Michigan鈥檚 abysmal recycling record is getting a push from recycling carts. The waist-high carts with flip-tops have spread rapidly to recycling communities in other states, and Michigan needs more of them to catch up, recycling advocates said.
They gathered Thursday at a park in Royal Oak to praise SOCRRA, a regional waste authority of 12 cities in Oakland County that鈥檚 planning to distribute more than 100,000 of the carts聽starting Monday.
鈥淎 lot more people are going to do a lot more recycling with these carts鈥� than they did with the much smaller curbside bins, said Colette Farris, a recycling development specialist with SOCRRA, who said even her 80-something mother doesn’t mind yanking a聽cart on its plastic wheels.
Curbside recycling has become a tenet of the environmental movement, although聽critics label it mere environmental window dressing 鈥斅爈ess important than addressing persistent threats from air and water pollution, and from invasive insects and aquatic species. Furthermore, in Michigan a significant amount of unrecycled waste continues to flow into the state’s landfills from other states and from Canada.
Last year, solid waste from other states and Canada amounted to nearly 24% of all trash dumped into Michigan’s landfills, according to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. Michigan’s so-called “imported waste” went up 7.5% in 2015 compared with the previous year, according to MDEQ.
That’s not likely to change, because Michigan’s landfill operators charge relatively low rates for dumping to attract outsiders’ business聽鈥斅燽ut neither does it mean that recycling in Michigan isn’t important, said Matt Flechter, recycling market development specialist with the MDE
“What we’ve done in Michigan is make our landfill capacity more than sufficient for our own needs right now, and that’s led to attracting out-of-state waste,” Flechter said. Politicians objected, yet the聽Michigan Supreme Court ruled in the 1990s that Michigan聽can’t block imported trash or charge more for it than for our own waste, he said. Meanwhile, neighboring states and Ontario put relatively high taxes and fees on their landfill tonnage, making it economical to ship trash here.
“But what we can do as Michiganders is just make sure that we recycle as much as we can,” to keep our disposal costs as low as possible 鈥斅燼nd to help the environment, Flechter said.
Advocates admit that recycling is more costly than it was just a few years ago. That鈥檚 because market prices have cratered for recycled commodities such as waste paper, cardboard, metal and plastic, said Justin Gast, technical specialist with the Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit group in Falls Church, Va., that contributed $100,000 toward buying the new carts in Oakland County.
鈥淵es, at this聽time commodity values are down, but that聽market can go back up,鈥� Gast said. Furthermore, recycling benefits the U.S. economy in ways that aren鈥檛 so聽obvious, he said.
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