Fifteen months ago, The Sunday published a cover story with the blunt headline, “Why Southern Nevada stinks at recycling.” At the time, Clark County was struggling to reach the Nevada goal of recycling 25 percent of its waste. The national average is 35 percent. By comparison, Philadelphia was recycling half of its waste, and San Francisco was hitting a 75 percent recycling rate.
It wasn’t that our hearts weren’t in it. In fact, we were putting more recyclable material in our bins than the local waste disposal company, Republic Services, could handle at its single recycling plant.
Exacerbating the recycling inefficiency was that the company didn’t have the technology to separate materials such as blister packs, yogurt containers, plastic ware and ketchup bottles that were being recycled at more advanced recycling plants elsewhere. In short: Much of what was put in recycling bins in Southern Nevada ended up in Republic’s landfill at the Apex industrial site in the desert. It is the largest landfill in the country.
We are gratified that Clark County now has come of age, at least in a trash technology sense. On Nov. 12, Republic Services on opened a new, 110,000-square-foot recycling plant after a year under construction. It is, the company says, the largest residential recycling complex in the country.
It’s quite a distinction: Republic now owns the country’s largest landfill and the largest residential recycling facility, the former thanks to the expansive desert and a waste disposal company whose business model is built on landfills, and the latter because Republic Services wants to do the right thing.
It’s not like the paper, soda cans and plastic bottles that go in the front end of the plant are converted into a gravy train at the back end. The recycling industry, which sells much of its products overseas, is taking a financial beating these days, due to the strong U.S. dollar, a weak Chinese economy and cheap and abundant crude oil. Making plastic requires naphtha that is distilled from crude oil, and these days, it’s cheaper to capture naphtha at a refinery than to recycle plastics.
And so it goes in the fickle recycling industry, which is supposed to be profitable. Republic Services, in its September filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission, said lagging revenue from recycled material decreased the company’s revenue during the first nine months of 2015 by 0.8 percent. That’s not a killer, granted; selling recycled commodities makes up less than 5 percent of the company’s overall revenue.
But for Republic Services to spend $35 million to build the new facility in North Las Vegas is worthy of the community’s applause, and now the ball is back in our court as residents to step up. Much of the county has been converted to single-stream recycling — the use of just one bin to dump all of a household’s recyclables without separating them. (Officials in Las Vegas and unincorporated Clark County haven’t yet decided to go this route, but they should for all of the obvious reasons.)
But even with single-stream recycling and the new recycling complex, we still have to be smart. Until now, we’ve been allowed to recycle only category 1 and 2 plastic materials, as noted inside the recycle triangle symbol. The new plant, with its optical sorters, magnets, vibrators, screens and glass crushers, can recycle all seven categories, including the 86 million milk and juice cartons served annually to our public school students, which previously had gone to the dump.
We must not think, though, that everything manufactured can go into a recycling bin.
“It’s called aspirational recycling,” an industry spokesman said. “People think, if it’s man-made, the recycler should be able to figure out what to do with it, so it’s thrown in the recyclable bin.”
So think before you toss. Among the items customers constantly and wrongly put in their recycle bins: PVC, garden hoses and dirty diapers. C’mon, folks, let’s use our heads.
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