Seeing slight shifts in municipal recycling programs
Seeing slight shifts in municipal recycling programs
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Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, several municipal recycling programs were suspended as a result earlier this spring and summer. In addition, bottle bill programs have been halted in some areas. Back in June, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order that allowed grocers and retailers to choose if they would want to redeem bottles and cans or continue not to for a 60-day period.
Recycling Today connected with Will Sagar, executive director of the Southeast Recycling Development Council (SERDC), to learn about trends SERDC is noticing this year in municipal recycling programs.
Recycling Today (RT): Based on what you’ve noticed lately, how have municipal recycling programs been doing this sprint and summer? Has the pandemic had much of an impact on them?
Will Sagar (WS): The first obvious thing everybody saw was residential picked up and commercial collection dropped. That affected the supply chain. We saw increases in OCC (old corrugated container) prices. That price has since dropped back down, but it’s still stronger than we were at before, which is encouraging. So, that’s been good.
Plastic containers suffered and price has gone down, but that’s not just the supply picked up. The price of oil went down because of the lack of demand for gasoline. When petroleum went down, plastic prices went down. So, that was pandemic driven, but a bit more indirectly.
Then the other side of that, we lost some bottle deposit programs for a while. Eight out of 10 states removed the requirement that retailers needed to operate buyback programs. People with beverage containers could forego it or put it in regular recycling programs.
But probably the bigger thing we’re looking at is the financial strains that counties and cities have been facing and are going to face from their lost revenue—sales tax revenues are down, occupancy taxes … they will see lower collection rates by the end of the year. City budges will be under an awful lot of stress throughout this fiscal year. Our hope is they don’t look at recycling collection as some luxury add-on program; we work hard for recycling to be essential in a pandemic because we need this material for supply chain manufacturing. Recycling is a significant part of economic recoveries, but if we start by not operating collection, we run into significant obstacles on recovery. So, that concern is out there.
RT: We’ve noticed in the media that some municipal recycling programs were suspended due to COVID-19. Have you been tracking this lately?
WS: It’s hard to track programs being suspended. You try to keep the list up, but it’s a moving target and there’s no central hub. I would have discussions with some state agencies, and they weren’t necessarily aware if there were suspensions within their own states. It comes down to if local government suspends their program, they won’t do an annual report on what they did until this time next year. They don’t necessarily have to tell the state if they stopped collecting in a given month. So, there’s a lag in that reporting time for state agencies to know about it. Some state agencies have closer relationships with localities than others, and some programs we were picking up in the media that the state agencies weren’t aware of.
RT: Since the pandemic hit, have contamination levels changed at all?
WS: We’re conducting a MRF study right now and we asked that question. So far, most of them have said there’s been no difference—it’s about the same. [The only difference is there is more residential material than commercial material.] I would speculate that there is less of public space recycling going on, and that tends to be a higher contamination level source.
RT: What do you think may be long-term impacts of the pandemic on municipal recycling?
WS: It does look like whatever ‘normal’ used to be is probably not where we’re going to be a year from now. Even if we had a vaccine and infection rates were down, I think there will be a lot more working remotely, and I think along the way we’re probably picking up a strengthening of family values. We’ve stayed in our bubble more, making it more important to spend time with children and grandchildren. I think that will keep residential collection reasonably strong.
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Source: Recycling Today
Seeing slight shifts in municipal recycling programs
<![CDATA[Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, several municipal recycling programs were suspended as a result earlier this spring and summer. In addition, bottle bill programs have been halted in some areas. Back in June, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order that allowed grocers and retailers to choose if they would want to redeem bottles and cans or continue not to for a 60-day period.Recycling Today connected with Will Sagar, executive director of the Southeast Recycling Development Council (SERDC), to learn about trends SERDC is noticing this year in municipal recycling programs.Recycling Today (RT): Based on what you’ve noticed lately, how have municipal recycling programs been doing this sprint and summer? Has the pandemic had much of an impact on them?Will Sagar (WS): The first obvious thing everybody saw was residential picked up and commercial collection dropped. That affected the supply chain. We saw increases in OCC (old corrugated container) prices. That price has since dropped back down, but it’s still stronger than we were at before, which is encouraging. So, that’s been good. Plastic containers suffered and price has gone down, but that’s not just the supply picked up. The price of oil went down because of…