Increase Recycling Using Market Forces

When I went in front of the Oregon League of Conservation Voters last week I brought with me a bucket filled with dozens of plastic items. They were different sizes and had different recycling numbers, but they shared one feature: Hillsboro won't recycle any of them.

The way to get more of these items recycled, I said, was find places that already do recycle them, and figure out how they manage it.

Consider a margarine tub. A margarine tub contains the same polymers as some of the screw-top bottles that the recyclers do take. You can tell because they have the same number inside the little "recycle" triangle. The difference is in the manufacturing process - tubs are stamped; bottles are injection-molded. That results in a different end product with a different level of demand by the plastics-recycling industry.

In the case of Hillsboro and margarine tubs, that's no demand at all. Nobody around here will buy them, so Hillsboro Garbage won't collect them from your recycling bin. They have to go in the trash and get buried in a landfill.

However, in San Francisco, you can recycle your margarine tubs at the curb. The difference: in Lodi, California some 80 miles east is Epic Plastics, which turns recycled margarine tubs into a landscaping product called Bend-a-Board.

In other words: there's commercial demand for that plastic.

So the trick to increasing the amount of solid waste that's recycled isn't to spend buckets of taxpayer dollars, nor is it to slap a mandate on the private sector, but to emulate the pattern found in nature, where every entity's waste product is some other entity's food. Find a way to identify or create a product that uses the plastic.

For the Portland Metro area, I would suggest that every area's waste stream be analyzed at least at the granularity of the eight jurisdictions that have solid waste contracts with haulers. Identify the major waste elements that are theoretically recyclable but are not yet being recycled. Partner with the science teachers in each area's high schools and middle schools and hold recycling science fairs to come up with potential commercial products that use those waste materials.

This could also be opened up to the general public. We've seen that average folks will do extraordinary things with little more encouragement than an annual event, publicity, and a small prize (build seige engines; build absurd flying machines; etc.) so this should attract some free creative labor as well.

And since I'm surely not the first to think of it, we should steal any good ideas that look like they've worked for others in the past, whether for recycling rubber, plastic, or anything else.