Tag: recycles

Money Back for Water Bottles

  • Nationally, we go through more than 30 billion non-carbonated drinks every year (Photo by Lester Graham)

Most states don’t have bottle deposit laws to encourage people to return their empties. Only eleven states do. Now, some are expanding their recycling programs to include bottled water. Sadie Babits reports the states know requiring a deposit for the bottles will keep them from ending up in landfills:

Transcript

Most states don’t have bottle deposit laws to encourage people to return their empties. Only eleven states do. Now, some are expanding their recycling programs to include bottled water. Sadie Babits reports the states know requiring a deposit for the bottles will keep them from ending up in landfills:

Every time Mary Nemmers buys a bottled beverage, she’s pays a five cent deposit at the register.

She wants to get that money back eventually. So she saves up her bottles and once a month brings them here to New Seasons Market in Portland, Oregon.

(sound of bottles being sorted)

Nemmers thinks this is a pretty convenient system. She gets to shop while a store employee sorts and hand counts her bottles.

Today Nemmers is getting nine dollars and change for her empties. While she’s glad to get that money back, she’s excited to learn that Oregon’s bottle deposit program has expanded.

“I just got some news that they’ll take back all the cans for deposits. Not just the ones that they sell. That started in January and that saves me an extra trip.”

That’s only part of the change. People in Oregon now also get five cents for every water and flavored water bottle they return to stores. That ends up being a lot of bottles.

Nationally, we go through more than 30 billion non-carbonated drinks every year. And that number is growing. Most of them end up in a landfill.

For Heather Schmidt, it makes sense to require a deposit for these bottles. She runs the sustainability program at New Seasons.

“We’re getting more back from our customers and that’s a good thing (chuckles). And we know that there’s quite a bit of water purchased, you know, and we’re selling it we want to take it back.”

Out of the eleven states that have bottle deposit programs, Oregon is one of the first to include bottles for water and other non-carbonated drinks.

Maine includes just about every beverage bottle. Connecticut adds bottled water to its program in April. New York and Massachusetts are debating similar expansions.

Mary Nemmers says it was about time that her state recognize that something needed to be done to make sure water bottles stay out of landfills.

“Because I do a lot of walking and I’ve seen lots and lots of water bottles thrown around and in trash cans. I assume that the expansion will reduce that and I’d like to see Oregon stay on the cutting edge of recycling.”

Not everyone is thrilled.

I spoke with the president of the Northwest Grocery Alliance who told me stores want recycling off their property.

A spokesman for the major food outlet Winco said the same thing. Stores say it’s messy to deal with “garbage” and stores have to dedicate staff time to recycling.

Heather Schmidt says at New Seasons Market, they don’t mind.

“Operationally, because we’ve increased the volume, it does mean we’ve had to add some staff labor to that to process but it’s something that we’re committed to.”

While most of the bottles are hand counted at New Seasons Market stores, large chain grocery stores use reverse vending machines.

I can stick a redeemable bottle into the machine. The machine checks to make sure it’s the right kind of bottle. Once it’s accepted, the bottle gets crushed and I get my five cents. Those crushed bottles, along with the plastic ones, end up here.

(sound of recycling plant)

We’re inside a glass and plastic bottle recycling plant. It’s a labyrinth of conveyer belts and equipment. The last drops of stale beer and old soda pop in the bottles make it smell sort of like your gym shoes meet the town dump.

Sadie: “Can we check out where the plastic bottles go?”

John: “Yes, We’ll go back this way.”

That’s John Anderson. He’s the President of the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative.

“Now, the plastic, we have seen an increase, but we’re only two months into this expansion at this point and it’s a slower time of year for water and flavored water.”

We stop in front of three bales of recycled plastic that remind me of massive hay bales.

I can pick out the water bottles scrunched together with a lot of soda bottles. These plastic bales will be sold to manufacturers – mostly overseas – who will turn this plastic back into something useable.

Anderson says all of the glass though, stays local and gets turned back into beer bottles.

Bottle deposits work.

The states that have bottle deposit laws have dramatically high bottle recycling rates – as high as Michigan’s 97%.

But the U.S. average is below 40%. The rest of those bottles spend forever in a landfill.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sadie Babits.

