next best thing; recycling is third; then waste-to-energy; landfilling is a last and worst resort. 

In this column, we’ve looked at all of these options, and we will continue to do so, but our focus will be on the recycling piece of the puzzle. One reason recycling nationally has been in such trouble for the past couple of years is very simply that people either do not yet understand what can and cannot be recycled, or they think they are beating the system by putting trash in the recycling bins because then they don’t have to buy blue bags. That trash mixed in with recyclables is called “contamination” in the industry.  

For any recyclable program to be viable from now on, the level of contamination needs to be drastically reduced. The folks at ecomaine say they get as much as 17% or 18% contamination from their owner members, and the best they generally see today is 10%. They need to have no more than 0.5% when they are selling the sorted commodities. My goal on the Public Education Subcommittee of the Recycling and Sustainability Committee is to see no more than 5% contamination in our recycling by the end of the year.  

With the commodities markets where they are today, we can actually reduce the costs of recycling through credits on the value of what we send to recycling, but that is only if we also reduce our rate of contamination dramatically. 

You can expect to hear more about this topic in the near future, but we need to start with a very simple change in our thinking. That is to not put anything in the recycling bin that is inside something else.

Plastic bags cannot themselves be recycled in the bins, and cannot be emptied or removed at the start of the processing stream. Paper bags or cardboard boxes can be recycled, but they cannot safely be emptied on the sorting room floor, and it’s not possible for the sorters to know whether the bag contains office paper and metal cans, or old diapers and food waste. Anything in a container is, therefore, often considered trash, and is not recycled. 

All recycling needs to be free of visible food waste, and, since the containers are then clean, items should be always be put into the blue bins loosely. If it’s easier to collect the items in the house with (paper)  bags, just dump the bag into the bin, then add the bags afterwards. 

The Recycle Bin is a weekly column on what to recycle, what not to recycle, and why, in Brunswick. The public is encouraged to submit questions by email to brunsrecycleinfo@gmail.com. Harry Hopcroft is a member of the Brunswick Recycling and Sustainability Committee.