Where does it go?

“The last three years in particular, the Amazon effect has really taken hold,” he said. “If we can still sort cardboard out, it has one of the highest values of all the recovered material.”

Serving some 435,000 customers from East Palo Alto to Burlingame, the Shoreway facility RethinkWaste manages includes a transfer station processing waste heading toward landfills and a material recovery facility which sorts recyclable materials and prepares them for their next use. Collectively, the 16-acre site annually processes some 500,000 tons of material, which La Mariana said is brought to the facility from some 95,000 households and 10,000 businesses by Recology trucks daily.

With some half a million tons of materials being processed at the facility by South Bay Recycling each year, La Mariana is well aware of shifting trends in the way products are packaged and advertised and their effect on the trash traveling through the facility he oversees. From an influx of cardboard boxes from shipments to plastic containers produced in an array of colors, the shifts La Mariana is monitoring can signal changes in the way he and the some 400 workers manage the large-scale operation.

So when China, the purchaser of much of the fiber-based recyclables processed at the facility, announced in October a plan to drop the acceptable amount of recyclables contaminated with material that needs to be sent to a landfill from 5 percent to .5 percent, La Mariana was paying attention. With a recovery rate hovering around 90 percent — meaning that amount of the material going into the recycling plant enters the commodities market and 10 percent goes to landfills — La Mariana said the Shoreway facility produces cleaner recyclables than many other plants.

But it doesn’t come close to meeting the new standards set by the Chinese government and put in place in March. Though the change signaled a shift in type of equipment and processes used at the $35 million recycling facility, it also happened so quickly, waste management authorities across the country could not hope to make the changes needed to adjust to them, he said. Because the market for recyclable material is negotiated at an international level, La Mariana said shifts of this nature are typically phased in over three to five years. But in restricting the recyclables it would accept from other countries in a matter of months, China has sent what La Mariana calls a tsunami of recyclable materials to markets in countries like Vietnam, Malaysia, South Korea and India, which are struggling to keep up with the influx of materials flowing into their countries.

“This is a seismic change in the industry,” he said. “It just changed so rapidly, so quickly. That’s what was kind of stunning.”

Though the shift in the global market primarily affects the some 60,000 tons of recyclable fiber materials — such as cardboard and paper — processed at the facility yearly, La Mariana said it has marked a change in the approach waste management officials take with recycled materials.

He said they have explored selling the material in alternate markets in Asia, but those countries have not paid as much as China previously did for the commodities, which helped offset the cost of the facility’s recycling program. He added those markets are also exploring raising their own standards, so he is also looking into adding more staff to the recycling plant’s operations and making improvements to the equipment used to sort the material so they produce a cleaner product that’s accepted into more markets.

La Mariana expected the dramatic market shift to create a $4 million loss in the operation’s 2018-19 budget, but said the board of the joint powers authority RethinkWaste represents, also known as the South Bayside Waste Management Authority, has remained committed to not increasing the amount of waste sent to landfills, which is more expensive and worse for the environment.

Though he said ratepayers will see the uptick in cost affect their bills because of China’s change of heart, La Mariana noted they can also help the authority keep the cost of meeting the increased recycling standards down. By putting the correct materials in the green, blue and black Recology cans at homes and businesses, customers can ensure cleaner materials go in and out of the recycling plant, he said.

He said plastic bags and black plastics are among the items many think should go in the blue recycling bins, but are not accepted at the facility that processes the recyclable materials. Because plastic bags can get caught in the facility’s sorting machines, he said they should not go in the blue recycling bins but are accepted at the Public Recycling Center located next to the recycling facility. He also explained black plastics do not sell well on international markets because they make for streaky pigments when plastics are melted down for reuse, and should be put in the black bins, the contents of which go to the transfer station and later to a landfill.

La Mariana said the authority is also hoping to spread the word about ways to responsibly dispose of household batteries and cellphones to mitigate the risk of incidents like a four-alarm fire that overtook the recycling facility on Sept. 7, 2016, and caused some $8.5 million in damage. Though staff were evacuated from the facility safely, La Mariana said it forced the facility to close for some four months while recycling materials were processed at other Bay Area plants.

“The good news is nobody got injured that night,” he said. “But that may not be the case if it were to happen again.”

With a conveyer system moving material through the facility to be sorted by an optical scanner and machinery using bursts of air to sort materials of different weights, La Mariana said a lithium-ion battery that went through the recycling facility and was exposed to friction may have caused the 2016 fire. Though the authority previously asked residents to place batteries in zip-top bag on top of their blue carts, as of Sept. 3 they have asked them to put them in zip-top bag on top of their black carts.

La Mariana said he is also supporting state legislation encouraging major retailers to have battery drop-offs at their locations and emphasize the importance of enforcing toxic substance control regulations to further protect the facility’s workers.

“These are real things that injure people,” he said. “They have a right to go home the way they came into work.”

Visit recology.com/recology-san-mateo-county/what-goes-where for information on what materials should go in each waste bin. The Public Recycling Center is located at Gate No. 1 of the Shoreway Facility at 333 Shoreway Road in San Carlos.

anna@smdailyjournal.com

(650) 344-5200 ext. 106