Related Links

A New Life for Old Phones

  • Recellular employee Myron Woods tests phones to see if they can be resold or re-used. Here, he's got a Nokia 6019, the model reporter Shawn Allee dropped off for recycling. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

It’s pretty clear Americans like their cell phones. On average, we get a new one about every
eighteen months. And yet, we hold on to the old ones, too; the government estimates there’re
about one hundred million lying around in closets and drawers. Shawn Allee found people eager
to take your old phones – if only you’d recycle them:

Transcript

It’s pretty clear Americans like their cell phones. On average, we get a new one about every
eighteen months. And yet, we hold on to the old ones, too; the government estimates there’re
about one hundred million lying around in closets and drawers. Shawn Allee found people eager
to take your old phones – if only you’d recycle them:

I put an old phone in a recycling box a while ago.

I checked around and found it went to one of the nation’s largest phone refurbishers.
It’s a company called Recellular. And it’s based in an old auto parts plant in Dexter, Michigan.

“It’s a big open space with a lot of room to handle the 20,000 phones that come in every day.
You need a lot of benches, you need a lot of cubby holes.”

Vice President Mike Newman points to some incoming collection boxes.

“Every box is a mystery. You have no idea what’s in there until you open it up and start
sorting it out.”

Newman’s company is hunting for working phones to resell here or overseas. Before that, his
people sort and test every model of phone.

And workers like Myron Woods remove personal data.

“Contacts, the voice mails, the ringtones, text messages. Hit OK and the phone’s cleared
out. After that you make sure the phone calls out. You get a ringtone, you hear the
operator, and then you’re done.”

Newman: “In 2008 we processed almost 6 million phones and for 2009, we’re looking at
more than double-digit growth again.”

And of those six million phones, Mike Newman says he can sell about half of them. He’d do
better if people like me didn’t keep phones in drawers for so long.

“The longer you wait, the less value it has so, if you move down from that old phone, as
hard as it might be to part with it, it’s really important to recycle it as soon as possible – it
will do the most good.”

What about Newman’s other phones – the duds? He has a different company near Chicago
recycle them.

Allee: “And here they are … holy mackerel.”

I’m now at Simms Recycling Solutions. A conveyer belt is moving thousands of phones.

“There’s the end of the line for your cell phones.”

Mark Glavin is the VP of operations here. He says there’s gold, silver, and other metals in the
phones he gets from Recellular.

“The cell phones get shredded into somewhat uniform-sized pieces.”

Glavin sticks the pieces in an oven to burn off the plastic – and then grinds what’s left.

Glavin: “That’s what’s left of the cell phones.”

Allee: “It’s almost like the powder you use for a baby, except its black.”

Glavin: “Yes.”

Glavin says there’s gold and other metal in the powder – so metal companies will buy it.

He also has stubborn chunks of metal that won’t grind.

“Those get pulled off and then those go to the furnace room to be melted.”

Glavin: “This is appropriately named the furnace room, where all the melting goes on. It
gets nice and toasty in here in the winter time.”

Allee: “Wow, what are we seeing here?”

Glavin: “After the material has been melted, we’ll cast it into molds and into 30-40 pound
ingots.”

He’ll sell metal from these ingots along with that black powder.

Recellular and Glavin’s company recovers about 96 pounds of gold from its phones each year.

Plus, that gold’s worth more than a million dollars. And recycling saves energy, and prevents
pollution from gold mining.

Glavin says recycling is taking off, and he can always count on people wanting the latest and
greatest phones.

Glavin: “Pretty soon your cell phone will be a chip like, on an ear-ring and a watch, and
there’s nothing to it except for a very tiny electronic.”

Allee: “And people will still swap it for the next one.”

Glavin: “Without a doubt.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Recycling Prices Down in the Dumps

  • (Photo by Julie Grant)

The recycling industry is the
latest to take a hit from the world’s
economic problems. Rebecca Williams
has more:

Transcript

The recycling industry is the
latest to take a hit from the world’s
economic problems. Rebecca Williams
has more:

The bottom has dropped out of most commodity markets: recycled paper,
metals, everything. It’s tied to the collapse of economies worldwide.

Tom Watson is with the National Waste Prevention Coalition. He says
recycling companies’ profits are way down.

“A lot of it is connected with China – and the demand for fewer products
there so they need less of the recycled materials for the packaging.”

Watson says China is buying a lot less of our recycled paper and cardboard
to make packaging, because we’re all buying a lot fewer products from
China.

