Spokane’s recycling bin blues: Many plastics end up incinerated despite residents’ best efforts

The city of Spokane promised to simplify recycling 13 years ago, telling residents they could dump aluminum cans, plastics, newsprint, paper, cardboard boxes, wine bottles and more into one large blue bin and roll it to the curb on garbage day.

Fulfilling that pledge of what the city called “single-stream recycling” has proven trickier than brochures handed out at the time suggested. Today, many of the items residents are told to recycle end up in a landfill or are taken to the city’s Waste-to-Energy Plant on the West Plains.

Residents with help from city recycling collectors used to take responsibility for sorting recyclables at the curb. Now, it’s all lumped together and hauled to the Spokane recycling center managed by Waste Management, the nation’s largest solid waste company. There, complicated and expensive machinery accomplishes the sorting that had previously been done at home.

This shift helped Spokane catch up to larger, more modern cities and made recycling so convenient that more people did it. Spokane residents tossed 25% more tonnage into their recycling bins within two months of moving to single-stream, climbing another 28% over the next three years. But the stream it generates is less organized than what used to get sorted by hand at the curb.

The newer system was made possible by an $18 million investment by Waste Management into the Spokane Materials and Recycling Technology, or SMaRT, Center. That center underwent major renovations last year with another $18 million investment to process more material and prepare the plant for further recycling amid the post-pandemic increase in online shopping and state legislation that will soon require more communities to create recycling services.

It has also made it easier for residents to “wishcycle” – putting items into the blue bin that no one suggested should be there. For example, the SMaRT Center has problems with receiving lithium ion batteries, which can be recycled only at a designated dropoff and pose a fire hazard in Waste Management’s expensive facility.

The change in 2012 also came with a promise that more types of materials would be recycled and should now be tossed in that blue bin.

When city crews had to physically lift separated tubs of recycling and dump them into segregated compartments in their trucks, the types of things being recycled were limited by space and the amount of labor required, Public Works Director Marlene Feist said. Spokane residents were told that the changes would allow more materials to be recycled for the first time.

But in an industry where few people consider what happens to their “recyclables” after they throw items into the blue bin, the truth is more complicated and controversial.

Many if not most of the plastics listed on the sticker affixed to recycling bins – from washed yogurt cups to takeout containers and plastic tubs for fresh fruits – are not getting recycled.

Instead, those items are culled and sent by Waste Management to the city’s adjacent incinerator.

The economics of recycling

Calling the Spokane Waste Management facility a “recycling center” is a bit of a misnomer. No paper is being pulped and turned into tissues, no beer cans are being melted down and molded for a new life containing seltzer.

Materials collected from blue bins and trucked to the center are placed on conveyor belts and sorted by a mix of manual labor that pulls off material that not even the sticker says should go in a blue bin, then processed further using optics, air blasts, mechanical arms and other technology. Those sorted materials are baled and shipped to buyers that pay by the ton.

Cities receive a cut to help defray some of their costs. Spokane receives 70% of the sale, for instance. In 2024, the city was paid nearly $750,000 for its recyclables, though the recycling system overall cost nearly $2.2 million.

Not all materials demand the same price – aluminum is stable at the high end of most profitable recyclables, while mixed paper and glass are marginal.

Those markets are dynamic, said Robert Jones, Waste Management’s director of recycling and transportation operations in the Pacific Northwest. The price for natural, uncolored high-density polyethylene – what milk jugs are made out of – is particularly high right now, pushing unusually close to aluminum.

The buyers of those products can also change, as was the case after China’s 2017 Operation National Sword policy. Those reforms meant more stringent review of recyclables being exported to China, with a focus on decreasing the amount of low quality, contaminated plastics being imported for reprocessing.

In limited cases, it’s transparent where some of the materials now go. The Inland Empire Paper company, owned by the Cowles Co., which also owns The Spokesman-Review, is a major buyer of the mixed paper and cardboard sorted by the SMaRT Center, according to Waste Management.

Plastics

Plastics degrade as they are recycled and eventually end up as carpeting, playground equipment or park benches, for example.

In order to reliably make a new product with recycled plastics, manufacturers need a relatively high purity supply of specific plastic resins.

“When the end market company receives the bale, any material that was not on the company’s spec list is contamination,” said Jackie Lang, senior area manager for strategic engagement and public affairs for Waste Management. “In situations where there is a high degree of contamination, the end market company will not accept the bales – will not pay for the bales.”

The fewer types of plastics being sorted, the easier it is to do, whether manually or automatically. Nos. 1 and 2 are easy to separate from each other because one floats in water and another sinks, but add in No. 5 plastic tubs, and it becomes significantly more expensive and complicated to maintain the purity of materials, said Professor Alex Jordan, the plastics engineering program director at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.

And while the number on a plastic item may indicate whether it can be recycled, it doesn’t mean it is worth it. Some plastic food containers are made with No. 1 plastic, same as a water bottle, but Waste Management’s markets for No. 1 plastic only accept bottles.

Today, any plastic item coming from Spokane, Spokane Valley and other municipalities that is not a bottle or a jug is incinerated.

Jordan said it was “probably wishful thinking” if there had ever been a prospect for recycling the long list of plastics Spokane included in its 2011 contract with Waste Management.

The incineration of plastics that Waste Management is contracted to take is reportedly a recent change in just the past few weeks, Feist said. That’s why the recycling guide for residents hasn’t changed.

