Plastic (27 page)

Years ago, Sean said, he had no trouble finding enough containers to make fifteen or twenty dollars in a day. But now, like other marginal folks who try to live off recycling bins, Sean found the bins already picked clean by clandestine fleets of cars and trucks that prowled the neighborhoods in the wee hours before the official collectors like Bongi arrived. At the redemption center, Sean watched enviously as an older Chinese couple emptied out dozens of garbage bags' full of bottles and cans that they had collected. Their haul probably didn't come from residential blue bins, the center's director told me, but from local Chinese restaurants and bars with which they had worked out some arrangement. The couple would make more than sixty dollars that day. Sean's take was a mere $5.41—scarcely enough for bus fare and a beer.

The financial incentives created by bottle bill laws cut two ways. On the one hand, they help collection, ensuring that more bottles get into the recycling stream. California recovers nearly three-fourths of PET bottles sold in the state
—almost six times the average of non-bottle-bill states.
Yet on the other hand, cherry picking from the curbside bins deprives cities of badly needed revenue for their waste-collection and recycling programs. San Francisco calculates it is losing five million dollars a year to professional poachers, some of whom operate as many as ten trucks.
(This money pours into state coffers instead of city ones.) Sometimes Bongi encounters people going through the bins as he is driving his route. Though what they're doing is illegal, he doesn't feel there's much he can do to stop them.

Once he finishes his route, Bongi heads across town to Recycle Central, the city's MRF, the first stop for my empty bottles. MRFs are where the jumbled recyclables collected by a town or county are sorted and baled for sale. San Francisco's MRF opened in 2004 and is a mammoth two-hundred-thousand-square-foot, thirty-eight-million-dollar structure perched on the waterfront. (As is common with waste-related facilities, it's located in one of the city's poorest, predominantly African American neighborhoods.)
On the day I went with him, Bongi pulled into the enormous warehouse alongside several other trucks, pressed a button to tilt the truck's back, and then sat quietly staring off into the distance as the truck emptied its load onto the tipping floor. He and the other drivers leave a mountain of recyclables on the tipping floor every day—seven hundred tons is the daily average. Once the trucks drive off, bulldozers rumble in and begin cutting into the sides of the mountain, plowing drifts of discards toward several conveyor belts that rise up into a ziggurat of belts and chutes and massive vacuums where the sorting of materials is done.

Because of San Francisco's reputation for recycling, I had expected to see some fantastically high-tech system. And, in fact, there is some gee-whiz automation. Magnets pull off the steel soup cans, and a device called an eddy-current separator repels aluminum cans and copper, making the cans jump off the lines into different bins. Steep slopes of whirring discs ferry paper and other lightweight goods upward while allowing heavier things to fall onto other moving lines below.

But when it comes to plastics, the system is surprisingly low-tech. Plastics are a challenge for MRFs. There are lots of different polymers and each has distinctive chemical and physical properties, different melting temperatures, and separate secondary markets. "People say plastic is plastic, but a milk bottle is as different from a soda bottle as an aluminum can is from a piece of paper," said Steve Alexander, executive director of the Association of Post-Consumer Plastic Recyclers.
Most plastics can't be recycled together, but many look so similar that they are difficult to sort. PET, for instance, is easily confused with PVC—they're both clear and used in the same types of packaging. But just a few PVC bottles in a half-ton bale of PET bottles, or vice versa, can contaminate the whole batch, rendering it unreusable. Even some products that are made of the same base polymer should not be recycled together; a PET bottle that's been blown into shape has a different melting temperature than a PET cookie tray that's been molded through extrusion. Try to combine them and you'll end up with unusable goop. There are machines—optical scanners, special spectrometers, and lasers—that can separate different polymers, but they are hugely expensive, and so few but the biggest regional MRFs have them. That means the sorting of plastics has to be done by hand—which creates jobs, but drives up costs.

