Kickstart: Recycling is complicated, even when you want to do it

This week's print issue of Plastics News has a story from Steve Toloken about how groups are pushing for more use of secondary material recovery facilities (MRFs) to capture more plastics for recycling. (You can also click here to read the story online.)

Expanded polystyrene, ubiquitous in packaging, shipping and food service, is one of those items that most MRFs won't accept. Since I had a few boxes of EPS in my basement that needed to be cleared out, I volunteered to take them to my local city MRF and get some photos to go with Steve's story.

I live in a very environmentally friendly community with a strong curbside recycling program, but EPS isn't accepted in the blue bins. To recycle EPS, you have to take it yourself to the city drop-off center, pay $3 per carload and unload it yourself.

That means you have to be willing to recycle it, be able to haul it yourself and pay for the privilege. And I'm lucky to be able to do that. Steve mentioned that his only drop-off option for EPS is to drive an hour to the office of the EPS Foam Association.

Are most people willing to jump through those hoops to do the right thing? Absolutely not. It's hard enough to get them to recycle PET bottles.

Do I have a solution? No. But it's clear that creating a complete recycling infrastructure is going to take cooperation that goes well beyond a few community efforts and involves the entire industry.

Plastics is not the only industry out there trying to improve recycling rates.

Waste management company Republic Services has teamed with Barstool Sports in a public service announcement that encourages beer drinkers to recycle every beer can that they empty.

"In 2019, the industry recycled 42.7 billion aluminum cans, which equates to a little more than half of all cans produced in the U.S. that year; that's down significantly from 2018, when the industry-average recycling rate was 63.6 percent," our sister paper Advertising Age writes.

PET recycling is about 30 percent.

So it would seem that the cooperation to improve recycling needs to expand well beyond just plastics.

Project Loon, a proposal to connect millions of people to cheap internet access via polyethylene balloons carrying WiFi routers, is being grounded.

Alphabet, the company that also owns Google, is winding down operations.

"Loon has been chasing the hardest problem of all in connectivity," executive Alastair Westgarth wrote in a blog. "[To reach] communities in areas too difficult or remote to reach, or the areas where delivering service with existing technologies is just too expensive for everyday people.

"While we've found a number of willing partners along the way, we haven't found a way to get the costs low enough to build a long-term, sustainable business. Developing radical new technology is inherently risky, but that doesn't make breaking this news any easier," he wrote.

The project launched in 2012 with the Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Raven Aerostar providing the super-pressure balloons to carry the technology. It helped people connect from flooded regions of Peru and hurricane-damaged areas of Puerto Rico.