Greening Austin Daily

Why Not Just Recycle Our Plastic Bags?

28th October, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments

In discussing  Austin possibly implementing a plastic bag ban, a question that comes up is why the City of Austin just doesn’t expand our curbside recycling program to include plastic bags.  KUT had this article which explains why the City doesn’t offer this (basically because it’s difficult and costly), and gives some insight on how even some companies that are able to recycle plastic bags (making, for example, decking material) require that the bags be very clean first, because it’s too costly for those companies to clean and dry the bags prior to recycling.  Here’s an excerpt:

Unlike other plastics, the city does not accept the plastic bags in its single-stream recycling program, although some big-box stores collect them.

The main reason you can’t recycle plastic bags in your blue bin is that they clog up the processing equipment.

“The plastic bags wrap around anything that rolls and turns,” said Bob Gedert, director of Austin Resource Recovery, the city’s department for both solid waste and recycling.

“The workers have to shut down the line and actually pull and cut and remove all the plastic bags from the line,” he said. That costs the city $175,000 a year.

Gedert says that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to reuse and recycle the bags. Some stores such as H-E-B, Wal-Mart and Randall’s collect them.

That free service really took off three years ago, when major Austin retailers voluntarily cut back on plastic bag use as a way to stave off a city ban then.

Another reason Resource Recovery doesn’t collect plastic bags is that ensuring that the bags are clean and dry is pretty labor-intensive, says Eric Lomardi, executive director of Eco-Cycle, a nonprofit recycler in Boulder, Colo.

Eco-Cycle works with the city of Boulder to accept plastic bags. But Lomardi says they do not process them.

“When you come here you have to talk to an Eco-Cycle staff person before we let you leave us anything, because the materials that we recycle here — plastic bags, Styrofoam — a lot of things that don’t make money,” Lomardi told KUT News. “We can’t afford to clean it up for industry, so you have to do it correctly. And we educate you face-to-face about how plastic bags have to be prepared for us to be able to recycle them.”

And while you can currently take your bags to large stores like an HEB or Walmart and recycle them there, given that the bags need to be clean and dry in order to be recycled, it would be interesting to know what percentage of what is collected in Austin is actually in usable condition for the companies collecting bags from those large stores….

The article also notes that “Retailers argue that if plastic bags are banned, stores will no longer have any incentive to accept them.”  Hmm…I doubt the distribution of bags is in any way comparable to the number collected through the local large stores…I’m guessing there’s not such a huge amount of participation in the recycling program to begin with compared to the thousands of plastic bags in Austin that are distributed each month.