You may have heard about some communities who have recently gone
to a simpler recycling system in which all recyclables, including
paper, cans and bottles, are placed into a single container. This
approach, which is commonly called
“single-stream recycling,” has been adopted by several
communities in the Bay Area.
You may have heard about some communities who have recently gone to a simpler recycling system in which all recyclables, including paper, cans and bottles, are placed into a single container. This approach, which is commonly called “single-stream recycling,” has been adopted by several communities in the Bay Area.
From time to time, I have been asked why our community doesn’t have a similar system. While my response answers the question to the customer who asked, I suspect that there are readers out there wondering the same thing.
So, why don’t we have single-stream recycling in Morgan Hill?
The answer is a relatively simple one. Single-stream recycling produces paper that is badly contaminated and has fewer end markets. Since we value our resources in Morgan Hill, switching to single-stream would degrade our resources and be inconsistent with our community values.
I know that many times we think about preserving landfill space as a primary goal of our recycling program since preserving landfill space was a primary goal of the state’s recycling law. However, for many of us, preserving landfill space is a nice secondary benefit to recycling, but the real incentive to recycle is to extend the life of our resources. Consider the following passage from a report produced by Conservatree in 2003:
“Originally, when local community collection programs were developed in the 1980s, most recyclers and legislators said it was to reduce demand on resources, energy and water. Saving landfill space was not the purpose for recycling but, rather, a strategy for achieving the environmental goals.
Now it seems that keeping materials out of landfills has become an end in itself, and the larger picture of resource use and environmental impacts is considered by many to be irrelevant or naive.
Have the reasons behind recycling really changed? Are diversion and preserving landfill space truly more important than conserving natural resources? Are they alone enough to justify the huge investments in equipment, labor, organization, education and innovation?
The answer clearly is that the reasons behind recycling haven’t really changed and that we should design our programs to maximize the resource value of our recyclables. And that, for those of you who were wondering, is why we still keep our paper separate from our bottles and cans in Morgan Hill.
Eco-Fact of the Week: Most communities starting a single-stream program are converting their program from small bins to wheeled carts. Naturally, the residents like the convenience of the carts and recycle more.
In Morgan Hill, however, we’ve been offering carts for over five years and try to provide residents with a broad variety of options to freely choose from when it comes to recycling containers.
Eco-Web Page of the Week: A very comprehensive analysis on the impacts of single-stream recycling can be found at www.conservatree.com/learn/SolidWaste/SingleStreamReport.pdf.
