Recycling project aims to help Spokane focus on putting right things in bins

People could soon receive a flyer or personalized feedback on what they’ve put into their recycling bin when the region launches a pilot program to reduce contamination at the curb.

Around 20% of households in the county will receive a note sometime this summer, depending on where they live and what they have put in their recycling bin, said Lindsey Chapman, solid waste project manager for Spokane County.

Chapman said the level of contamination varies widely across the county, with some trucks coming back with as much as 30% of their contents contaminated or nonrecyclable, while others have little contamination.

She hopes the education effort, funded by a $147,000 grant from a nonprofit, will increase the quality so that more of what is picked up on curbs in Spokane County can be made into new materials.

Most people across the county will receive a mailer about recycling in the next month, but only those on 30 recycling routes will receive some type of notice regarding their bin over the summer.

The flyer will encourage them to make sure their recyclables are loose in the bin.

Spokane will have the most expansive pilot by having cart taggers travel about 15 routes in the city, open a bin and leave a flyer marked with what items are in the bin that shouldn’t be.

The remaining routes, almost all of which are in unincorporated Spokane County, won’t receive personalized feedback, just a general tag with information about what is recyclable on their route.

Chapman said the county and city plan to have a cart tagger go over the 30 routes four times.

At the end of the summer, the region will compare routes that received no tags, received general information and personalized feedback to see which strategy reduced contamination the most.

Waste Management, the company that owns and operates the Spokane Materials and Recycling Technology (SMART) Center which processes the region’s recycling, will do an audit on 400-pound samples of recycling before and after the project.

That company has completed cart tagging projects in other areas, such as Snohomish County, where it saw a 50% reduction in the amount of plastic film, the material from plastic bags, in recycling, Joel Kohlstedt, recycling education project manager for Waste Management, said.

That company has done smaller cart tagging projects in other communities around the Pacific Northwest.

“Giving the same tag to people three to four different times can seem like a lot, but it really can get the message across,” he said.

Jackie Lang, public affairs and communication manager for Waste Management, said recycling has changed considerably since it became widespread in the 1970s. Early programs were about participation, now local governments and private companies involved in recycling focus on quality, making sure bottles and cardboard aren’t in plastic bags and unsuitable material doesn’t make it into bins.

Local governments and U.S. companies that process recyclables have had to refine the quality of the materials they process over the last two years. China stopped accepting most of the world’s recyclable material in 2018. Other countries in Asia soon followed suit.

“There is new pressure on the system today to only include those materials that will be turned into end products,” Lang said. “We need a cleaner recycling stream today than we did when China was taking a lot of our material. Now it’s about putting the right thing in the right container.”

Recycling Partnership, the non-profit that granted the funding for this study, has funded similar projects in Atlanta and Chicago, focusing on neighborhoods in those cities.

Asami Tanimoto, community program manager for the nonprofit, said those cart tagging projects, which focused on specific neighborhoods, reduced contamination between 30% and 60%. Those programs focused on making sure items weren’t recycled in a plastic bag.

The nonprofit, an organization funded by private companies such as Starbucks, Coca Cola and Exxon Mobil, as well as manufacturers and industry groups, provides free resources for recycling and offers grants to local governments to test methods like cart tagging, which Tanimoto said is one of the most effective ways to clean up materials.

Kris Major, education coordinator for the city of Spokane’s Solid Waste Department, said she hopes the pilot project, as well as other education efforts, will reduce the average level of contamination in the region’s recycling bins from about 13% to less than 5% over the next year.

When the city first switched from sorting recycling to single stream recycling in 2012, where people put all their materials into one bin and it was sorted at a facility, less than 5% of it was contaminated, she said. In the years since, the amount of contamination has steadily increased.

Major said the county and city, which are collaborating with two private companies for the pilot project, are not releasing which routes are going to be affected because they do not want people who live along them to change their behaviors before they have a chance to do the study.

Those with questions about the study can contact city of Spokane Reycling Outreach Assistant Gina Claeys at gclaeys@spokanecity.org

Editor’s Note: This story was updated on April 29, 2020 to include contact information for those looking to learn more about the pilot.