Trash talk: All your burning recycling questions answered
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DENVER — Colorado has a trashy scorecard when it comes to recycling. In 2023, the state recycled less than 16% of its waste, half the national average. By comparison, California recycles 41% of its waste and Oregon recycles 39% of its waste.
But Colorado isn’t lagging behind simply because some residents are careless or unsure about where to place their litter — the state has some significant barriers that makes recycling difficult.
To answer your burning questions about all things trash, recyclables and compost — and to understand what the state is doing well (and not so well) — Rocky Mountain PBS interviewed Rosie Briggs and Sean Brown.
Briggs is the public education and engagement senior manager at Eco-Cycle, a nonprofit organization that partners with Boulder County to operate the Boulder County Recycling Center. Ecoycle also operates the Center for Hard to Recycle Materials in Boulder, known as CHaRM, which collects hard-to-recycle items like Styrofoam, electronics, mattresses, refrigerators — even toilets.
Sean Brown is the education and program assistant at Denver’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure focused on solid waste management.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Rocky Mountain PBS: In 2023, Colorado diverted just 16% of its waste, half the national average of 32%. Why is Colorado’s recycling rate so low?
Rosie Briggs: Here in Colorado we have a lot of space, and that means we have historically had really low landfill rates. For a while it was $20 to $30 a ton to dump into our front range landfills, while the U.S. landfill rate was about $55 a ton. If you look at places like New England or Europe, where they have much less space, their landfill rates are much higher. As a result, you see recycling infrastructure, funding and legislation rise with it, so there’s an incentive in those places to divert those materials.
Sean Brown: Also, for anywhere outside the front range, it’s very expensive to recycle. Think about mountain towns and the expense of getting trucks up there. Can they even get up the mountain roads in the winter? That can drive down rates companies earn from recycling.
We also just get a lot of pushback from people, for whatever reason, of not wanting to take the extra step to get something recycled, or not really taking the time to understand the system.
RMPBS: How different is the recycling protocol from one municipality to the next, or from one state to the next?
SB: They differ quite a bit. It really comes down to what each city invests in. Boulder’s done a great job investing in its own recycling facility. Denver has its own fleet of trucks and collection services but hasn’t invested in its own recycling facility. Other municipalities may rely much more on private markets.
RB: Whether something is recyclable or not depends on your local facilities and your local markets. But Colorado is moving toward being more uniform when it comes to recycling.
RMPBS: Say more. How are we moving toward being more uniform?
RB: In June 2022, the state passed the Producer Responsibility Program for Statewide Recycling Act, which essentially puts more onus and responsibility on manufacturers of products to fund recycling. The state is still hammering out the implementation of the bill, but getting to the tail end of it, with a goal of it being implemented in 2026.
SB: The bill involves plastics and packaging. The current problem is that a lot of packaging and plastics are not recyclable, or there’s no profit to be made from recycling them.
With this new program, one central nonprofit organization will collect funds from manufacturers and then divvy those funds out to recyclers who are processing those materials. This will ensure recyclers are compensated for accepting this material [thus providing economic incentive for recyclers to recycle it].
RB: It's really exciting that we've even been able to do this on a statewide level.
RMPBS: Is Colorado the first state to implement a program like this or is it modeling this program off of another state’s program?
SB: There's programs like this for all sorts of materials in different states. Paint Care is a program we passed in Colorado about a decade ago — a central organization collects a fee from paint manufacturers. It then divvies out those funds to private market players to recycle unused paint. Some other states are passing similar programs around batteries.
RMPBS: What does ‘packaging and plastics’ refer to? Doesn’t essentially everything we consume involve packaging and plastics?
RB: That’s part of the work that has to be done here. We have to sit down and look at all of the packaging that comes into Colorado. Some is not recyclable at all, and some is expensive to recycle so manufactures should have to pay more. Things that are infinitely recyclable, like glass, manufactures would have to pay less for.
RMPBS: President Trump has been steadfastly working to dismantle U.S. efforts to fight climate change, from pulling out of the Paris Agreement to doubling down on oil and gas drilling. How do you believe his policies will affect funding and prioritization of Colorado’s recycling industry?
SB: In my mind, it will make it harder for smaller municipalities to invest more – they’ll be more on their own. They’ve historically used a lot of grant money to either form programs like a hard-to-recycle program, or to expand some sort of infrastructure. They won’t be able to add capability past what they can already do right now, because, unlike cities like Denver and Boulder, they have smaller tax bases.
RB: It’s hard to predict what this will do. It’s all the more reason to double down on our state and local efforts. One thing we’re lucky to have already established here in Colorado is called the Colorado Circular Communities Enterprise (C3) grant, formerly called the Front Range Waste Diversion grant. In 2019, the state realized the landfill rates were too low, and decided to raise the rates, creating a pot of money that would fund communities engaged in waste diversion efforts. It’s really great that in our state, we had the foresight to build these funds on our own and support communities and nonprofits.