And when you've got to get through seven hundred tons of stuff a day, it's not possible to do a rigorous sort. The conveyor belts are moving too quickly for the men and women who work the lines to closely examine each item, much less check its resin code. So they just look for bottles. They pull off bottles made of PET, like the Coke bottles I put in my bin that morning, and of high-density polyethylene, like the containers used for milk, juice, detergent, and motor oil. They also sort the HDPE bottles by color, since a colorless container has more next-life opportunities, and therefore higher value, than one that's sunshine yellow, grass green, or black. (The color in plastics can't be removed in reprocessing, and any dark pigments will render the recycled plastic some shade of gray, at best.)

What about all the other plastic products San Franciscans are encouraged to put in their recycling bins? The yogurt tubs, berry baskets, greasy takeout clamshells, rotisserie chicken trays, half-empty hummus containers, and smeary peanut butter jars that I spotted speeding along the conveyor belts at Recycle Central? The sorters don't even try to separate out this motley collection. The problem isn't the gunky food residue—reprocessors can get even the greasiest jar clean. The trouble is that the value of these plastics in scrap markets isn't high enough to make it worth the time of the seventeen-dollar-an-hour sorters.
There's a certain chicken-or-egg quality to the problem posed by these plastics. Most city recycling programs don't collect them because there are no robust end markets, but the end markets can't develop without being assured of a steady supply. Recology's answer to the conundrum is to pack the #3s through #7s together in bales and sell them as mixed plastics, leaving it to others downstream to sort them and find them useful afterlives.

I walked around to the back of the warehouse and watched as huge compressed blocks of the various materials emerge from the back end of the sorting ziggurat. Several bales of smooshed PET bottles were stacked against one wall. Nearby, there were a few smaller colorful bales of mixed plastics and a shipping container half filled with bales of colored #2 bottles.

Up to this point, the scene I'd witnessed was pretty typical of what happens in any MRF. But what happens next can vary widely, depending on where you live and what plastic is involved. If I lived in the Midwest or on the East Coast, for instance, my local MRF would likely sell the bales containing my used Coke bottles to a domestic PET reclaimer, who would shred them into flakes, wash them, and then run those through float/sink tanks to separate the scraps of bottles from the scraps of caps and labels (PET sinks in water, while the plastics used in labels and caps float). The plastic from the caps—usually polypropylene or high-density polyethylene—would be skimmed off and sold to manufacturers to be made into new caps or other products. The PET flakes would go through more cleaning and processing and eventually be sold, as either flakes or pellets, to manufacturers to make into new PET products, such as polyester fiber, the strapping used to hold packages on pallets, other packaging, or even new soda bottles. One likely endpoint for my bottles would be Mohawk Industries, the Georgia textile company that uses tens of millions of pounds of recycled PET to make carpet.

But on the West Coast there's just one destination for my used Coke bottles—in fact, for most of the plastics I put in my recycling bin: China.

China?

Yes, China. For years, it's been cheaper for San Francisco and other West Coast cities to send their used plastics on a two-week boat ride to China than to truck them around the country to domestic reclaimers. Indeed, even port cities on the East Coast and in Europe and Latin America send plastic scrap to China. A freighter can carry far more tonnage than a truck, and the fuel is cheaper. Also, since America imports more from China than it exports, ships arrive here packed to the gills with cargo but return with mostly empty holds. Asian shipping lines historically have been happy to offer reduced rates so they can make at least some money off that return trip.
Surprisingly, by some analyses, shipping our plastic waste to China is an environmental plus. Using plastic scrap reduces the amount of virgin resin China has to produce itself, which means fewer greenhouse gas emissions from its coal-fired factories.

China currently takes about 70 percent of the world's used plastics.
(India, another emerging plastics power, also takes a good chunk.) Much of that is composed of used PET bottles, almost all of which are processed by the Chinese into polyester fiber.
It takes a lot of fabric to clothe a billion people. Chinese recyclers are able to outbid their Western counterparts because they enjoy the same advantage as Chinese manufacturers of plastic products: cheap labor costs.

