BOSTON (WHDH) - A quick drop in the recycling bin is often made with good intentions.
“It’s good for the world,” said Josh, a student in Boston.
While many hope their efforts are helping to sustain the planet, they admit they don’t know what happens to their items after they are tossed out.
“I care about the planet and it seems a shame for things to just go to waste,” said Rose Marie, a Boston resident. “It would be nice to know what happens to the recycling when it disappears.”
Massachusetts has one of the highest recycling rates in the country, but 7 Investigates wanted to find out if the items you put in your bin are really being recycled.
To find out what happens, we attached six AirTags to different types of recyclable items.
Then we dropped each item off for recycling at various locations across the state, ranging from homes to an apartment complex, to businesses, and to a public bin.
One of the trackers didn’t work properly and lost signal at the business where we recycled it.
A plastic juice jug we dropped at an apartment complex south of Boston was treated like trash immediately.
But there was some good news. Within a week, we tracked four of the items arriving at facilities where recyclables are supposed to go next. Massachusetts has nine of these facilities called Material Recovery Facilities (MRF). Recyclable items get sorted and bundled together at these locations before getting sold to businesses that will use them to make new products.
“The industry makes money off of the material that comes in the door,” explained Gretchen Carey, the former president of MassRecycle. “It is a bad sign for us and our system if a good bottle makes it through and ends up as trash; it’s loss money; financially, that is a bad thing.”
Carey has spent years working with recycling programs in Massachusetts and now runs GCarey Sustainability. She said many of the factors that determine what gets recycled and how often is based on the market for the items. Carey said while the market and demands fluctuate, she believes the overall system does work.
More than 600,000 tons of recyclables are processed at these MRFs annually, according to Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection data.
While four of our items made it to the correct next step in the process, our investigation found making it to a recycling facility doesn’t mean an item will be recycled.
A plastic bottle we dropped at a metro west business left a recycling facility and headed to an Ohio landfill. It was likely sorted out as trash.
“The tune of three million tons of trash goes away somewhere else,” Carey explained. “Most people would not be happy to find out their trash is not only leaving the state but going far away. It is going by rail to places like Ohio and Michigan.”
A cardboard box we dropped in the Worcester area was sent from the recycling center to a facility that turns waste into energy.
So of the five recyclable items we were able to track, three ended up trashed.
There are a few possible reasons for this. The trackers we attached could have fallen off the items and been sorted separately or those trackers may have thrown off the sorting process.
The items could have been flagged as contaminated. That can happen when people toss non-recyclable or dirty items into a recycling bin.
“There is always trash left over from recycling and we call that contamination,” Carey explained. “If anyone has thrown absolutely anything in from gravy, a large vat of yogurt, any kind of thing that is going to cover all of the recycling with food. That is going to end up as trash.”
Carey says while some amount of recyclables will end up being trashed because of contamination, a vast majority of the items at MRFs in Massachusetts go on to get a second life.
“Have some faith in the system,” she said. “It is a whole lot better than most people think, so there is reason for hope. Don’t give up.”
Part of how well the recycling system works can start with the consumer. Items that are clean and dry are more likely to be successfully recycled. Purchasing items made from recyclable goods also helps ensure there is a demand for recycled items.
To find out how to increase the chances that items you put in the blue bin actually get recycled, visit: https://massrecycle.org/recycle-smart-ma/
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