RMPBS: A lot of people around Colorado have Ridwell boxes in front of their homes and apartments, where they place items like electronics, light bulbs and plastic film to be collected. Why don’t our cities recycle these items? And why do we have to pay to recycle them?
SB: Denver handles a little bit of these items already. Our e-cycle coupon program subsidizes electronic recycling costs for residents. Everyone's entitled to one coupon per year, and you can basically bring in as many electronics as you want with that coupon.
Electronics are pretty profitable as you can get great metals out of them, but the labor to extract some of those metals is quite extensive. So cities like Denver will help offset that cost a little bit. And by encouraging the recycling of electronics, Denver is helping ensure they don’t end up in our alleyways and landfills.
But if you look at other materials like textiles or soft plastics, there are so few companies recycling them because the cost is exorbitant, so companies like Ridwell use some of the revenue from consumers to get it to the right place and in some cases, pay for it to be recycled.
RB: When we talk about whether something is recyclable, we’re referencing single stream recycling – the things we put in our regular recycling bins. Our recycling facility in Boulder sorts glass from plastics from carboard. Ridwell, on the other hand, collects hard-to-recycle materials, like apple sauce packets and looks for markets that will recycle those materials. They’re essentially charging you the consumer to provide the money that otherwise wouldn’t be there to get that apple sauce packet turned into something new.
But we as a society need to make this recycling universally accessible and take the financial burden off of the consumer.
RMPBS: You mentioned clothing is a hard-to-recycle item. Why is that? And will Goodwill or another thrift store actually recycle our clothes if they can’t sell them?
SB: Clothing is really tough because right now it’s made up of so many different fiber types, both natural and non-natural synthetic fibers. That makes it extremely labor intensive to separate each of the different fibers. I don't even know if we have machinery or technology to really do that.
The other problem is there’s just so much of it that it creates this existential problem for any recycler to want to take it on.
A lot of the clothes end up going overseas in huge shipping containers.
RMPBS: What countries do these textiles go to?
SB: They often go to African nations who will take the materials and sell them in bulk. They take in large shipping containers, hand sort the materials, sell some items to flea markets, and then the rest of it goes — I have no idea where. It could go right in the trash. They could be burning it. It could be going into water sources. It’s very much something to worry about.
But a lot of these countries have recently stopped taking in our textiles because the volume is so high.
RB: The market for used clothes is just so saturated right now.
But there are really exciting facilities being built, like one in South Denver that’s working on taking apart textiles. It’s the next kind of frontier. It’s a really big one to tackle.
RMPBS: What are the worst items to put in the trash? In other words, what shouldn’t end up in our landfills?
RB: Electronic waste or e-waste is actually legally banned from landfills because of the health and environmental risk, but right now the cost burden of recycling falls to the consumer, often making it inaccessible. Organics [e.g. banana peels] are also a big problem in landfills — they emit huge amounts of methane.
SB: I agree with Rosie. Electronics are especially bad. Heavy metals that leech into our waterways and soil pose massive dangers. Battery fires are also incredibly dangerous — it’s the largest risk factor to sorting facilities right now. A single fire can cost a couple million dollars.
When we put electronics in landfills, we lose revenue from not recycling valuable metals from them, and end up paying more in virgin material extraction to make those products again.
RMPBS: What happens if someone dumps a trash bag or some other form of trash into the compost bin or the recycling bin? Does that bin’s content automatically get dumped into the landfill — or is there someone manually sorting the items?
SB: We have contracts with our processors that say we can have a certain amount of contamination in our loads. Anything above it, they’ll fine us more or we’ll have to increase our rates per load or rates on the next contract. Basically it'll cost the city more money if our processors get contamination rates above a certain threshold. So that's how processors hold us a little bit accountable.
There are also a few small efforts we can do to decontaminate a load. At our transfer stations where we’re pulling together a bunch of loads, we’ll try to pull out obvious trash that we see. But it’s not a perfect system.
If everyone just dumped their trash in the compost, we would overwhelm the system and our contract rates might skyrocket. There is no free lunch in this regard – we’ll pay for it.
So if you as an individual are thinking “don’t worry, it’ll get sorted. It doesn’t matter if I toss my trash in the recycling,” realize that you’re having an exponential impact. We can only handle a certain percentage of that.
RB: Once loads come to a materials recovery facility [e.g. a recycling center] like ours, all of the stuff gets placed on conveyor belts.
Our primary job is to sort one material from the next. We have human hand sorters whose primary job is not to take out contaminants. It’s to sort these materials – like separating paper from plastic containers or separating plastics number one sorted from plastics number two. We have our work cut out for us just in sorting out this single stream into each materials category. So yes, we will take out those contaminants, but that’s not what the facility is there for.
Therefore we always say, “when in doubt, throw it out.” If you're not sure if something is recyclable, just don't put it in the recycling bin.
