Grandpa isn't driving the garbage truck, but he's a recycling wizard

By Peter Longini

I was raised with the belief that creating waste was reprehensible and that it set a bad example for others.

As a child, it meant cleaning my plate and not wasting any “perfectly good” food. As an adult, it meant taking recycling seriously.

The principle of recycling, reusing and re-purposing the material we consume, rather than discarding it as landfill trash, is appealing. And so was the idea that much of this waste has value to companies who need those materials – enough value to pay the collection program’s costs and potentially even earn a profit.

So today, I not only separate ordinary trash from recyclables collected by Waste Management from my home in McCandless, I also take glass bottles and jars – which the company no longer collects – to a recycling facility behind the municipal building. And I gather plastic bags, which I periodically take to the recycling container in front of my local Giant Eagle.

Beyond that, I frequently find myself holding onto household items whose useful life has passed, just in case I find a new purpose for them. From time to time, I’ve participated in creek and roadside trash pickup programs because I’m painfully aware that plastic bags and bottles have been degrading the environment, clogging oceans, killing fish, turtles and other marine wildlife.

In 2004, when I was working with Cranberry Township, I helped to implement what was then an entirely new residential waste collection system, using trucks with robotic arms to lift and empty trash carts.

I would sometimes ride with the contractor – Vogel Disposal – on their collection routes as the system was being introduced. I visited the company’s pick line, the labor-intensive sorting process required by single-stream recycling. I also visited the company’s Seneca Landfill operation in Evans City, where a nonstop flow of trucks struggled up a makeshift road to unload.

In 2010, I even visited the ultimate recycling resource – an experimental poop reclamation facility that turned the sludge from sewage treatment plants into industrial fuel. That use, it turned out, was not a commercial success; the resulting fuel didn’t have the BTU energy that was available from more conventional sources. But I liked the idea that what comes around, goes around, again and again.

At the same time, however, I realized that the curbside recycling model introduced in many American communities about 30 years ago suffers from serious flaws. The economics are unstable. Prices for recycled items swing wildly, creating a difficult business model.

Until 2018, most of America’s recycled plastic and paper was sold to China, whose appetite for raw materials was voracious. But sadly, Americans didn’t take their recycling seriously, casually mixing ordinary trash with recyclables. As a result, the material sent to China was highly contaminated and ultimately useless. So the country essentially slammed the door on American recycling exports.

The challenge of what to do with our prodigious waste remains serious, but its details keep changing. For example, 20 years ago, glass bottles were a major component of household recyclable collections. So were newspapers.

Today, many food and beverage companies have switched their glass containers to plastic and most newspapers today are delivered online. As a result, the mix of items in residential recycling carts has changed, and along with them, so have the markets for recycled materials. Last year, only 21% of recyclable wastes were actually recycled, including just 9% of all plastic in use worldwide.

Government policies can help to tweak that model by promoting enhanced producer responsibility – systems in which companies assume more of the financial and logistical burden for recycling their products. Laws of this type already exist in some other countries, and similar strategies can be adopted here.

At least in theory, a manufacturer’s motivation to reduce costs would drive their compliance. However, waste is growing faster than the speed of legislation, so the problem is destined to be with us for years to come.

But there’s hope. My two grandsons – ages 3 and 6 – are always excited to watch the curbside trash collection at their home in California. They love the whole process.

The truck is the biggest vehicle to regularly visit their cul-de-sac, and the driver obligingly waves back to the enthusiastic boys.

Recently, for my birthday, the 3-year-old gave me a card with a drawing he had made. His mom provided the required caption: “Grandpa Peter driving a garbage truck.” It was one of the most appropriate greetings I’ve ever received.

Peter Longini, of McCandless, is a former communication professor, speechwriter and ghostwriter for business leaders and public officials.