I often find myself in front of the recycling bin, turning a discarded container over and over in my hands, trying to locate and decipher the tiny number inside the chasing arrows. Or trying to draw on some higher power to help me figure out if the item really is recyclable. It’s not always obvious. Most recycling programs won’t take ice cream cartons, for instance. There is a reason, of course, but standing there by the recycling bin, I don’t know it, do I?
And I certainly don’t want to contribute to contamination of the waste stream. If I put the ice cream carton in the recycling bin, and it’s not recyclable, what happens to it?
Okay, the reason ice cream cartons are not recyclable is that they are coated with wax, plastic, or another waterproof substance. The first step in recycling paper is floating it in water to reduce it to pulp. That won’t work with the waterproof coating. And that usually means they’ll end up at the landfill. The same applies to frozen food boxes and cardboard beer and pop carriers.
The truth is the recycling business is governed by local rules which can vary significantly across the state. That’s because the haulers that pick up your recycling bin have different systems to sort the waste and have varying access to the businesses that ultimately do the work of recycling. And markets are constantly shifting, so we get confused about what to do.
How are we doing?
Contrary to our shiny self-image, Minnesota is doing a pretty bad job of recycling and making new products from our waste. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) estimates that nearly two-thirds of what ends up in landfills and garbage incinerators in the state could have been reused, recycled, or composted.
To be sure, we’re not the worst among states; a recent study compared recycling rates for certain products in the various states and found rates from 2 percent in West Virginia to 72 percent in Maine, with Minnesota in the middle at 49 percent.
Part of the problem is the range of raw materials used in products, especially plastics: all those numbers inside the chasing arrows. Generally, #1 and #2 can be recycled, and sometimes #5.
But the shape of the object can also make a big difference. Emma Pardini, Coordinator of the Environmental Program at the Western Lake Superior Sanitary District in Duluth (WLSSD), says in many systems, anything smaller than the palm of your hand is likely to be sorted out and sent to a landfill. “When we’re talking about whether something is recyclable, we’re really asking if it’s sortable,” she says. “There are many products made of recyclable plastic resin, but not in a shape that is easily sorted.” In many facilities, an early step in the process is to break the glass. “They shake everything until the glass breaks, and then the small glass pieces can be sorted further, but anything that’s little, no matter what it’s made of, is going with that glass.” So small items like milk carton caps and even plastic medicine containers can move along with the glass until they’re removed as contaminants. “I always encourage people to talk to their hauler, because every facility is different: their infrastructure, their process, the number of staff they have to hand-sort material, their market contacts,” says Pardini.
WLSSD sets and enforces the rules on solid waste and wastewater in a 530 square mile region around Duluth. The region’s landfill is expected to be full in 2026. Recycling diverts material from the landfill, and the agency has been working since 1971 to get residents to recycle more. Still, Pardini has a gentle attitude.
She acknowledges that the rules can be confusing, and she knows many of us are anxious to do the right thing without being sure about how. “Recycling is a lever we’ve learned about that we can pull to help our communities and the environment,” she says. “But it’s not the only lever out there.” We have other levers we can pull, including “precycling.”
“When you’re buying something off the shelf, think about what you’re going to do with it when you’re done with the product,” advises Pardini. “If you’re deciding between a glass jar of pasta sauce and a plastic jar of pasta sauce, you can be confident the glass can be recycled over and over. With glass, you don’t have to be standing in front of the recycling bin at nine o’clock at night wondering if it belongs in the bin. You can make that part of the decision-making process when you buy.”
Recycling as we know it can be confusing and less than perfect, yes. But rational decisions about what to do with waste could become simpler soon. Several bills in the legislature this year are designed to do that. They would flip the current pattern and make producers take responsibility for the entire life cycle of their products. It’s a global trend, based on the idea that manufacturers control product design and thus bear the greatest ability and responsibility to reduce toxicity and waste.
Electronic waste
A bill for electronic waste collection and recycling, SF3940/HF3566, is a major update of Minnesota’s electronics recycling program, which started in 2007. The bill aims to recycle a broader range of products and sets up a system called Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR, to pay for itself. We already use this system for paint. When you buy a can of paint, you pay a small fee (currently about a dollar for a gallon) to manage the paint you don’t use.
Nationally, paint manufacturers set up a non-profit entity to manage the recycling program. The PaintCare Recovery Fee is used mostly to reimburse county-run Household Hazardous Waste facilities and paint retailers that accept your half-empty can and either re-sell it or send it on for processing into other paint, fuel, or other uses.