That means recyclables are stacking up in a lot of places. Recyclers are
starting to talk about charging garbage companies to drop stuff off. And that
might mean we’ll be paying higher trash bills.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Bike Co-Op Pedals Self Sufficiency

  • A volunteer at re-Cycles looks for a replacement. Volunteers teach bike repair to amateurs and novices. Their goal is to get people out of their cars and onto their bikes. Photo by Lisa Routhier.

When it comes to bicycles, many of us are weekend warriors. The thought of riding a bike to work is intimidating – especially given the chance it might break down. Now, some cycling advocates are helping ordinary people become amateur bike mechanics. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly visited a community-run repair shop and has this report:

Transcript

When it comes to bicycles, many of us are weekend warriors. The thought of riding a
bike to work is intimidating – especially given the chance it might break down. Now,
some cycling advocates are helping ordinary people become amateur bike mechanics.
The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Karen Kelly visited a community-run repair
shop and has this report:


(ambient sound in shop)


It’s the perfect day to work on your bike.
Rainy and cold. But the forecast says warmer weather is ahead.


And that’s why people and bikes are packed into a so-called
bicycle cooperative based in Ottawa, Canada. It’s called Recycles.
And it’s a bike repair shop that’s open to everyone.


Its walls are lined with cookie tins filled with greasy bicycle
parts. Fenders and inner tubes hang from the ceiling.


For just a few bucks an hour, you can get a bike stand, access to
tools and advice from mechanics.


The shop is run by ten volunteers who keep it open two nights a
week and on Sundays.


Mark Rehder is the coop’s director. He’s a firm believer that anyone can fix a bike.


“If they’re a complete novice, we’ll start. We’ll sort of,
‘here.’ We’ll do it or show them and hand them the screwdriver or
the wrench and say ‘you keep doing that and when you get that part
off, let me know.’ And then so the head mechanic will move on to
someone else and the person, ‘okay, I’ve got the thingamajig off’
and we’re ‘okay, now you have to clean that out’ and just step by
step…guide them through the thing.”


The coop was started seven years ago by a group of dedicated
cyclists. Lloyd Deane is one of the coop’s founders. He says their
mission is simple – to get people out of their cars.


“There is an alternative out there and it’s quiet, it’s
healthy, it’s cheap, it’s uncomplicated and you can actually fix
it yourself and we’re a living testament that people with no
mechanical skills whatsoever can come in here and fix their own
transportation.”


(pedals turning)


Volunteer mechanic Rob Galdins focuses intently on the bicycle
wheel spinning in front of him. He works on one side of the bike
as a client tightens nuts on the other.


“We’re putting on some new brake pads and we’re just sort of
centering the brakes so that they hit the rim squarely…
And yeah, tighten that nut. There’s already a nut there. Okay….”


Nearby, volunteer Jennifer Niece is making the wheel true on her
own bike. She says this experience has changed the way she uses
her bicycle.


“I do a lot of touring and I wasn’t really able to do that by
myself until I started volunteering here because if I got a flat
tire or if my brakes busted or something out on the road, I
wouldn’t have been able to fix it. So it’s really valuable for me
to learn that.”


When the volunteers aren’t helping other people, they’re refurbishing
used bikes. They sell them to keep the operation going. But the
group also receives some outside support.


Most of their tools and parts are supplied by the Mountain
Equipment Co-op, a Canadian nonprofit that sells outdoor gear.
Mark Vancoy is the social and environmental coordinator at the
Ottawa store. He says they support Recycles because it fills a void in the
community.


“If you were to go to a bike shop, a lot of times … the
shop rate is, for most people, sort of out of range for them. So this
really empowers people to be able to one, afford to have a bike
and two, to keep them up in working order.”


The bicycle co-op is probably one of the smallest volunteer
organizations in Ottawa. It has a tiny budget, no rules, and virtually no
hierarchy. But the leader of this band of volunteers, Mark Rehder, is
convinced it’s an ideal way to change society.


“It’s great to go up on parliament hill and wave the signs,
‘down with Bush’ or whatever, but at a local level is where change
is most effective. It’s just little groups like us, doing little
things and connecting with the other little groups and maybe every
now and then sort of pulling out a pillar that was propping up
something society didn’t need anyways.”


(sound of bike shop)


Rehder says sometimes they’ll talk about politics. Mostly, they’re focused on
flat tires and broken chains. But many of them share the same dream –
they look forward to a day when cyclists will have the roads to themselves.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Karen Kelly.