By David Pogue //
Hello there! I’m new around here. My wife Nicki and I moved to Bedford Hills last fall. It was a whole big empty-nester/house-downsizing thing.
I think of myself as a valiant eco-warrior (although my loved ones may describe my obsessions less charitably). For example, I report stories about the environment for “CBS News Sunday Morning.” I wrote a book called “How to Prepare for Climate Change.” I’ve just joined the board of Bedford 2030.
And when it comes to attempting to minimize my destruction of the earth … man, do I walk the walk. Take, for example, plastic recycling.
If you’ve ever visited a municipal landfill — mountains of trash, shot through with massive festering shreds of drooping, filthy, shredded plastic — you know why plastic is a problem. It refuses to biodegrade. Instead, it breaks down into tiny pieces (microplastics), which finds its way into your water, your food, your air, your bloodstream, and — via the placenta — newborn babies.
So I’ve become, I suppose, something of a freak. I reach into the trash in public places to retrieve plastic bottles that lazy slobs throw there (instead of using the recycling bin 12 inches away).
Amazon prints “Recycle me!” right on their bubble-wrap shipping envelopes. What they fail to print is: “But first, take all the paper labels off me, or else the recycling facility will just send me to landfill.” So yes, I sit there with scissors, cutting off the labels, so that I can recycle the rest.
Food residue ruins the recyclability of plastic. So yeah, I wash the insides of my cereal-box liner bags before sticking them in our plastic bag recycling box. (What’s that? “But you can’t recycle plastic bags?” Of course you can! True, you can’t put them into your regular recycle bin; they gum up the recycling equipment. But you can take them to chain grocery stores or the Bedford Recycling facility, located at 343 Railroad Ave., Bedford Hills.)
I mean, I could go on. (Just ask anyone who’s met me at a cocktail party.) There’s a whole website, the Bedford 2030 Recyclopedia, that itemizes every consumer item you’ll ever come across, and details whether or not it’s recyclable. If you’re drastic about plastic like me, it reads like a thriller. Unfortunately, the Recyclopedia also presents a cold, hard truth: It’s hard to master plastic recycling.
Nobody outside the recycling industry could ever learn all the rules. It’s impossible. For example: You can put No. 1 and No. 2 plastic into your main bin, except if it’s black, like the bottom half of restaurant take-out tubs. Those go into the trash. (The scanners at the recycling plant can’t see black containers against the conveyor belt.) You can recycle a plastic bottle with the cap attached, but if the bottle is glass, you’re supposed to throw the cap away. Mesh produce bags “can be recycled,” and yet they should be “discarded with your regular trash.” You can’t recycle cardboard milk and ice cream cartons so, weirdly, it’s actually better to buy your milk in plastic jugs that you then recycle. Those, at least, won’t end up in the landfill.
Got it?
If you recycle at all, you mean well. You’re really trying. You’re putting effort into doing your part.
But millions of us throw things into the bin that we’re not really sure about, because we want to give it the benefit of the doubt. That’s called “wishcycling.” Unfortunately, wishcycling is actually worse than doing nothing at all. A worker at the recycling facility (ours is in Stamford, Conn.) will have to reach onto the conveyor belt, grab that thing you threw in with good intentions, and send it to the landfill.
In other words, the golden rule for recycling is not “If in doubt, throw it in the recycling bin.” Hard though it may be to accept, the real rule is: “If in doubt, throw it out.”
And then there’s the elephant in the room — the problem so big, it makes all of this stressing about the rules of plastic recycling look almost foolish. Recent research indicates that only about 5% of our plastic ever actually gets recycled. The rest goes to landfill, or it’s burned, or it winds up in the ocean. The entire plastics-recycling concept, in other words, is essentially a myth, propagated by the plastics industry in hopes of heading off regulation.
See, China used to buy our used plastic, no matter how grubby and contaminated. But in 2018, the Chinese government announced that it was sick of serving as the planet’s trash pit and announced that it would no longer accept our stuff. To this day, U.S. recycling centers are still struggling to find buyers for the plastic they do collect. Here’s my “Sunday Morning report" on this topic.
I had a long talk with Bedford town advisor, Peter Kuniholm, a longtime environmental engineer, former president of the New York Solid Waste Associations, and a principal author of our Recyclopedia. He didn’t exactly say, “Dude, you’re overthinking this to the point of absurdity.” But he did imply that I might be missing the forest for the shrubs. The important work is not persuading people to micromanage the plastics they’re putting into the various bins; it’s persuading people to recycle at all. Only 35% of Bedford residents recycle anything!
If you could peer-pressure your family and neighbors into just recycling the basics — paper, cardboard, metal, glass, and No. 1 and No. 2 plastics — you’d be striking a powerful blow against landfillage and carbon pollution.
Kuniholm also pointed out three bits of good news.
First, our 35% residential participation rate is actually excellent compared to most towns; in fact, it’s the highest recycling rate in the state. (Insert very weak cheer.) On the other hand, only 12% of our local businesses recycle at all, which is pathetic. Second, remember that stat about “only 5% of plastics are ever recycled?” Things are better where we live, thanks to our MRF in Stamford. (MRF stands for materials recovery facility and is pronounced, hilariously, “merf.”)
The Stamford MRF is modern and high-tech. Its sophisticated sorting equipment winds up separating, baling, and selling about 75% of the plastic we send there. In other words, three-quarters of Bedford’s recycle-bin plastic actually does get melted down and recycled. Yeah, that means a quarter of the plastic is too contaminated to resell, so it goes into the landfill but again, that’s much better than many processing centers.
So let’s see: 35% of Bedford homeowners, and 12% of Bedford businesses, recycle at all, and the MRF recycles 75% of the plastic we send there. Multiply it all out, and you learn that a grand total of 16% of Bedford plastic winds up recycled. Distressing as hell, but nothing like the 5% national average.
The plastics situation won’t improve until we succeed at three tasks. First, we need new laws, like the one that just fizzled in the New York legislature under pressure from plastics lobbyists. Second, we need materials scientists to hurry up with developing plastic that’s genuinely and completely biodegrade. Finally, we need to upgrade our MRFs with robot sorting machines, molecular-resolution cameras, and laser and infrared sensors. Those technologies will permit our MRFs to produce bales of much purer plastic, which will fetch a much higher price on the resale market, which will mean that more of our recyclables will, in fact, be recycled.
At that point, the limiting factor on what plastic gets recycled won’t be the recycling facilities; it’ll be our own laziness.
Anyway, I guess I can live with knowing that 75% of my own plastic gets recycled.
Meantime, I’m thrilled with my new hometown. I look forward to meeting people, making friends — and then haranguing them about plastic.
David Pogue is an Emmy-winning correspondent for "CBS Sunday Morning” and a New York Times bestselling author. He lives around here.