Plastic Promises? : Despite being labeled ‘recyclable,’ many plastic containers aren’t. And that’s trying the patience of recyclers and consumers alike.

The woman phoning the Chula Vista City Hall was irate. After she had taken the trouble to rinse out and store a two-week supply of cottage cheese containers, margarine tubs and yogurt cups for curbside recycling, the city had rejected them. The driver had picked up everything else--paper, glass, aluminum cans and plastic milk jugs--but left a note saying the plastic containers couldn’t be recycled.

‘She was not pleased,” recalls Athena Bradley, who administers Chula Vista’s 2-year-old recycling program. “She told me she was looking right at the containers and they were stamped with a recycling symbol. When I said we still couldn’t take them, she was so mad she called me a ‘stupid idiot.’ ”

The woman hung up before Bradley had a chance to explain: Although most plastic containers are marked with the universal recycling symbol--three flying arrows--only a few (mostly bottles) can currently be recycled.

The misunderstanding is causing such headaches for recyclers in Southern California that they have launched a “Take the Wrap” protest. They’re asking consumers to mail their unrecyclable recyclable plastics to the Society of Plastics Industry (SPI), the Washington-based trade group whose 2,000 member companies represent all segments of the U.S. plastics industry.

“We have the task of educating the public as to what is and isn’t recyclable,” says Brooke Nash, executive director of Solana Recyclers in Encinitas. She’s a member of the San Diego Chapter of the California Resource Recovery Assn. (CRRA), which is spearheading the protest. “Right now, our toughest job is convincing people that only a few of the many, many plastic bottles are actually recyclable.”

The job is tough, she maintains, because SPI has painted too rosy a picture of its recycling progress.

Three years ago, spurred by the landfill crisis, SPI created a coding system for resins, the raw plastic material from which various containers are made. Plastics must be separated by resin type to be recycled, and SPI has been successful in getting most plastics stamped with a code number in the recycling arrows. Equally successful was the industry’s aggressive national advertising campaign promoting its commitment to recycling.

But, says Nash and her colleagues, SPI put the cart before the horse.

“They informed the public how recyclable their product was but didn’t build enough plants,” she says. “The whole notion of a recycling code is completely flawed because there aren’t many markets for used plastic yet. Plastics is 25 years behind everything else: There are plants and mills for recycled paper, glass jars and aluminum cans. That’s what we’re protesting.”

At SPI’s Washington office, communications director Susan Moore reports that only a “few garbage bags” of protest plastic have been delivered.

“I applaud their energy, but wish they would put it toward something positive,” she says. “I think they are further inciting the problem by calling attention to it.”

The San Diego recyclers intend to call even more attention to their campaign by staging a media event Sunday when the CRRA opens its annual conference in Long Beach.

“This is a campaign that was destined to happen,” says Coy Smith, executive director of the mammoth San Diego Recycling Co., which processes recycled material for 14 of 19 cities in San Diego County. The plastic problem, he says, is time-consuming and confusing.

“The residents do not blame the plastic industry for putting an arrow on the container, they blame me if I don’t take it,” he says. “I have 150 people a day who bring me bags full of plastic bags because it’s got arrows on it. We end up saying we will dispose of it for them, but we can’t recycle it.”

Although the future for plastics recycling holds promise, say experts, right now it’s a limited venture. What can be recycled in most municipal programs are soft drink bottles coded No. 1 and opaque milk and water jugs coded No. 2. What can’t be recycled, at least not in most cities, is just about everything else plastic that sails home from the grocery store.

The overall plastic recycling rate in California in 1990 was 3.2%, according to the California Integrated Waste Management Board.

“There’s a bizillion problems with plastic,” says Smith, who, like other recyclers, deplores the lack of standardization. “Yogurt containers can come in four different sizes and each one can be a different plastic. Evian water comes in one bottle size which is recyclable and another size which isn’t.”

What all these products do have in common is a circle of flying arrows. To a consumer population with growing ecological awareness, that means recycle.

