Recycling Talk Sorts Through The Confusion

You can recycle the thick cardboard container that soup stock comes in when you buy it at the store, but you can’t recycle ice cream containers. You can recycle plastics in the shape of containers, but not a toy made out of the same kind of plastic. You can recycle pizza boxes — but not paper plates.

This information and much more about what we can and cannot recycle — along with an explanation of why we recycle the way we do in Connecticut and how it got that way — was dispensed with speed and humor by Sherill Baldwin, an environmental analyst at the state’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and the founder of EcoWorks, at a talk entitled ​“What’s In/What’s Out.” The event was hosted by the city’s Office of Climate and Sustainability and held Monday night at the Ives Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library at 133 Elm St.

Baldwin knew that the audience was primarily interested in understanding the city’s and state’s recycling better. What could go in the blue plastic bin and what couldn’t? But before getting into the details of that, she made sure we ​“took a step back,” and understood how recycling fit into the broader context of waste management.

She began by explaining how the landscape for waste management in the state has changed in recent years. For decades, the state burned a third of its trash — hundreds of thousands of tons from dozens of towns, as NPR reported in 2022 — at a Hartford facility called the Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority, or MIRA. The facility’s ability to convert trash to energy meant that the state landfilled much less of its waste than it does now. But mechanical difficulties at the plant and falling costs of energy made it cheaper to send garbage out of state than to maintain MIRA and sell its energy. As a result, MIRA closed in the summer of 2022.

“As a result of that, we are now sending about 40 percent of our municipal solid waste out of state, and out of state disposal is primarily landfilling,” Baldwin said. That’s ​“not so great,” she said. ​“We don’t like the fact that we’re not sustaining internally, within our own borders.” 

Knowing that MIRA would close eventually, in August 2020, DEEP formed the Connecticut Coalition for Sustainable Materials Management (CCSMM), ​“to explore ways to reduce the amount of waste that is generated in our state, improve reuse, recycling, organics collection, support EPR legislation, and consider other innovative solutions,” as the coalition’s website puts it. 

Extended producer responsibility legislation requires manufacturers to take responsibility for their products and their packaging, from creation to disposal. As DEEP states, ​“Connecticut’s first EPR law, for electronic waste (or ​‘e‑waste’), was passed in 2007. Subsequently, EPR laws have been passed for paint (2011), mattresses (2013), mercury thermostats (2014), gas cylinders (2022), and tires (2023).” Thanks to the state’s paint stewardship program, for example, people can now bring half-empty paint cans back to participating retailers, hardware stores, and transfer stations to dispose of paint properly. Several local initiatives have started collecting food scraps for animal feed. A succession of bottle bills from 1978 to the most recent bill in 2021 means, among other things, that soon people can get reimbursed for 10 cents a bottle.

“There’s a lot of good things happening,” Baldwin said.

Other measures are geared more specifically toward regular citizens, looking for ways to generate less trash in the first place, help people reuse things instead of throwing them away, recycle more and more efficiently, and compost more.

Baldwin pointed out that the current mode of trash pickup in New Haven (and many other towns) charges people all the same amount (through taxes) whether we generate lots of trash or just a little, ​“which means there’s no incentive to reduce, reuse, and recycle,” Baldwin said. The coalition is recommending that towns start charging residents by volume for trash, through either purchasing special trash bags or tags per bag, so that people who generate more trash have to pay more to have it removed. The logic follows that people will then find more ways to make less trash.

For Baldwin, making less trash, and reusing and recycling more, however, often require people to change their habits and form new ones. This started with figuring out how to throw away less food. ​“We have a lot of food that’s wasted in Connecticut,” she said. Throwing away less started with buying less; making a shopping list, for example, to reduce ​“impulse buys.” Planning meals, eating leftovers, and starting a compost bin could help, too. Beyond food, she suggested, ​“can you buy food with less packaging? Can you buy durable items that can be repaired?… Can you replace single-use items” — coffee cups, plastic utensils, paper napkins — ​“with reusable alternatives?”

Baldwin then got to the main event: recycling. What can New Haveners recycle and what can’t they? As it turns out, DEEP has developed an app for that, RecycleCT, which can tell you, item by item, what goes in the blue bin and what goes in the trash. But she also wanted to give the audience an understanding of why that was so. This required a quick tour of how recycling happens.

“Often what we think of as recycling,” she said, is ​“some guy who comes to our house, he grabs our toter, he puts it on the truck and then it goes away.” But ​“that’s just the beginning. We’re on the front lines of it, but there’s so much more to understand.”

She explained that the recycled stuff goes to a materials recovery facility, or MRF (pronounced ​“murf”). There, paper is separated from metal and plastic, and then each type of paper and metal and plastic is further separated. This sorting is done by a crew of people, who have to sort recyclable stuff from ​“tanglers” that gum up the machinery. They then ​“bale up” the good material into cubes a few feet wide to be resold and remade into other things. So plastic milk jugs might be ground up into plastic beads, which a manufacturer than re-forms into a new milk jug. The jug gets filled, and someone buys it. ​“Only then is the cycle complete,” Baldwin said.

To resell the materials to be recycled, though, the materials can’t be contaminated with other materials that don’t belong there. On this score, in 2015 — the last time it was measured — Connecticut’s recycling stream was over 50 percent paper, followed by glass (17.2 percent) and plastic (7.2 percent). Fully 18.2 of the stream, however, was contaminants. ​“We were not doing so great,” Baldwin said, which was why RecycleCT was born. 

The contamination rate meant that recycling buyers in China wouldn’t buy it. Connecticut reduced its contaminant rate. Then Covid upended the prices of raw materials. ​“It’s really hard to predict where prices are going,” Baldwin said. In the face of that, the state is hoping to reuse even more, from clothing to plastic film.

“So you need to think beyond the two-bin system. We have more than just trash, and more than just a blue bin,” Baldwin said. ​“There are so many opportunities to reduce waste, reuse, and recycle.”

The good news is that Connecticut can recycle a wide variety of things: glass and metal food and beverage containers, plastic containers, corrugated cardboard, boxboard, newspaper, magazines, office paper, and yes, pizza boxes.

The most frequent contaminants of the recycling stream: plastic bags, bottle caps, shredded paper, bagged materials, and ​“tanglers” — garden hoses, hangars, clothes, that gum up the works of the sorting machines. Black plastic, styrofoam, paper cups and plates, napkins, tissues, toys, pots, and pans also can’t be recycled.

MRF employees reported that some items can’t be recycled in part because they’re dangerous or just disgusting to sort. These items included scrap metal, batteries, automotive oil, ammunition, lawnmower blades, knives, syringes, propane tanks, diapers, and tampon applicators (“yucky! Like, please,” Baldwin said).

“A lot of things are recyclable, but not in this program.”

Baldwin ended with ​“quiz time,” holding up items one at a time to see if the audience had gotten the hang of it. Was a styrofoam egg carton recyclable? No. How about a cardboard one? Yes. She went through cardboard coffee cup holders (yes), a plastic milk jug (yes, but better to throw the cap in the trash), a pizza box (yes, even if greasy), an ice cream carton (no; ​“it has to do with the wet strength of the paper, and if you ask me what that means, I can’t tell you,” Baldwin said. ​“But I have spoken with the Carton Council”), garden hose (no, because it gets tangled in the machine), a broth box (yes).

The audience brimmed with questions, about whether to take the caps off water bottles (better to do it) or to rinse containers before recycling them (yes, for the sake of MRF workers). The details piled up. But it was all the service of maybe making New Haven a greener place.