Making a pitch for recycling

Last year, Spokane sent more than 50,000 tons of garbage to a landfill more than 200 miles away because there wasn’t room to burn it in the city’s trash incinerator.

Meanwhile, curbside recycling service in Spokane and the urbanized parts of Spokane County accepts fewer materials than programs serving the largest five cities in Washington.

It’s a juxtaposition that some say should be changed, especially in an age of high energy prices, growing concern over climate change and angst about the costs of building a larger incinerator or landfill.

“We need to look at the third option, which is reduce the waste,” said K.C. Traver, chairman of the county’s Solid Waste Advisory Committee.

For more than a decade, Spokane County’s recycling rate has been stagnant. It hovers a bit above 40 percent of the waste generated in the county – about the same as the statewide average. Some, such as Traver, believe the rate could improve by starting programs to recycle construction waste and by simplifying curbside recycling.

It’s not easy to compare recycling rates between counties and cities because many areas calculate their numbers differently. Seattle estimates its recycling rate at 47 percent but says it would be higher if it used the same method Spokane and the state use.

What is clear is it’s easier for residents of other cities to recycle more. Of the five biggest municipalities in Washington, Spokane alone charges extra for customers to recycle mixed paper products, like junk mail, cereal boxes and toilet paper rolls. It’s also the only one of the five that doesn’t collect colored plastic bottles.

Suzanne Tresko, recycling coordinator for the Spokane Regional Solid Waste System, said the problem is capacity. Recycling trucks used by the city, and by Waste Management outside the city, don’t have room for more materials, Tresko said. And recycling centers aren’t set up to handle large amounts of other materials.

One way to boost recycling would be to switch to a single-stream recycling system similar to what’s used in Seattle, Tacoma and Bellevue. Customers there toss all recyclables – except sometimes glass – into one container. Instead of a trash collector sorting recyclables into compartments on a truck, the paper, cans, cardboard, plastics and other materials are sorted at a recycling center.

The system, proponents say, allows communities to collect more types of recyclables and encourages more participation because it’s easier for consumers. There is debate, though, about the costs: It’s cheaper to collect at the curb but more expensive to sort later.

Brett Stav, general planning and development specialist for Seattle’s public utilities department, said it’s less expensive overall. But Russ Menke, interim director of the Spokane Regional Solid Waste System, said he’s not a fan of single-stream recycling.

“You end up with more material in the bin, but it’s more contaminated,” Menke said.

The contamination level is one of the main arguments against single stream. Most newspapers collected at the curb in Spokane are recycled by Inland Empire Paper Co., which is owned by Cowles Co., owner of The Spokesman-Review. The Millwood paper plant uses 350 tons of paper daily to produce about 530 tons of newsprint, said Doug Krapas, Inland’s environmental manager. Tom Baranowski, general manager of Fiber Reclaim, the Inland subsidiary that gathers recycled paper, said the mill accepts paper from across the Northwest, including communities that use single-stream collection. He said some of those systems deliver paper with 10 percent or more contamination from plastics, metal and glass.

The problem adds to the mill’s costs and requires equipment to be replaced more often, he said. Still, Baranowski said some single-stream systems have processing centers that have contamination rates closer to 1 or 2 percent. That’s only slightly higher than contamination in paper from Spokane’s curbside program, he said.

Inland would support a single-stream system as long as contamination is reduced, he said.

Seattle’s Stav said new technology is helping. Even if paper is contaminated to the point it can’t be used for high-quality paper, it’s still kept from landfills and incinerators.

“We have no problem getting rid of mixed-paper products,” he said. “China can’t get enough recycled paper.”

But Tresko said it would be best to produce a product that can be used in Spokane, to avoid the costs of shipping it elsewhere.

Clark County is studying a switch to a single-stream system. In the first three months, recycling at the 5,000 participating households increased by 23 percent, said Tanya Gray, solid waste analyst for the city of Vancouver, Wash. Spokane Recycling Products, which handles a portion of the materials generated in curbside collection, is examining a move to a single-stream service. General Manager Mike Young said such a system in Spokane is inevitable in two or three years.

But the system isn’t cheap, he said. It would require a large indoor center for sorting that could cost as much as $20 million. Further, there isn’t enough material generated in the county to make the center efficient unless neighboring counties participate, Young said.

The county’s Solid Waste Advisory Committee recently recommended the city examine a move to single-stream curbside recycling. Traver, the committee’s chairman, said he believes $20 million isn’t too much compared to the cost of expanding the Waste-to-Energy trash incinerator. The city will finish paying off the plant in the next few years, which could free up money for better recycling while still reducing the cost for consumers, Traver said.

The plant has two boilers that each can burn about 135,000 tons of garbage a year, Menke said. Of the 66,000 tons sent to the Roosevelt Landfill in south-central Washington last year, Menke estimate 50,000 tons were shipped out because the plant is at capacity.

It wouldn’t be economical to build a third boiler until the excess reached about 100,000 tons, he said. “The more we recycle, the less we’d be hauling to the regional landfill.”

Still, the city has a financial incentive to recycle less. That’s because it runs the Regional Solid Waste System and owns the Waste-to-Energy plant. Every ton of garbage disposed in the county generates $98 for the system, whether it’s burned in the incinerator or sent to the Roosevelt Landfill.

“If you reduce the tonnage that goes across the scale, it’s obviously going to reduce the amount of revenue,” Tresko said.

Menke said one area where recycling saves the city money is composting. It’s cheaper to send yard waste to a composting site in central Washington than to a landfill.

“Generally speaking, recycling is not less costly than disposal, but we do it because it’s higher on the priority list,” he said. “It’s the better thing to do.”

But Gretchen Newman, a state Department of Ecology environmental specialist, said recycling generally reduces disposal costs, especially if long-term environmental factors are considered. For instance, landfills have to be maintained and monitored indefinitely.

A 2003 state study that examined what residential garbage customers threw away found that 94 percent of it could be recycled. Newman estimated she succeeds at recycling more than 90 percent of her trash.

Tresko said she, too, is able to reach a similar percentage by taking some material not recyclable at the curb to drop-off centers and working to avoid creating waste in the first place.

After years of a steady recycling rate, she expects the county’s percentage to start to climb soon. She’s noticing increasing interest in recycling programs at community events. And demand is growing among garbage customers for an expanded recycling program, Tresko said.

“I think we’re on this rocket ship that’s ready to take off.”