At Ocean Knoll School in San Diego, Sallie Kobulnicky’s fourth graders mailed boxes of junk plastic to Washington as part of their recycling project.

“So much of this stuff is marketed for kids--like little juice drinks and individual fruit cups,” says Kobulnicky. “Our kids are very serious about recycling. They have naive assumptions, and I think the code is really deceptive. We’re trying to teach values, not half-truths.”

Ironically, the code was intended to help recyclers, not beleaguer them. Plastics, by-products of oil refining, come in many resin types--high-density polyethylene, low-density polyethylene, vinyls, styrenes and propylene. To be successfully recycled, they must be sorted by resin type, which the coding does.

By assigning a number from 1 to 7 to each major resin, the plastics industry made it easier for recyclers to separate the resins, says SPI’s Moore.

“The codes are molded into the bottom of the container for a reason,” she says. “It’s to help a recycler sort. We didn’t put it on the label for the consumer to read.”

The recyclers respond that customers read the codes whether they’re supposed to or not, and that they interpret the recycling sign to mean just that.

And as municipal recycling programs get revved up throughout California in response to a state law cutting back landfill quotas, the recycling industry finds itself in a push-pull quandary: The people most interested in encouraging households to recycle must spend increasing energy explaining to the public why they can’t.

“The public wants to be able to recycle as much as they can and they don’t want their efforts thwarted,” says Nash. “When they see a bottle with an emblem and you’re telling them you’re sorry, but what they see is not the reality, it makes them very mad.”

That complaint is echoed up and down the state.

“We have a public relations fiasco here,” says Michael Anderson, president of Garbage Re-Incarnation Inc. in Sonoma County, who’s been a recycler for 20 years. Although his company is the largest multimaterial community recycling center in Northern California, he refuses to take plastic because he can’t sell it.

“I feel angry,” he says. “I go into a grocery store and realize that my right to buy a glass mustard jar is gone. The shopping shelves are full of plastic and our options are limited.”

Nearly 15 million tons of plastics are discarded every year, making up 8% of the weight--but a sizable 20% of the volume--of U.S. landfills.

Moore, on behalf of the industry, insists that the gap is only temporary and that the industry’s primary focus is on building a market infrastructure for increasing the use of recycled plastic. “We have 269 plastics reclaimers operating around the country now,” she says. “They’re going into soft drink bottles, salad dressing bottles, carpeting, fiber-fill for clothing, recycling bins and trash cans.”

She thinks the rebel recyclers are exaggerating their plight: “I think it could easily be overcome by education. We don’t mean to belittle the situation, but we do know that communities that do a good job of education don’t have this problem.”

Gyl Elliott, spokeswoman for the City of Los Angeles’ Recycling Division, disagrees. She says that despite a comprehensive education campaign, the city--which now services 275,000 homes but eventually will reach 720,000--still has problems.

“We pick up No. 1 and No. 2 beverage bottles. That’s all,” she stresses. “What we don’t want, and get a lot of . . . are plastic bags, cottage cheese and yogurt containers, and packing materials--the foam peanuts and molded foam. Those are the biggest offenders, in that order.”

The Major Plastic Resins

* Polyethylene terephthalate. Plastic soft drink bottles, peanut butter, salad dressing and mouthwash bottles, spice jars.

* High-density polyethylene. Milk, water and juice containers, grocery bags, toys, liquid detergent bottles, motor oil containers.

* Polyvinyl chloride or vinyl: Clear food packaging, shampoo bottles.

* Low-density polyethylene. Bread bags, frozen food bags, grocery bags, mustard squeeze containers.

* Polypropylene. Ketchup bottles, yogurt and baby fruit juice containers, margarine tubs, medicine bottles.

* Polystyrene: Videocassette cases, compact disc jackets, coffee cups, eating utensils, cafeteria trays, fast-food sandwich containers, grocery store meat trays.

* All other resins. Unmarked containers, lids and mixed resins.

From the Society of the Plastics Industry Inc.