Holiday season means contaminated recycling stream
Holly Tonini/Observer-Reporter
Holiday trash waits to be collected at a home on East Pike Street in Canonsburg.
Courtesy of Waste Management
Waste Management workers recycle plastic bags.
For recycling centers, the winter months bring more than just holiday cheer: They also carry a deluge of materials into the recycling stream that aren’t actually recyclable.
From late December through early February, waste management providers including Republic Services and Waste Management see an uptick in the volume of materials flowing into their recycling plants – and with it, a jump in items that don’t belong.
This increase can be traced back to the flourish of festive objects that this time of year brings, said Frank Chimera, area senior manager for Republic Services in the Philadelphia region.
Wrapping paper, holiday lights, wreaths – all are “items you don’t typically generate in high volumes throughout the year,” Chimera said. “Lots of times, people don’t know which should be recycled and which shouldn’t.”
And when things like artificial trees and ornate ribbons end up in the recycling stream, time and money is wasted at plants.
For one, recycling centers have to sort through all materials that cycle through their doors to make sure there’s no trash mixed up in the stream. When there is trash mixed in with recyclable items, centers have to make runs to landfills – a process that takes resources. Intuitively, more trash in the recycling flow means more resources lost by centers.
Much of the sorting that takes place in recycling plants is done by machinery with lots of moving parts. Throughout the year, plastic bags obfuscate the sorting process by getting tangled up in facilities’ machinery. During the holiday season, string lights and ribbons create the same problem.
“That causes potential damage to the equipment and what it certainly causes is downtime,” Chimera said. “We have to shut down the plant, because you can’t just shut down one piece, you have to shut down the entire thing when you have a piece of equipment that has something in it that shouldn’t be there.”
However, the manager added that this time of year also brings the opportunity to bolster the recycling stream with material that belongs there.
“The things that are great to recycle are things like cardboard and wrapping paper,” Chimera said, though he noted wrapping paper with lots of glitter should go in the trash. “Things like tissue paper, shirt boxes, your gift bags that are made of paper – all of those are good things to recycle during the holidays.”
But at the end of the day, if you’re not sure whether something can be recycled, Waste Management spokeswoman Erika Deyarmin urges you just to toss it in the trash, rather than risk contaminating the recycling stream.
“When in doubt, leave it out,” she said.