![]() Harvey & Sons, a recycling company based in Westborough, Mass., said that he had around 6,000 tons of paper and cardboard piling up, when he would normally have a couple hundred tons stockpiled. The fallout has spread beyond the West Coast. It is “difficult with the public to turn the spigot on and off,” said Brian Fuller, a waste manager with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. Local waste managers said they were concerned that if they told residents to stop recycling, it could be hard to get them to start again. Other communities, like Grants Pass, Ore., home to about 37,000 people, are continuing to encourage their residents to recycle as usual, but the materials are winding up in landfills anyway. Rogue sent all its recycling to landfills for the first few months of the year, said Garry Penning, a spokesman. Though Republic is dumping only a small portion of its total inventory so far - the company handles over five million tons of recyclables nationwide each year - it sent little to no paper to landfills last year.īut for smaller companies, like Rogue Disposal and Recycling, which serves much of Oregon, the Chinese ban has upended operations. The company has been unable to move that material to a market “at any price or cost,” he said. In the Pacific Northwest, Republic has diverted more than 2,000 tons of paper to landfills since the Chinese ban came into effect, Mr. That has compounded a problem that waste managers call wishful or aspirational recycling: people setting aside items for recycling because they believe or hope they are recyclable, even when they aren’t. “All of a sudden, material being collected on the street doesn’t have a place to go,” said Pete Keller, vice president of recycling and sustainability at Republic Services, one of the largest waste managers in the country.Ĭhina’s stricter requirements also mean that loads of recycling are more likely to be considered contaminated if they contain materials that are not recyclable. While some waste managers already send their recyclable materials to be processed domestically, or are shipping more to other countries, others have been unable to find a substitute for the Chinese market. 1 it has banned imports of various types of plastic and paper, and tightened standards for materials it does accept. But as part of a broad antipollution campaign, China announced last summer that it no longer wanted to import “foreign garbage.” Since Jan. In the past, the municipalities would have shipped much of their used paper, plastics and other scrap materials to China for processing. ![]() In recent months, in fact, thousands of tons of material left curbside for recycling in dozens of American cities and towns - including several in Oregon - have gone to landfills. But this year, because of a far-reaching rule change in China, some of the recyclables are ending up in the local dump anyway. ![]() Its residents are accustomed to dutifully separating milk cartons, yogurt containers, cereal boxes and kombucha bottles from their trash to divert them from the landfill.
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