Also, some contaminants are really problematic at our recycling center, like plastic bags, which can jam the whole system, or syringes, diapers and burritos.
SB: There’s an additional layer of complication with compost: If a non-compost material breaks down in the compost, and our staff don’t catch that, that affects what gets put back into our soil. Let’s say it has pFAS or broken down plastics in it, that's going back into our food and growing soil.
RMPBS: Wow, that’s really scary.
SB: Some processors have screeners that screen out and catch a lot of the contaminants. But these companies have to invest more in machinery to do that. If we just gave them a clean product, we'd all have a cheaper system.
There are certain things they don’t catch, though, that they’ve warned us about, like tiny glass particles or PFAs that are microscopic. So while they do sort out a lot of the larger contaminants, these tiny particles may end up in the final product.
RMPBS: How problematic is it when people put their recyclables or compost into plastic trash bags?
SB: If it's a tied-up plastic bag, we won't know what’s in it. It’s very confusing. We very well might flag it as contamination. So don’t bag those items.
It’s extra labor effort to pull those bags apart, and could also harm our employees, say, if there’s broken bottles in the bag that they can’t see.
RB: If it ends up getting to our facility, we’ll do our best to open the bag and shake it on the conveyer belt. But, like Sean said, it’s dangerous. We don’t know what’s in the bag. And our facility is operating at something like 28 tons per hour. We don't have time to run across and open your bag.
You may have seen some Hefty bags sold as “recyclable.” That company got into some legal trouble. Recycling differs from place to place and maybe there was one pilot or one state or municipality that allowed their bags in their recycling system. But every other recycler wouldn’t take it.
SB: Just Google "Hefty bag lawsuit."
RMPBS: I imagine many of our readers (myself included) order lots of items online from Amazon. How recyclable are cardboard boxes?
SB: I dropped my Amazon Prime recently.
RB: Me too.
Paper and cardboard are all made of tree fibers which is not infinitely recyclable in the way that some other materials like steel, glass and aluminum are, that just go around and around, bottle to bottle, as many times as one wants.
The average fiber material can be recycled five to seven times. They often start out as something like corrugated cardboard or an Amazon box, where the fibers are really long and strong, and there's a lot of life left in those fibers. But every time we recycle a fiber material, those fibers get cut a little bit shorter. A cardboard box may become paper or an office pack and then end up as some kind of low-durability fiber like a paper towel, tissue or toilet paper. If that item keeps getting recycled, it is still valuable because you’re saving a tree – you’re saving virgin pulp. So please recycle your boxes when you get them.
But there’s this Amazon effect. If we all started getting all of our products in these cardboard boxes, then that means we’re producing and consuming way more than we ever were.
SB: I agree. The consumption cycle moves faster than the recycling cycle. We're overproducing wood pulp and boxes at a rate faster than we're recycling them and getting them back in the system. And we don’t get a cardboard box out of a cardboard box. As Rosie said, the material gets flimsier and flimsier each time it’s returned to the system.
RB: In the past, Amazon had little mailers that were paper with bubbly material on the inside. That would be considered trash because it’s multiple materials that our facility wouldn’t be able to separate.
Now Amazon’s blue and white mailers are all plastic for the most part. It’s categorized as hard-to-recycle stretchy plastic that we don't want to go into our regular recycling bin because it jams up our machines. It has to go to a special hard-to-recycle facility.
RMPBS: Which plastics can get recycled in standard recycling facilities? It seems like the one thing everyone seems to not understand!
SB: If you can poke your finger through it — like if it’s really malleable, throw it out [or if you can, bring it to hard-to-recycle facility]. If you can’t poke your finger through it, it’s probably an acceptable plastic.
RMPBS: We couldn’t end this discussion without talking about the peanut butter container conundrum. Should we clean out our plastic peanut butter containers? How much water is too much water to make recycling the container not worth it?
RB: First of all, unless you're running the water for like an hour into your peanut butter jar, you don’t have to worry about the water usage issue. Recycling saves so much water and so many emissions and natural resources.
Things I like to flag for folks: Would it mold and make someone sick if it’s out in a facility for a bit of time? Our materials have to sit for a little while before they get processed. We're moving as fast as we can, but we have a lot of materials. Would it attract things like rats, hornets, or wasps? There’s real people working at recycling centers. Could it spill and contaminate other materials?
Just do your very best to clean it — use a spatula, give the remains to your dog, put a shot of water in it and shake it up. Try your hardest to empty that container.
SB: I boil this question down to this: Is there less than a serving size of the material that was originally in there? If there’s less than a serving size, we’re probably not talking about much food contamination. But can you actually get some more food out of that? If you can, try and clean it out a little further.
RB: We’re both just saying: do your best to empty the container.
Type of story: Q&A
An interview to provide a single perspective, edited for clarity and obvious falsehoods.
An interview to provide a single perspective, edited for clarity and obvious falsehoods.
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