Similarly, the proposed new electronics law would add a 4.4 percent recycling fee to televisions, computers, peripherals, FAX machines, DVD players, and gaming consoles. That’s projected to raise $90 million yearly, which would pay for the collection, transportation, and recycling of the covered items.
Maria Jensen, Co-Director of Recycling Electronics for Climate Action, has been helping to shepherd the bill through the legislature. She says the response has been mostly positive so far.
“This is very much a jobs-positive bill and also a critical metals-positive bill,” she says. Jensen is co-author of a study that detailed the cost of our poor e-waste recycling record and predicted that recovering 68 critical metals from electronic waste would add more than $3 billion to the economy and create more than 3,000 jobs.
The study found that on average, Minnesotans generate 46 pounds of e-waste annually and we collect less than 25 percent of that for recycling. Tons of heavy metals end up in landfills, where they leach out and pollute groundwater. And the now-ubiquitous lithium batteries are causing alarmingly destructive fires in sorting facilities and landfills.
“This measure will pay for itself just by avoiding fires,” Jensen says.
And it would save consumers money, she says. “To recycle a microwave today, you have to pay $20 to $25 dollars. For a smoke detector, today you pay up to $15; under this program, it would be 92 cents. It spreads the cost evenly among everyone purchasing these devices rather than the few who are trying to recycle them and it removes the cost barrier in recycling so people are incentivized to do the right thing.”
It even includes a grant program to help recycling companies improve air quality in and around their facilities.
Packaging waste
Another bill takes aim at the mountains of packaging waste that are now part of our world.
HF3577/SF3561, the Packaging Waste and Cost Reduction Act, would require all packaging to be reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2032.
Again, it’s based on the concept of producer responsibility. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency would create an advisory board which would study current practices and set goals. Producers would create a Producer Responsibility Organization (PRO) to develop a stewardship plan to meet those goals and charge members fees to pay for the system.
According to MPCA Assistant Commissioner Kirk Koudelka, the bill represents a wrap-around effort to deal creatively with waste. “It not only looks at making sure we can see how to recycle or compost, but also how to do waste prevention, reuse and refill,” he says. “It’s designed to drive producers to make products recyclable,” he says.
A key step would be setting criteria to describe what is really recyclable. Oregon is one of the few states ahead of Minnesota in shifting to producer responsibility.
The criteria there include collection, processing and making sure it goes to a responsible market to be turned into something else. It should be as easy to recycle as it is to throw things in the trash. Once the criteria are set, only products that meet the rules can be collected for recycling. “In Minnesota if you’re not on that list, in the future you can’t sell your product,” says Koudelka.
This approach represents a major shift in the age-old model in which industry freely shifts its costs to consumers and governments. But Koudelka says it may not necessarily raise costs for consumers. “Studies have shown that in Canada, there’s been no cost increase on individual products sold to consumers as a result of producer responsibility,” he says. “As they redesign their products, there could be some internal cost savings. They’ll have to either make them easier to recycle or devise a new system to collect them. It puts the decision-making on the producers.”
The planning process will be lengthy. The legislation currently requires that the list of criteria be ready in March of 2027. The studies that will be the basis of the stewardship plan will be designed to identify gaps in the current system and opportunities to improve it. The producer fees will help pay for investments in shorter trucking routes and more robust end markets, according to Mallory Anderson with the Partnership on Waste and Energy, a project of Hennepin, Ramsey, and Washington counties.
The research will also point to reasonable expectations for recycling outcomes, and Mallory expects Minnesota’s performance could rise from less than 50 percent, where it’s been stuck for decades, to 65 percent or 75 percent. That may sound unambitious, but Mallory says the process will be incremental. “A big part of this policy is continual improvement. We’ll do a lot of work in the first few years on creating robust markets and setting up infrastructure for further recycling.”
Other bills
The MPCA has its own bill this year, HF4721/SF4711, calling for more comprehensive recycling of lithium batteries and rechargeable batteries.
Believe it or not, there’s a separate bill to deal with shrink wrap for boats, HF3320/SF3427.
And of course there’s an old favorite, a “bottle bill,” HF3200/SF3260, calling for deposits on beverage containers and placing producer responsibility on distributors and importers. That’s been proposed for years.
In this year’s short session and given the prodigious number of bills passed last year, it’s hard to imagine passage of any, let alone all, of these bills. But the MPCA’s Kirk Koudelka says they’re moving through the process. “There’s been a lot of hearings, there’s a lot of interest from a wide range of stakeholders, so we’re hopeful we’ll be able to make some of these large changes to help deal with some of these difficult issues,” he says.
