Confusion abounds in Buncombe about what trash can be recycled. Here’s why.

by JOHN BOYLE

The second of two parts

Like a lot of locals, Erin Harris really wants to recycle as much as she can.

“But we were doing most everything wrong,” Harris said, expressing a common lament when it comes to knowing what you can and can’t recycle here. “No. 1, we were buying boxes of recyclable bags, the blue ones.”

Harris moved to the Kenilworth neighborhood with her partner, Henry Nelson, four years ago from Memphis, which had different recycling policies. She said a neighbor recently gave her a rundown on recycling no-no’s, breaking the news that those blue bags she and Nelson were using to hold all their other recycling actually end up in the landfill, as do the plastic clamshell salad containers they’d been putting in the recycling bin.

On top of that, they mistakenly had been putting paper receipts and tissue out for recycling.

“It would be superhelpful if there was a way that when someone buys a property, the city sends out a little informational package to them, about various things, including recycling,” Harris said.

Most Buncombe County residents, and most Americans, assume that anything with a little triangular recycling symbol on it is recyclable. But that’s not the case.

It really comes down to what the recycling entity in your locality accepts and has a market for.

“Wherever you live is different, and that’s the challenge,” said Bridget Herring, sustainability director for the city of Asheville. “It’s not the same set of rules, and that makes it more challenging in general.”

Here in Buncombe, when you send over those blue recycling bags — or other plastics such as microwaveable containers and clamshell packaging for takeout food — they end up in the landfill as garbage. That’s because Curbside Management, the main recycling facility in Buncombe and other western NC counties, cannot recycle them.

Curbside Management, commonly known as Curbie, accepts and recycles plenty of other items – plastic bottles, tubs, yogurt cups, milk jugs and more – because it has a market for the materials and it makes economic sense. But it lacks the equipment and a market for other, harder-to-recycle plastics such as clamshells or heat-resistant meal holders.

Harris has plenty of company when it comes to tossing materials in the bin that will not be recycled. During a recent Asheville Watchdog tour of the Curbie facility in Woodfin, co-owner Abraham Lawson said every day its workers pluck out a steady stream of nonrecyclable materials, with plastic bags being the top offender.

“Now, almost everything is automatically sorted, but then all of our employees that are on the sort line are negatively sorting,” Lawson said. “So they’re pulling out things that don’t belong, instead of pulling out things that we’re trying to recycle.”

Why Curbie cannot recycle clamshell containers

What comes to the Curbie facility from Asheville, Weaverville, Woodfin, Fletcher and other mountain communities “should be 100% recyclable,” Lawson said.

“That’s not based on the recycling logo on the bottle or the can or the paper,” Lawson said. “It’s based on a set list of criteria which we have on our websites and the city of Asheville’s website. Ours and the city of Asheville’s match up.”

Curbie employs a “single stream” method of recycling. Localities encourage customers to put everything into the large rolling bins loosely, so everything comes into the plant mixed.  Machinery does most of the sorting, but humans have to remove offending items by hand while they whiz by on conveyor belts at dizzying speeds.

Between 5% and 10% of all trash arriving daily at Curbie ends up in the landfill. Besides Styrofoam and plastic clamshells, the detritus includes old VHS tapes, electrical cords, greasy pizza boxes, old lumber and myriad other items that people chuck into their recycling bins because they have a “chasing arrows” triangle on it with a number inside. Or they just think it should be recyclable.

Curbie’s website states what can and can’t be recycled, and Asheville and Buncombe County carry matching information on their recycling web pages.

Lawson explained why Curbie can’t recycle clamshell containers, which are typically clear plastic or Styrofoam and most often used to store food.

They’re made with a different process than drinking bottles, in which plastic is heated and injected with air to create the shape. Manufacturers add certain chemicals to get the composition they need for bottles.

Clamshells are “thermo-formed” with heat, and pressed into the needed shape.

“And they have different chemicals and additives that are thrown into the plastics there to make those form and hold the material together, and those different chemical compositions make them different materials in the eyes of the downstream processors,” Lawson said. “So, they can still be recycled, [but] we do not have the capability, the infrastructure, the space to keep those materials separate in our facility.”

It’s much more difficult to find a buyer for the clamshell materials, and Curbie would have to invest in more space and new machinery to handle that type of trash.

