This week on The Big Why: A listener is curious about recyclables that don’t get recycled in Montana. Namely, why is plastic recycling so limited?
Austin Amestoy: Welcome to The Big Why, a series from Montana Public Radio where we find out what we can discover together. I'm your host, Austin Amestoy. This is a show about listener-powered reporting. We'll answer questions, big or small, about anything under the Big Sky. By Montanans, for Montana, this is The Big Why.
We’re returning to one of our listeners’ favorite topics: Recycling. Reporter Aaron Bolton is here with me. What are we talking about this time?
Aaron Bolton: One of our very first Big Why episodes was all about recycling, and you, Austin, reported on glass recycling in particular in Montana.
Austin Amestoy: Yes! I learned a ton about recycling for that episode. Not to mention, got to drive a glass-crushing loader for a minute, which was very fun.
Aaron Bolton: And now, years later, our listeners continue to be curious about why recycling is so limited in Montana.
Lori Stiffler of Butte had been thinking about this for a while.
Lori Stiffler: Because we’re all encouraged to recycle. But when it comes right down to it, what happens to the things we actually recycle? Does anybody take them? Does anybody melt down the material?
Specifically, she was curious about recyclables that don’t get recycled in Montana. Namely, why is plastic recycling so limited?
Austin Amestoy: I remember just scratching the surface of this in my reporting on this. But if it’s anything like what I’ve learned about how we recycle glass and other materials, I’m guessing this is an economics story?
Aaron Bolton: It absolutely is. And I learned that we’re part of a complex, at times international, web of recycling that’s run as a for-profit business. I wanted to get a sense of how recyclers in Montana are doing. So, I went to my local plastic recycler, Valley Recycling in Kalispell.
As I pulled up, a garbage truck was unloading thousands of pounds of cardboard from local retailers.
Valley Recycling takes cardboard and aluminum cans. But it only recycles number one and two plastics. Number twos are your thicker milk jugs and number ones are thinner plastics like single use water bottles. At least here, like in other parts of the state, fruit or yogurt containers go in the garbage.
Manager Mike Smith says his biggest day-to-day challenge is educating people who are moving here from big cities.
Mike Smith: They come here and they get it in their head that we’re going to do the same thing here as they did there.
Aaron Bolton: He says large cities on the coast may be able to recycle lower grade plastics, like yogurt containers. But that’s just not the case here.
Austin Amestoy: Why is that? I assume it’s a money issue.
Aaron Bolton: It is. Smith ships plastics to California, Las Vegas and other cities. The only kinds of plastics that can bring enough money to pay for shipping and still be economically viable to recycle are your number ones and twos. Still, Smith’s margins are slim.
Mike Smith: We shipped a load last month. I want to say for the number two plastics it was $380 a ton, and for the number one plastics, it was like $185. So it's very little money involved.
Aaron Bolton: Sometimes he has to pay to get rid of number one plastics. So, the number twos pay for that cost. That eats into his profitability.
Austin Amestoy: Why are prices for plastics so low?
Aaron Bolton: The biggest reason is labor costs are high. You have to pay workers to sort and clean material before it can be shipped to one of the few facilities in the country that can melt plastic down into little pellets; think, the beans inside Beanie Babies. Those facilities also face high labor costs and expensive machinery. That’s why there are so few of them.
Austin Amestoy: If it’s not economical to pay U.S. workers to do this work, why don’t we send our plastics overseas? Isn’t that where a bulk of them go anyway?
Aaron Bolton: That used to be the case, but overseas markets have been shrinking. China was the largest buyer of North American plastics, but the government there put a stop to that about seven years ago as the domestic supply of recyclables grew.
Steve Wong, a recycling broker based in Hong Kong, says there’s another reason those markets abroad are shrinking, too. It’s cheaper to produce new plastics.
Steve Wong: So cheap, it’s even cheaper than the cost of recycling.
Austin Amestoy: Why would it be cheaper when we already have all this material that could be turned into new plastics?
Aaron Bolton: Like we mentioned before, labor is a big factor. Shipping costs are another. But Wong says no matter how much sorting and cleaning you do, it’s hard to get recycled material that’s pure enough to pass muster for lots of products.
Austin Amestoy: So, it’s cheaper and less labor intensive to make new plastics and you can get a better end product. As you’ve said, Montana is at a disadvantage because of how far we have to ship our material. That has me wondering, will recycling survive in Montana?
Aaron Bolton: It doesn’t seem like recyclers in Montana are going anywhere for the time being. Dusty Johnson with the Montana Department of Environmental Quality says recyclers here have gotten creative to reduce their shipping costs to stay afloat.
Some semi trucks deliver in Montana, but are empty when they leave the state. Those trucks can offer cheaper shipping rates for recyclers. Recyclers have also found ways to combine different materials like plastics and cardboard in a single load, reducing the number of trucks they need.
But ultimately, she says the current system isn’t economical and we need to find a way to pay for this service.
Dusty Johnson: We have a misconception with recycling. We gladly pay to throw our garbage away or have somebody come pick up our garbage every month. But we don’t do that with recycling, and we're going to have to.
Austin Amestoy: How do Johnson and others think we can do that? I assume that means paying to recycle plastic?
Aaron Bolton: In short, it does. To get a better idea of what companies need to make it work, I talked to Mitchell Becker. He runs his family’s company, Becker Plastics, in Wisconsin. They take clean plastics from manufacturers.
Mitchell Becker: Let’s say a company was making something along the lines of a garbage bag or a Ziploc bag, and the pull string is messed up, or the actual zipping function of the zipper bag is messed up, They would send that to us directly.
Aaron Bolton: It’s a much simpler process than taking dirty plastics from people’s homes.
But Becker says a tax on new plastics could offset the extra cost for him to recycle the plastics we throw in our recycling bins.
Mitchell Becker: If the profit margin is there, then it makes sense and everyone will come back into the game.
Austin Amestoy: What are the chances of that happening, especially in a divided Congress?
Aaron Bolton: Not very high, by the looks of it. There was a bill in 2023 that would have established a federal tax on new plastics. Like previous attempts by Democratic lawmakers, it failed. We haven’t tried anything similar that I could find in Montana, save for a 2019 bill in the state Legislature that would have taxed single use plastic bags. That also died.
Austin Amestoy: Ok, so what does our question asker make of all this?
Stifler says she’s disappointed that economics are getting in the way of reducing plastic waste and the environmental and human health impacts that come with it.
Aaron Bolton: She says she’d be more than happy to pay a tax on plastics and other materials if it meant more of it stayed out of the landfill.
Austin Amestoy: Thanks for your reporting Aaron.
Aaron Bolton: Thanks for having me.
Austin Amestoy: Now we want to know what makes you curious about Montana. Submit your questions below, or leave a message at 406-640-8933. Let's see what we can discover together!
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