What’s the deal with “Hard to recycle” materials & Specialty Recycling Programs?

What are “hard-to recycle” materials?

Can batteries be recycled? What do I do with shoes too old to be donated? You may have found yourself asking questions like these if you are someone who thinks twice before landfilling an object. Perhaps you’ve heard that your local grocery store takes plastic bag drop-offs to be recycled, or that you can recycle electronics at your local transfer station. You’re wondering if there’s any way to recycle hard-to-recycle materials, which include:

In short, they are materials that could be recycled, but are difficult to recycle due to the environmental impact of the process, the high cost, the lack of infrastructure, etc. Are programs claiming to recycle these items actually doing so or is it all just greenwashing? Spoiler-when it comes to hard-to-recycle materials (and any materials!) reducing, reusing, and repairing are far more effective at addressing our waste crisis than recycling.

The rise of hard-to-recycle materials “recycling”

In Deschutes County, some of these materials can be dropped off at transfer stations to be recycled. This includes:

• Free recycling of items such as car batteries, paint, and electronics.
• Recycling with a fee for items such as antifreeze, microwaves, and tires.
• See Republic Service’s Deschutes Recycling Information Sheet for a full list of items they accept for recycling.

Local stores also collect materials that they claim to recycle, either for free or for a fee. A few examples in Deschutes County include:

• Staples, Lowe’s, and Home Depot accept batteries – call to verify which items they are currently accepting. See the Call2Recycle locator for options for batteries, cell phones, and E-Bike batteries.
• Batteries Plus recycles various types of batteries, lighting, and small electronics such as cell phone and laptops.
• Free plastic bag recycling at grocery stores including Safeway.

Recently, specialty recycling programs, offering subscription recycling services for a multitude of items, have grown in popularity. Programs include:

• Ridwell’s subscription plans, ranging from $14-24/month offer recycling of materials such as plastic film, batteries, light bulbs, clothing, and pet food bags (their services are not currently available in Central Oregon).
• Terracycle offers mail-in recycling subscription programs, ranging from free to over $100/box, in which customers can mail in materials such as textiles, cosmetics, and plastics.

Our regional waste collectors, Republic Services and Cascade Disposal, which have franchise agreements, are also proposing a RecyclePlus paid service and will be presenting details to City Council on Dec 18th. You can view their presentation slides here.

• The program, which would begin in January, includes collection of materials such as Styrofoam/block Styrofoam, light bulbs, textiles, batteries, plastic clam shells, and plastic film.
• It would be optional and cost $10 per month for the rental of the RecyclePlus containers and an additional $5 fee for each requested collection.

We look forward to doing a deep dive into their service as it rolls out, including reaching out to them directly to learn more about their program and what happens to the items once they’re collected.

The impact of these programs

Ridwell claims to have kept 23 million pounds of materials from the landfill, with “2.5 million pounds of soft plastic film and crinkly multi-layer plastic out of landfills, and 8 million pounds of plastic overall.” TerraCycle claims to have diverted “billions of units of waste”. The RecyclePlus programs offered by our waste collectors are still new, but seem to collect similar materials, and we look forward to learning more of their impact.

What we do know is that recycling is most impactful when an item is recycled into the same item, preventing the extraction of raw materials from the environment and supporting a circular economy. However, most hard-to-recycle materials cannot be recycled into the same product, they can only be downcycled. This means the product they’re recycled into won’t itself be recyclable; the item may have a second life, but will still end up in the landfill eventually. For instance, plastic film accepted by Ridwell’s recycling program in Denver is made into Trex Decking, which has an advertised lifespan of 25 to 50 years, but is not recyclable afterwards. Furthermore, for mail-in recycling services, the high carbon footprint of shipping and transportation is another concern.

Sometimes there’s a darker side to hard-to-recycle materials recycling, as is the case with many textile and electronics recycling programs. “Recycled” textiles are often sent overseas to lower-income countries, where there is no market for them and they end up in landfills or waterways. 

The bottom line is that these programs, even in the best of cases, are not as impactful as simply Reducing, Reusing, and Repairing. That’s because those three actions prevent waste in the first place, and dealing with waste – even through recycling – has an impact on the environment. Even the CEO of Terracycle highlighted that “Recycling—whether through TerraCycle or through municipal recycling—is only a Band-Aid.”

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to learn more, subscribe to our Rethink Waste Newsletter and always feel free to reach out to me at naomi@envirocenter.org with waste-related questions.