“It’s a millions-of-dollars investment to do that,” Lawson said.

Part of the problem, environmentalists say, is that the petroleum industry that creates all these plastic products has convinced Americans that the recycling triangle and number inside equate to recyclability. Really, that symbol just tells you what kind of plastic it is.

The Center for Climate Integrity, which seeks to make the petroleum industry pay for the effects of global warming, makes a blunt case that the industry misled consumers for decades about the recyclability of plastics.

There are “thousands of different types of plastic, each with its own chemical composition and characteristics,” states a February 2024 report from the left-of-center group titled “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling, How Big Oil and the plastics industry deceived the public for decades and caused the plastic waste crisis.”

The U.S. recycling rate for plastic as of 2021 was estimated at just 5%-6%, the center said.

“Despite decades of industry promises, plastic recycling has failed to become a reality due to long-known technical and economic limitations,” the report states.

“To date, viable markets only exist for polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and high density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic bottles and jugs,” the Center for Climate Integrity states. “These are known as plastics #1 and #2, respectively, under the industry’s Resin Identification Codes (RICs).”

Lawson said Curbie has a good market for bottles and jugs.

“We’ve got three or four different vendors that we ship to, and those three or four vendors are either turning that PET into carpet, or some of them are grinding it up and washing it and turning it into a flake or pellet, that can be really turned back into anything,” Lawson said. “But carpet is probably the largest consumer of that plastic in this region.”

‘I’m as confused as ever’

All of this remains baffling to locals who just want to recycle as much as possible.

“I’m as confused as ever,” Arden resident Christine Mauck said, noting that the clamshell container issue is particularly puzzling. “I throw them in [the recycling] sometimes, and other times I don’t.”

Waste Pro, the same company that handles garbage hauling for Buncombe County, picks up her recycling, but it all goes to Curbie. Mauck would like to see better messaging about what’s acceptable and what’s not, which could include some kind of informational stickers or placards on the large rolling bins Waste Pro issues for recycling.

Waste Pro has handled recycling in Buncombe for a decade, serving 34,500 customers. Spokesperson Tracy Meehan said the company, whose contract ends this year, has worked with the county “extensively to educate customers on recycling.

“Throughout the contract, Waste Pro has provided a variety of educational resources including downloadable calendars, information brochures, and a customized website that links back to the county site,” Meehan said. “Educational outreach is done largely in digital formats; however, customers can request a paper form of materials.”

Waste Pro also has a “tagging” program in which workers tag recycling carts with visible contamination with a non-collection notice detailing what items need to be removed before collection can occur.

Meehan said the biggest offenders are no surprise: plastic bags.

Buncombe County spokesperson Lillian Govus said the county hears from customers who have trouble with recycling, particularly plastics.

“Plastic bags — this includes grocery bags and recyclables collected in plastic bags — and clamshell containers are probably two of the largest contaminants we see,” Govus said. “Bulky plastic items like kids toys, plastic storage bins, etc. are also easily spotted contaminants.”

The confusion is understandable, Govus said, because “almost every item that is made of plastic has a recycling symbol on it nowadays.”

“Unfortunately, we don’t have any control over how companies brand their products,” Govus said. “While yes, these items are technically recyclable in some capacity, they are not recyclable here in Buncombe County.”

The county tells customers to keep it simple and remember Buncombe recycling isn’t done by number but by shape — plastic bottles, jars, tubs and jugs are all recyclable.

“If it’s not one of those shapes, it’s most likely not recyclable,” Govus said.

While recycling is a global industry, it’s really a “hyperlocal process,” she pointed out.

“Recycling in our community looks very different from recycling in California, but it also looks different than it does in Wake County or New Hanover County,” Govus said. “This is largely due to how the local materials recovery facility — in our case, Curbie — is set up and what materials they are able to recover through their operational process.”

Any time a big national story comes out about how little plastic is actually recycled (estimates put it at less than 8% globally), Govus said, the county will get a lot of calls from customers wondering if their materials really are recycled.

Such articles essentially give misinformation to “local communities like ours who have clearly invested infrastructure and workforce to the recycling industry,” Govus said. “One of the most important messages we want to convey to residents is that their actions in fact do matter and make an impact on recycling in our county.”

Lawson provided a map Curbie produced that shows where collected and sorted items actually go.

