Putting an End to “Wishcycling.”
By Isabell Geiger and Adam Brodsky
It all started at a local chamber of commerce meeting. What sorts of problems are your businesses dealing with regarding waste?
During our first week working as DevryBV’s Summer Interns, we were given an unusual assignment: knock on doors at small businesses in Excelsior, the lakeside town in which our firm is headquartered, and see if they have common interests centered around waste. Could we help our local businesses connect and work with each other to solve shared problems?
The business owners we met each cared about the environment and were often frustrated by trash.
Pallets, some made of wood, others plastic, ended up in the dumpster because no clear, better alternative was available.
What to do with spent batteries? There are many different types nowadays, and online guidance is confusing or even contradictory.
What else can I do with all these big books of fabric samples that my waste hauler won’t take and end up thrown in the trash?
One business manager said he’d like to recycle more waste, but they were at the mercy of what the trash hauler would allow them to recycle. No styrofoam?!
Another tried to do the right thing, sorting metal cans properly, but she disposed of them in a plastic bag, resulting in a surprise $160 fine appearing on the next trash bill. Ouch!
A fair number of fingers were pointed at the waste recycling company that services our town.
The site visit.
On a sunny August morning in Minneapolis, six members of the DevryBV team were handed hard hats, yellow vests, and safety glasses. For several hours, we met with managers and wound through the catwalks of a giant recycling center run by Republic Services, the second-largest provider of “non-hazardous solid waste collection, transfer, disposal, recycling, and energy services in the United States.”
Steve, our guide and a veteran of the recycling business, noted that Minnesota does a relatively good job in correctly recycling materials, ranking in the top five among states for residual rates and cleanliness of material.
Yet there’s a long way to go. Minnesota has set a statewide goal to recycle 75 percent of total solid waste generated (as measured by weight) by 2030; in 2021, the figure was 45.5 percent, with traditional recycling making up 28.9 percent and organic recycling 16.6 percent of that total).
Most of us in the room felt that we were recycling all we could at home. So what’s the problem?
“Wishcycling.”
Much of what consumers think is recyclable simply won’t get converted into output that the facilities can profitably sell.
Well-intentioned homeowners and businesses sort things in recycling bins that are instead sent to the landfill—the industry calls this “wishcycling.”
Plastic bags. Shipping envelopes made of both fiber and plastic. Black plastic take-out food containers that optical sorters cannot recognize. Toy and gift packaging that generally fuse cardboard and plastics together. None of these things can be efficiently sorted and bundled into categories the waste management companies can sell, at least with the technology installed at the facility we visited.
And then there’s styrofoam, which is so light and bulky that it’s difficult to process profitably. It’s sometimes economical in a business with a single, large source of styrofoam, such as furniture stores that use densifiers, which compact the styrofoam and make it easier to transport. But that’s not realistic at the consumer level.
Can we get to a 75 percent rate of recycling?
For now, consumer education is the best investment in improving recycling outcomes. Just because a package is recyclable does not mean its contents are. For example, while the cardboard box may be recyclable, the used diapers stuffed inside it are not.
What you can recycle varies by community. The facility we toured accepts only #1, 2, and 5 types of plastics, which should be “clean, dry, and empty” to avoid being rejected or obstructing the machinery. Republic’s customers in our service area should put all other types of plastic in the trash.
Looking at the vast amount of material going through the facility we toured (trash coming in that morning is usually sorted, bundled, sold, and shipped out that afternoon), it seems daunting to go from 29 percent recycled waste to 75 percent in five years. Where will the capacity come from?
New technologies can be seen and heard everywhere at the facility. Optical sensors. Powerful magnets. Compressed air. Several nimble robots with suction cups worked the line, although they’re more in a “training” phase than operating at peak performance.
Engineers, scientists, and innovators are working on the problem globally. Representatives of 3M, a multinational company based in Minnesota, went along with us on the tour. They are working to help the world's graphics industry, which creates a lot of complex plastic waste, #6, that isn’t currently being recycled, to find a solution.