So I learned when I visited a recycling plant in Dongguan, one of the factory boomtowns in Guangdong Province. The plant's genial owner, Toland Lam, also heads the recycling committee of China's major plastics trade association. Other recyclers I'd contacted were skittish about being interviewed. But Lam was happy to talk with me, eager to demonstrate that not all of the West's exported trash ends up being sorted and disassembled by impoverished women and children in toxic, illegal operations, like the one highlighted in a 2008
Sixty Minutes
episode. The program tracked a shipment of computer monitors from a recycling company in Denver to the rural village of Guiyu,
where residents' daily exposure to the hazardous metals contained in electronic waste had left most of the children with lead poisoning. (At a recycling conference, two managers of corporate recycling programs confessed to me that such expos's kept them vigilant in tracking their recyclable waste. "I don't want to end up on
Sixty Minutes
," said one.)

Lam was one of the early entrepreneurs in China's recycling industry.
In the 1980s, he worked as a petroleum engineer for Arco Oil and Gas and was stationed in Los Angeles when friends in Hong Kong contacted him and asked for his help in connecting them with American companies who might want to unload their plastic waste. Lam saw an opportunity to get back to China and into a potentially lucrative new line of work. At that time, he said, "Nobody knew how to do this. [The scrap] was free. In the early stages, many people made money. Now the market is getting more competitive."

He now owns several plants, including this sprawling facility in Dongguan that recycles postindustrial plastic waste from U.S. businesses—off-spec raw material, shrink-wrap and packaging, and factory-floor tailings. The warehouses—huge open-walled sheds, really—are monuments to excess. I walked through canyons of scrap, feeling like one of the humans in that '60s television show
Land of the Giants.
I passed a towering mound of DVD covers, probably sent from a big-box store; a bale at least twelve feet high of sheets of Cheetos wrappers that for some reason had never been cut into bags. There were ice floes of compressed shrink-wrap; piles of trimmings from disposable diapers. In every case, said Lam, it was cheaper for the American manufacturers to bale up the discards and ship them to him than to reprocess the material themselves.

The reason became clear when we entered one of the sorting sheds. Several women in aprons were pulling piles of plastic sheeting from enormous bags that were as tall as they were. Some were carefully snipping paper labels off the sheets, a necessary step before the plastic film could be washed and processed into new pellets or flakes. "In China, this labor is cheap. They have many hands," said Lam. "You're talking a couple of hundred U.S. dollars for hiring a person. Can you hire a person for two hundred dollars in the United States?"

"You mean two hundred a month?" I asked.

"Yes, that's what we pay. In the United States, it's two hundred a day ... It's not worth that kind of labor to separate [materials]. But in China we can do that."

All the workers were migrants who lived in dormitories and ate at the canteen on the leafy, landscaped grounds. The plant was clean and well ventilated; still, the sheds were filled with the smell of hot plastic and the roar of the state-of-the-art machines Lam uses for washing and grinding the scrap back into usable pellets or flakes. Most of the workers were wearing hardhats, and a few had on masks, but I didn't see anyone wearing earplugs or utilizing any other kind of safety equipment. When I asked Lam how he knew what types of plastic resins he was dealing with—a challenge Western reprocessors handle with the use of electronic eyes—he said he could usually tell based on his years of experience. But if need be, he could resort to the lighter test: burning a sample to determine the polymer type from the color and intensity of the flame.

In another building, I watched a man standing atop a large machine and shoveling clumps of plastic into it. These clumps were quickly melted and then extruded out the other end in long gray spaghetti strands, run through a trough of water to cool, and then chopped into small pellets that Lam would later ship back to American manufacturers.

From a global perspective, you could say that businesspeople like Lam are helping to turn the world's one-way waste stream back into a productive loop. "The business world has worked out this solution," said Edward Kosior, an Australian expert on recycling technology.
The neighborhood scrap peddler who took care of waste a century ago is now operating on a much bigger stage. While San Francisco's commitment to zero waste is why I'm encouraged to put broken ballpoint pens, used picnic cups, and cracked pails in my recycling bin, China's hunger for those used goods is largely what has assured them a useful afterlife.
If I were living in Chicago, a salesman for one of the local waste haulers told me, it would be an entirely different story. Then those items would go straight to landfill. Trying to ship bales of mixed plastics from Chicago to China isn't economical, he explained. And at this point, "in the Midwest, there are no markets for them."