What moves the fastest? The slowest?

Besides having a buyer to make recycling practical, Curbie also needs a sizable amount of a material.

“We wouldn’t recycle anything that we can’t get 40,000 pounds of,” Lawson said. “That’s the threshold. In order for us to ship something out of our plant, we ship 40,000 pounds. That’s the truck weight going down the road.”

It also needs to be able to collect that poundage within weeks or a few months.

“Right now our slowest commodity mover would be — and that’s part of our infrastructure — would be tubs and lids, the yogurt tubs, and things like that,” Lawson said. “We ship a load of that about every three months.”

Curbie is installing a machine this summer to better handle those products, and Lawson expects the shipping time frame for tubs and lids to increase to about once a month. The cavernous 68,000-square-foot facility is packed not only with loose materials waiting to be sorted, but also large compressed blocks of paper, aluminum cans, and plastics that will be trucked to buyers.

Some processing fluctuates. On the day The Watchdog visited, the plant had a huge pile of cardboard, thanks to several fresh deliveries. Lawson mentioned a situation about two years ago in which the cardboard fiber market dried up “and no one picked up anything for months.”

Aluminum cans are the most valuable commodity Curbie handles, followed by clear or natural colored milk jugs. The least valuable commodity is glass, which Curbie breaks and grinds up when it comes in.

“Our machine separates out anything less than two inches,” Lawson said, adding that the glass product it sells is not super clean. “That’s kind of by design to be able to move that volume of glass and not have to do it by hand.”

Curbie sends glass to another processor that pulls out contaminants before shipping the cleaner material to a buyer.

The highest volume material is cardboard, followed closely by mixed paper — junk mail and office paper. Confusion remains here, too, though, as some kinds of paper, such as tissue or receipts, are not recyclable.

“So almost all of our paper and cardboard go to container board manufacturers,” Lawson said. “All of those plants will take that and break down those fibers or break down the paper into the fiber, and then they’ll kind of press it into big long sheets that are hundreds of feet long.”

Better messaging needed

Herring, the city’s sustainability director, said the city has placed informational stickers on carts, and it has a similar tagging program to the county’s for people putting non-recyclables in their carts. She and Govus also stressed the city and county use the Waste Wizard app, which they encourage customers to download on their phones so they can quickly check what’s recyclable and what’s not.

Additionally, the city and county support efforts by nonprofits and other organizations such as Asheville Greenworks, which through its Hard 2 Recycle event offers recycling events for materials such as Styrofoam and electronics.

“That gives people other outlets for recycling,” Herring said. “Unfortunately, this is not going to get less complicated.”

Fletcher Town Manager Mark Biberdorf said the town lists accepted recyclables on its website, but it does not “placard” the bins.

“Recycling is a service that is constantly changing and that is why we do not ‘placard’ our cans,” Biberdorf said. “Until just recently, Curbie would not pick up milk cartons, but now they are accepting these types of items.”

Black Mountain also does not place any information on its recycling bins. The town started using rolling recycling carts in April, Town Manager Josh Harrold said.

“We place lots of information on our website regarding recycling do’s and don’ts,” Harrold said.

Woodfin Town Manager Shannon Tuch said her town posts the “What to Recycle” flier that Curbie has on its website.

“We also printed the flier and sent a copy, along with FAQs, with a letter to all residents, informing them of the change to our service when we issued roll-out cans in late 2022/early 2023,” Tuch said. “In addition to issuing cans for both trash and recycling, we moved to every other week for recycling collection.”

Buncombe County Board of Commissioners Chair Brownie Newman acknowledged the confusion over what’s recyclable, and said that when it comes to better messaging, there “are many opportunities to do more on this.

“We just recently adopted a resolution to encourage the community to move forward with less use of single-use plastic bags and to use more reusable bags,” Newman said. “I think we are interested in doing more on the public education side,” because this has always been a “really environmentally conscious community.”

But despite that intention, no further funds are budgeted for expanded messaging, Newman said.

Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer said the city “does a lot of messaging” on recycling, including on social media and even via information sent out with water bills. She knows the messaging has a limited effect.

“Clearly, when you go around and see what’s in people’s recycling, you can see we need more education,” Manheimer said.

Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at (828) 337-0941, or via email at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service go to avlwatchdog.org/support-our-publication/.