Lake County recycling takes a load off landfills

Spring is a great time to take those recyclable cans and cardboard you’ve been storing in your shed all winter to the Lake County Solid Waste transfer station between Pablo and Polson.

Mark Johnston, solid waste manager, has worked nearly 20 years expanding Lake County’s recycling program to take more materials than almost any site in the area. Sure, anyone will take your aluminum cans, but Lake County will take your clean steel cans, mixed paper, cardboard, milk jugs, clear drink bottles, metal, vehicle batteries, and tires.

Why can Lake County take plastics and all this other stuff when almost no one else does? It boils down to the care Johnston and his dedicated crew take to help folks sort their garbage.

If you pay close attention to the signs on bins at the site, you can help ensure the recyclables are useable, and thus can be kept out of the landfill, save tax dollars, and help reduce manufacturing energy consumption and waste. But wet cardboard, or any food or dirt, even grease on a pizza box or food in cans or other containers, makes it unusable and the crew has to sort it out and pitch it.

“The worst thing that can happen is if I send off a couple bales of 50,000 pounds of cardboard and it gets to the mill and it tests that there’s too much moisture in it. They would throw out the whole thing and send us a bill.”

Right now, Johnston has a market for clean #1 drink bottles and #2 milk jugs, preferably without lids. That doesn’t include other items like plant pots, plastic chairs, or produce clamshells, even though they have recycling numbers on the bottom. For now, there’s a bin to collect those other plastics, and Johnston is working on a market for them, too. Bins for the other items listed above are in the same area at the site. Plastic bags can be recycled at Wal Mart.

Transportation is a key factor determining whether materials can be affordably recycled. For instance, most glass is more expensive to haul than it is worth for buyers. With proper processing, it could be ground and polished to meet specifications for adding to road material, but this would require the county to buy specialized, expensive equipment. It would be nice, says Johnston, to save the energy that goes into making new glass, but at least it is an inert material, so it is not environmentally hazardous. For those interested in recycling their own glass, he says Bayern brewery reuses certain bottles; food banks can often reuse clean, lidded jars; and you can pay the nonprofit Recycle Works to take your glass in Missoula.

For now, Johnston says it’s more productive to concentrate on “low hanging fruit,” i.e. getting more cardboard, paper, metal, and plastic recycled.

China, once a major purchaser of U.S. plastic garbage, quit buying it due to the high percentage of contamination – everything from diapers to syringes and food scraps. Lake County is only able to recycle plastic because it is well sorted, and dirty items are removed.

Johnston says recycled plastic gets made into such items as “lumber” for porches, car bumpers, carpet, laundry detergent bottles and polyester clothing. The FDA is not yet allowing food grade containers made from recycled material, though that is done in Europe. Recycled plastic is also used to produce energy. Some sites (in other states, none in Montana to date) burn it to produce electricity. The ash concentrates heavy metals from the material, so is expensive to dispose of. Others are looking to convert waste to energy by creating synthetic gasses for fuel. Carbon, hydrogen and other elements can be captured and used to make out of it, you can make all that back into other products including jet fuel and even carbon soil augmentations. But so far these processes have been difficult to scale up from lab.

In the end, says Johnston, to further reduce what goes to the landfill, we would need to reduce how much we create. The U.S. generates an average of 4.5 pounds of garbage per person per day, but rural Lake County, and Montana overall, range above that average.

Lake County residents currently recycle about 10 percent of the county’s waste, saving $50 for every ton not hauled to the Missoula landfill.

“That means I’m not raising solid waste fees to cover that price,” says Johnston.