“What we’re trying to do is give Waste Management some time here,” Feist said. “Honestly, this is brand new. If in a few months it doesn’t look like this product is ever going to be recycled, then we will probably update the guidance, but we don’t want to do that with a few weeks of change.”

Waste Management had told the city until recently that every plastic item that is not a bottle or a jug has been baled as “mixed plastic” but is still being recycled, Feist said. Waste Management, citing confidentiality, has never revealed to the city what actually happens to it, Feist added, including whether it is sent to another, better-equipped sorting facility, or is somehow recycled as mixed plastics despite the unreliable manufacturing properties that would entail.

“We have a statement from Waste Management that says it was being recycled, but due to the competitive nature of the market, they aren’t willing to disclose who that goes to,” Feist said.

And unlike other materials going into the blue bin and sent to a buyer, the city doesn’t make any money off of that “mixed plastics” category.

In the past few weeks, whatever market Waste Management had for “mixed plastics” has dried up, the company reportedly told city officials.

“They said they had been working to send the mixed plastics to Canada, but that fell through because of tariffs,” Feist said.

Lang said that the market for mixed plastics “has been on and off, so I don’t have an exact timeline” of the change.

“This could be a scenario where mixed plastics were previously being sent to a secondary processor to extract any remaining commodity value or potentially sent to an alternate end-use market, such as a cement kiln,” Lang said.

There are programs, buoyed by the consumer goods industry, to divert mixed plastics to cement kilns to be burned as an alternative fuel source – much like the city’s Waste-to-Energy incinerator, but with the added pollution from transporting the material to that kiln.

There is also research into fortifying cement with irradiated plastic flakes.

Though Spokane Valley’s contract with Waste Management is worded differently, it does include a provision to collect all plastic “food and beverage containers,” and both cities have identical stickers on their recycling bins. While the city of Spokane manages its own trash and recycling pickup, and also updates those stickers, Waste Management is responsible for updating the stickers in the Valley, said Jill Smith, communications manager for Spokane Valley.

Spokane Valley has sent out more recent information to residents via brochure that further limits the instructions on what should be placed in the blue bin – including plastic tubs, which are not recyclable. Smith said Monday the city was still under the impression those were being recycled.

Jordan is watching with interest research into the industrial-scale production of compatibilizers – chemicals that could allow for the blending of different plastic types during recycling, or into new formulas for existing plastic resins that would allow them to be chemically broken down and more easily reused.

Such concepts exist in the classroom and laboratory, Jordan added. The reality on the ground, he said, remains significantly messier. When plastics without a market end up in the SMaRT Center, it risks contaminating the purity of other bales of material, which could then get rejected by a buyer.

Glass is not recycled

In this region, glass is not recycled. But it is still critical that glass goes into the recycling bin.

When possible, recycling glass is beneficial: It takes significantly less energy to recycle used bottles into new ones rather than starting with sand. But for its weight and low value, shipping glass by the truckload nearly 300 miles west was also of questionable economic or environmental benefit, particularly when glass does not decompose in landfills and produce methane or other greenhouse gases, as does much other garbage.

At one point, enough of glass was uncontaminated that it could be color-sorted for shipping to Seattle for recycling by two glass bottle plants.

“They don’t want it from a single-stream recycler, they want it color sorted, so now they want it specifically from the source,” Spokane Solid Waste Director Chris Averyt said. “They’re targeting wineries that have a specific color and thickness of glass.”

But even before the pivot in 2012 to the big blue bins, bottlers had already grown increasingly disinterested in the eastside’s glass. Faced with fewer options and higher costs, in late 2008 Spokane began taking glass collected through curbside recycling and stockpiling it in mounds in Colbert.

City leaders tried and failed to find a buyer.

“We don’t really want to throw a useful resource into the incinerator or haul it off to a landfill if we can find other uses for it,” then-Mayor Mary Verner said.

Today, much of the city’s glass ends up at the Graham Road landfill, where it is crushed and used to cover landfill piles to mitigate odor. Sometimes it is crushed for limited use in roadbeds.

If glass were tossed in the garbage can, it would end up in the Waste-to-Energy Plant, which burns trash and produces electricity. One study suggests the incinerator has a lower carbon footprint than comparable landfills, and the city has spent $650,000 to study fitting the smokestack with carbon capture technology.

Glass robs the incinerator of energy and doesn’t give any back. It also produces slag and releases heavy metals.

Spokane Valley, on the other hand, doesn’t face the same problems: Its trash is going to the landfill, not the incinerator.

Mixed signals

Lang argues there’s a good reason why the communications to the public don’t quickly reflect changes in the realities of recycling.

“For the system to work well, messaging for the public needs to be simple and not changing every few months,” she wrote in an email. “Our customers are always asking us to keep recycling guidelines as simple and consistent as possible.”

Lang acknowledged there are ways to improve, and suggested the possibility of one day putting stickers on recycling bins with QR codes so residents can get quickly understand how things have changed.

Jones has advocated for “truth in labeling” for plastics, writing a 2024 Seattle Times op-ed that expressed frustration with the confusion caused by the triangle of arrows with a number in the middle and called for packaging manufacturers to have to “accurately label products, so consumers have the right recycling information to sort items into the correct containers.”

Spokane Valley also will review its recycling contract and the guidance it sends to residents later this year, Smith noted.

The entirety of the state’s recycling systems could also soon be in for a radical change. The Legislature recently approved a bill establishing an Extended Producer Responsibility that would require packaging manufacturers to pay into a pot that would be used to invest into a makeover for the state’s recycling system and encourage the use of less packaging that cannot be recycled.