Recycling Rate in State Shows Dramatic Gains : Waste disposal: The amount of all containers returned--aluminum, glass, plastic and steel--went from 56% in 1989 to 70% in 1990.
In what many see as a strong sign that California’s long-troubled beverage container recycling program is finally working, the state will announce today that recycling rates for bottles and cans have jumped dramatically--particularly for containers made of plastic.
The return rate for all materials combined--aluminum, glass, plastic and steel--went from 56% in 1989 to 70% in 1990, according to the state Division of Recycling. In the same period, the proportion of plastic containers recycled by Californians more than quadrupled, increasing from 7% to 31%.
“Lo and behold, it worked,” said Mark Murray, policy director for Sacramento-based Californians Against Waste, the environmental group largely responsible for the law creating the recycling program.
“We’ve done a pretty good job of education,” said Ralph E. Chandler chief of the Division of Recycling, who gave much of the credit to the hubbub surrounding last year’s 20th anniversary celebration of Earth Day.
The higher rates put California ahead of the nation in the recycling of aluminum cans. The number of phone calls to the division asking for directions to recycling centers increased to 125,000 in 1990 from 25,000 the year before, Chandler said.
Refunds to Californians for turning in used beverage containers at more than 2,000 recycling centers went from $69 million in 1989 to $219 million last year.
Chandler said he believes that the jump in the plastic bottle recycling rate stemmed from a raise in January, 1990, from 2 cents to 5 cents in the fee paid for returning large bottles--a segment in which plastic bottles, made almost exclusively of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), have most of the market share.
Industry reaction to the big jump in plastic bottle recycling was mixed.
“We are ecstatic about the recycling rate,” said Ron Kemalyan, executive director of the Plastic Recycling Corp. of California, the plastics industry’s recycling company. “We just wish it didn’t cost so much.”
Just last week, the company sued the division over its formula for setting the fee charged packaging manufacturers to encourage recycling. The state requires manufacturers to pay such fees to underwrite the recycling of materials whose scrap value on the open market would not otherwise generate enough money to pay for their collection.
The price of used aluminum is already high enough that no fee is charged aluminum can makers. But under the state’s formula, manufacturers have had to kick in processing fees that now amount to 0.6 cents per glass bottle; 3.7 cents per 12-ounce steel can, and 5 cents per 24-ounce plastic beverage bottle.
“It’s the first time in the United States--maybe the world--that the manufacturer has been held accountable for the costs of recycling,” Chandler said.
That policy disturbs plastic bottle makers. For plastics manufacturers “to bear the full costs of a recycling program in which they don’t have any control over the costs is a bit unfair,” Kemalyan said. Instead, plastics recyclers have long argued for more curbside recycling programs and less reliance on recycling centers and the current fee system.
Most environmentalists counter that curbside programs unfairly transfer the higher costs of recycling materials such as plastic to consumers, hiding those costs in garbage-collection fees.
Environmentalists were generally pleased at the news of higher recycling rates, which they viewed as proof that redemption laws motivate recycling.
The increases bring California recycling rates closer to those of states with traditional bottle-redemption laws that simply pay consumers a fee for turning in containers. Nine of those states have recycling levels running from 90% to 95% for beverage containers.
RECYCLING CATCHES ON The 3-year-old California beverage-container recycling program has helped produce a significant increase in recycling rates, with the rate for all containers jumping from 56% in 1989 to 70% last year. Plastic, meanwhile, more than quadrupled to 31%. What is significant is that while plastic accounts for less than 4% of disposable beverage containers in California, it has been criticized as taking up more than its share of landfill space--about 20%.
Aluminum 1988: 61% 1989: 64% 1990: 76% Glass 1988: 35% 1989: 40% 1990: 57% Plastic 1989: 4% 1989: 7% 1990: 31% Steel (in tin cans) 1988: 0.17% 1989: 2% 1990: 3% The Beverage Container Market Nearly all disposable beverage containers in California are made of these four materials.Aluminum, the most common, also dominates the recycling market in terms of number of containers returned. Steel: 01.% Plastic: 3.7% Aluminum: 73.3% Glass: 22.9%
