Paper, plastic piling up across Oregon as China refuses to take U.S. recycling

Paper and plastic are piling up at recycling centers across Oregon in the wake of China’s refusal to take them.

Already, the state has given a dozen recyclers permission to send the materials to landfills.

“The warehouse is full of mixed paper and plastics with nowhere to go,” said Gaelen McAllister of Garten Services, which provides recycling services for Marion County.

The crisis comes on the heels of a new report that shows Oregonians are producing more garbage than ever, and recycling a smaller percentage of it.

On Jan. 1, China stopped allowing many materials to be imported for recycling, saying contamination levels were too high. China has been the world’s largest importer of recycled paper and plastic and took most of Oregon’s recycling.

The ban includes 24 kinds of solid waste, including unsorted paper and some types of plastic. It also set new limits on the level of non-recyclables allowed in other wastes.

“Material recovery facilities have had to slow down their processes to make sure they’re pulling more contamination out," said Bailey Payne, Marion County waste reduction coordinator. "That’s reduced the capacity of these facilities.”

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality has been meeting weekly with counties and waste haulers to try to find alternatives.

Marion County doesn’t plan to ask DEQ for permission to throw away recycled materials, Brian May, the county’s Environmental Services Division manager, said.

“We kind of need to weather this storm and figure out how to get us through till things get better,” May said. “The silver lining that might come out of this — it might open room for domestic markets.”

The county is encouraging business and residents to continue recycling. But it wants them to stop recycling things that they wish were recyclable but aren’t.

That includes plastic bags, Styrofoam, disposable coffee cartridges, plastic bottle caps, restaurant clamshell containers, and waxed cardboard.  

“If you look in a residential recycling bin, you might find 9 percent to 13 percent contamination by weight,” May said. “Were really trying to get that education out to people.”

Oregon households and businesses threw away a total of 3,050,432 tons of garbage in 2016, up 9.6 percent from 2015, a new report from DEQ found.

That’s 2,609 pounds per person.

The statewide recovery rate, meanwhile, was 42.6 percent of total waste generated, down from a record 49.7 percent in 2012.

Recovery includes recycling, composting, and burning recyclable materials for energy. Oregon’s legislatively set recovery goal is 52 percent by 2020 and 55 percent by 2025.

Marion County residents followed the state trend last year, throwing away more garbage and recycling less.

Households and businesses here tossed a total of 243,107 tons of garbage in 2016, up 10 percent from the previous year. The county’s recovery rate was 49.4 percent, down from 52.2 percent in 2015 and well below its legislatively mandated goal of 64 percent.

“It’s obviously of concern to us to see it go down,” Payne said. “But there are a lot of things outside our control a bit.”

The biggest factor pushing down the county’s recycling rate was a dramatic fall in the price of scrap metal, he said. People likely no longer collect – or steal – metal to sell to recyclers, and may be holding on to supplies until the price comes back up, he said.

Marion County is making more garbage, meanwhile, because of a booming economy.

“There’s a lot more building, a lot more buying,” he said.

tloew@statesmanjournal.com, 503-399-6779 or follow at Twitter.com/Tracy_Loew

More environmental news:

►Corvallis dumps 37 million gallons of sewage into the Willamette River