National and state-level associations are setting policies and best practices on recycling, such as the National Waste & Recycling Association (NWRA). There’s also the Recycling Education Committee within the Recycling Association of Minnesota.
But, as consumers, we all have our own role to play in how the recycling industry takes shape in the years to come. We shouldn’t settle for just #1, 2 and 5 plastics being accepted. That’s not even half of the most common types of plastic.
Nationally, only 9 percent of plastic waste is recycled, while plastic pollution has doubled every six years, according to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
Consumers should demand better recycling options, and markets should be created for more categories of plastics, so haulers get paid and can stay in business.
And the companies creating the trash to begin with should adopt better practices. For example, in recent years, global toy companies have been feeling pressure from various sources–investors, policymakers, and consumers. In 2022, Denmark-based LEGO said it was on track to make all its packaging from “more sustainable” sources by the end of 2025. Today, the company says it is replacing single-use plastic with paper-based bags in all its LEGO sets, for example.
Meanwhile, Boston-based Mattel says it aims to achieve “100 percent recycled, recyclable, or bio-based plastic materials” in its products and packaging by 2030. That said, the company expects to see a reduction in plastic packaging by only 25 percent per product by 2030, as compared to its 2020 baseline.
Based on pledges like those, we understand that we’ll continue to see a lot of plastic-wrapped toys and consumer goods for the foreseeable future, although the hope is that more of the plastic will be less harmful than today’s waste plastics.
In the big picture, waste is simply a byproduct of inefficient resource management. Beyond recycling, societies need to embrace the circular economy as a solution.
Did we help Excelsior’s small business owners with their waste management?
On balance, yes, we feel good about creating awareness and identifying tangible opportunities to manage waste more effectively. In some instances, we pinpointed common roadblocks and found opportunities to improve on several issues the Excelsior business community faces. However, some of these problems are more challenging than they appear.
Key takeaways:
Proper recycling can lead to savings via lower trash bills, in the form of avoided fines. The less landfill-bound trash they throw away also saves money in monthly fees from the waste haulers. In this regard, educating employees on what can be recycled versus tossed is directly linked to saving money (it’s both doing the right thing and doing the economically advantageous thing). Although it’s not available everywhere as of yet, BetterBin is an app that helps people determine which bin their waste item should be disposed of and could become part of employee training. Putting a sign with simple instructions for what can and can’t be recycled in a given community, right on each collection bin, is another tactic to consider.
Local businesses can team up for collection days on non-recyclable items. These include plastic bags, mattresses, and batteries that shouldn’t go in the standard mixed recycling for our service area. Small drop-off fees for businesses can be easier to swallow than large fines incurred for incorrect recycling.
Pallets, pallets, pallets! Pallets are a hard one to solve. We are looking into ways our small businesses can centralize their pallets so a hauler can take them away for reuse. Unfortunately, with the limited numbers of pallets that any one small business generates, it can be difficult to schedule pickups and reach any scale. We’ll keep at this because, together, businesses can find a solution that could result in a revenue opportunity. And the ground is shifting on this issue. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws will come into effect soon.
As for fabric samples, we found a local small business called Save-a-Sample that specifically works with interior designers to accept donations of fabric samples and then provides them to design schools for classroom use. The firm offers a “second life” to architectural and design samples that traditionally ended up in the trash. We’ve connected the two companies and expect good things to come.
Boat Wrap IS recyclable. While we did not have a chance to meet with the businesses in Excelsior on this issue, we have some good news! Boat wrap IS recyclable. This is an issue the next intern team is planning to tackle.
Food waste. Sometimes, people throw organic waste in the recycling bins. We are creating awareness that this is a no-go! On another note, we learned that there are some new investments in food waste-to-energy in our area that are promising for home and business owners. Stay tuned on food waste since DevryBV is actively advancing on ideas and opportunities for clients in this space!
Image: Isabell Geiger
