Recycling Angst in Seattle

What’s the deal with recycling? For the longest time, Seattle prided itself in being on the forefront of reducing the massive volumes of trash going into landfills by encouraging/mandating recycling. The footnote to that statement is that it HAD to…city-owned landfills had closed in the 1980s and been declared Superfund sites, and local waste disposal options were dwindling. Depending on how long you’ve been a Seattle resident, you may remember when we had color-coded milk crate-type bins into which we sorted glass, paper, and cans. It almost felt sacrilegious when we were told to toss all of our recycling into a single container. But citizens had embraced recycling as a way of modern life, and the city continued to encourage the practice and often touted the percent diversion from garbage (i.e., by 1995, Seattle was recycling nearly 60 percent of its waste stream).

There are apparent recycling success stories, like paper. The industry (American Forest and Paper Association) says that in the US, paper is one of the most consistently recycled products in the waste stream, at around 65-70 percent. In contrast, that other staple of recycling—glass—is surprisingly less successful: according to a recycling provider called Roadrunner, only 31 percent of glass is recycled. The rest goes to a landfill or into the environment, and that’s around 28 billion bottles and jars each year.

And then there’s plastic.

Plastics make what was the feel-good recycling story much fuzzier and more complicated. Last fall, Douglas Main wrote a sobering article in the MIT Review (“Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again.”) that cited, among other depressing numbers, the fact that 430 million tons of plastic are produced each year. Of all the plastic that has ever been made, a mere 9 percent has been recycled. We’ve all seen, either with our own eyes or online, the disposition of the remainder as neighborhood and roadside trash, and in staggering aggregations in coastal collection zones around the world.

Focusing back locally on our Seattle recycling scene, the dilemma of what to do with plastics is particularly vexing. In another one of my past lives, I co-chaired the Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) Solid Waste Advisory Committee, a group charged with providing citizen and end-user perspective and guidance to SPU on issues related to garbage and recycling. You would think that with that experience, recycling questions would be less challenging to me. But they aren’t! Everyone knows that clear soda and water bottles are recyclable, because (in my case) the experts interviewed on NPR have told us that those are about the only universally recyclable plastic objects out there. What about those plastic trays from the Fred Meyer deli? And the horrible heat-sealed packaging in which Costco seems to encase everything? Those clamshell berry and tomato boxes? Detergent jugs? Those numbered recycling symbols embossed on the bottom of all things plastic have become fairly meaningless, unless you happen to be an industrial chemist. What’s a well-intentioned Wallingford resident supposed to do?

Well, if you’re an editor for the high-powered, hard-hitting blog Wallyhood: you contact the media relations folks at SPU for advice. Brad Wong, the Acting Public Information Officer for SPU, responded to my bleating cry in the digital wilderness and answered a few questions. He noted that in 2022, the city of Seattle recycled nearly 53% of its solid waste. Brad also emphasized food waste recycling as one of the most impactful things we all can do to reduce emissions from landfills. (If you’ve been around Seattle a really long time, you might recall that the eastern part of the UW campus, down by the stadium and basketball arena and all those parking lots, is built on solid waste, i.e., garbage. Bored, inspired, or drunken students used to go down there and ignite the methane seeping out from the decomposing fill. Those were simpler times…)

Brad confirmed that one of the most useful resources for determining what to do with potentially recyclable material is to plow through the long list of items that SPU provides online via its Where Does It Go? Tool and try to figure things out. Here’s what it says for the items I puzzled over above, and more:

• Black plastic deli trays: Yes! If larger than 3 inches. But no thin plastic cookie trays, which I’m thinking are the inner liners that hold cookies and crackers.
• Horrible Costco packaging: This was not specifically addressed on the Where Does It Go? website. But I suspect that SPU might say, toss it because of sharp edges from hacking open and blood from the inevitable injuries incurred while doing so.
• Clamshell berry and tomato boxes: Yes!
• Detergent (and milk and juice) jugs: Yes! Clean and dry.
• Plastic bags: NO! A hard NO, as these really gum up the recycling machinery and caused SPU to ban them from residential recycling a few years ago. I bag and take mine to Fred Meyer, which has a collection bin at their entrance. I’m not sure what happens to the accumulated bags, but in my imaginary best-case world, these are turned into something useful and not dumped in some far away country.
• Plastic clothes hangers: No! SPU says to toss in the garbage. Better yet: give them to a thrift store.
• Plastic lids: Yes! If they’re larger than 3 inches. This is especially relevant in my household, because I buy a lot of grated or shredded cheese and start a lot of plants. It’s hard to believe, but there are only so many potted plants to put into the tubs and lids to catch watering runoff.
• Plastic & plastic bubble wrap mailers: No! SPU says to trash these. But…if they are plastic only (vs. paper and bubble wrap combos), I roll them up and bag them to take to Fred Meyer and their plastic bag recycling bin. Am I wrong?
• Plastic cups & utensils: It depends. This is one of those more complicated answers. The easy partial answer is for clean plastic cups, which is Yes! For dirty cups, plastic utensils, plastic plates, and Styrofoam cups, SPU says No! all go into the garbage. And then there’s a third category for utensils marked as compostable, which can go into food waste.
• Credit cards, gift cards, hotel cards: No! SPU says to cut them up and toss into the garbage. I used mine to make a colorful wall in my outhouse in the San Juan Islands, but I suspect this might be a niche recycling application.

There’s a LOT more on the SPU Where Does It Go? Tool website, especially relating to the plastics questions, and I recommend this as your go-to resource for recycling uncertainties. Brad Wong also pointed out that SPU also posts on Facebook and Instagram as part of a Where Does It Go Wednesday series, where more specific information is provided (e.g., what to do with outdoor grills and gardening supplies. Also, SPU does send out a summary sheet each year to customers, and this is a good quick reference especially in the face of those changing recycling markets and recycling capabilities.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that there are plenty of other avenues for diverting stuff from landfills. I see a lot of my neighbors have signed up for Ridwell pickup, which is a paid service to recycle the more difficult materials. Laudably, Nordstrom supports a BeautyCycling program in its stores to take back empty containers and packaging for cosmetics, makeup, shampoos, and the like. Recently, I saw that someone on Facebook had mentioned an outfit, Matthew 25: Ministries, that will reuse empty plastic prescription pill bottles (which are not recyclable in Seattle) for shipping medical supplies to developing countries. A few months ago, Wallyhood posted an article about an electronics recycling depot (InterConnection) in the neighborhood. There are many others; you just need to look around, and perhaps make a little extra effort or pay a little more to get things to the collection points.

Regardless of the multiple layers of frustration you may experience when literally sorting through your refuse, the fact remains that whatever you divert—through reuse, recycling, or composting—reduces the amount of stuff that will be shipped by rail to be buried in a landfill in the Oregon desert. Until we kick our addiction to unnecessary packaging and single-use applications, this will have to assuage the environmental guilt that pervades life in the modern world.