Honeycan Recycling Method 102: It is often not a yes/no (Recyclable/Non) Question - but WHY

"Honey, Can I Recycle This?" Part 2

Follow up lesson from HoneyCan Method 101

We constantly see two bins for our discards: one labeled "trash" and another "recycling." In cities like Barcelona (my second domicile), there are multiple bins. Two are intended for trash—one small round litter bin on the street corner and one large dumpster, lifted and emptied by a truck, which should probably take only bagged trash. Four are for recycling. Paper, Compost, and Glass are fairly obvious (though each produces its own "HoneyCan" questions). Then there are the carters - the same as the Irish and Russian Jewish immigrants to USA cities, who push carts up and down the city streets collecting scrap metal (and electronics).  Those will be the subject of another blog.

The most confusing one for my Ph.D. spouse is the yellow "container" bin, which accepts both metal and plastic packaging. And most of her questions are about plastic.

Often, when she asks me about a plastic container—say, a yogurt cup whose mouth is wider than its base—I consider three explanations.

1) Appeal to Authority. Whatever the Barcelona recycling webpage says, do that. Someone else has already made the decision, and neither of us needs to understand why.

2) Prioritize. What is the worst outcome of getting it wrong? What happens if we mistakenly recycle something that shouldn't be recycled, versus mistakenly throwing away something that could have been?

3) Simplify. If I want her—and millions of other people—to recycle with confidence, perhaps the technically perfect answer doesn't matter very much. Give participants rules that don't discourage them from doing the things with the greatest positive impact.

And... did I say just three explanations?

4) Pontificate. Give her a firehose of information about the history of natural-resource consumption, commodity markets, MRF technology, mining, international trade, and their implications for the future of the planet and human society.

Longtime readers of this blog already know which one I'm naturally inclined to choose. My wife just wants to know where to put the yogurt cup.

HoneyCan Method Recycle 101: When your partner asks "Honey, Can I Recycle This?"

The HoneyCan Method™

"Honey... Can I Recycle This?"

Many of us in the recycling industry eventually develop what I call the HoneyCan Method.

The HoneyCan Method isn't about knowing everything.  It's about knowing what matters most.

In my case, my life partner is a brilliant multilingual Ph.D., an endowed professor at Middlebury College, and—if I'm being honest—the principal reason Good Point Recycling survived its early years. Every time I took a business risk, or simply made a bad call, she quietly kept the household solvent until I figured things out.

This morning she walked into the kitchen holding an empty white-and-blue deodorant stick.

"Honey... can I recycle this?"

Every recycler reading this already knows the problem.

It's an admittedly difficult question. The Addison County Solid Waste Management District could give one answer. The hauler another. The MRF operator another. And after thirty-five years in the recycling business, I could probably give half a dozen different answers before breakfast.

Experience has taught me that this is usually a mistake.

(🟢 See Geek Note #1 if you're one of my fellow recycling nerds.)

Years ago I would have launched into a discussion of resin codes, MRF sorting equipment, commodity markets, "acceptable contaminants vs. recycling poison" and why the answer is "it depends."

If you use the blog search box for "cognitive dissonance", you'll see a recurring theme (and personal struggle).

Too Much Information is its own form of misinformation.

My wife has patiently spent years listening to me mansplain to her why tearable plastic isn't necessarily paper, why waterproof paper isn't really paper, and why a plastic window in an envelope matters. I have explained fiber recovery, hydropulpers, contamination rates, and every other fascinating detail that recycling professionals love.

She has a lecture to give in ten minutes.

She doesn't want a graduate seminar in materials management.

She wants to know whether to put the deodorant stick in the trash or the blue recycling bin.

That's how the HoneyCan Method evolved.

"Honey... can I recycle this?"

I also recognize the expression she gives me now. We call it the "smile and wave."

She genuinely appreciates that I've devoted my career to recycling. She even finds my enthusiasm charming.  But in this context, she's like 5-year-old Robin taken to visit great-aunt Nelle Freeland in her Alzheimer's bed, with grandma instructing me "Smile and wave, Robby, she doesn't remember you but she likes that".

My wife just doesn't need every deodorant stick to become a discussion that somehow wanders through the Basel Convention, Indonesian paper mills, cognitive dissonance, and—because this is my blog—the General Mining Act of 1872.

(🟢 Geek Note #2 is waiting patiently at the bottom if that's your thing.)

So after thirty-five years, here's how I explain recycling to beginners.

1. Aluminum is incredibly important.

If you recycle just one aluminum can, you've probably accomplished more environmental good than correctly sorting a dozen questionable plastic items.

Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy that, as the old recycling saying goes, it's roughly equivalent to filling that can halfway with gasoline.

In fact, if you have to choose between spending your time worrying about 20 odd plastic containers or picking up one abandoned aluminum can from the parking lot...

Pick up the aluminum can.

The free market already understands this. You almost never find aluminum cans sitting in a landfill in the developing in the world for very long... people actually live at the landfill to prevent that. Someone will recover them because they actually have value.

2. Steel and electronics matter more than most people realize.

Scrap metal is underappreciated in municipal recycling discussions precisely because private markets already recover so much of it. The recycling industry doesn't spend much time celebrating things that already work well. REMA is way bigger than Packaging Recycling for a good rea$on.

3. Paper is important.

But clean paper is more important than contaminated paper. One plastic bag in a paper bale doesn't discount the whole bale, but it's an enormous source of problems (the Indonesian origin of the Basel Convention BAN Amendment on mixed plastic, geek friends, was the plastic residue at a recycled paper mill).

Usually it's better to throw away one questionable item than contaminate an otherwise valuable bale of paper.

Let's just skip talking about glass (true recycling vs. glass aggregate "diversion") except to say "not the ceramic ones".

KISS.  Keep It Simple Stupid.

After all these years, I have not completely stopped trying to teach people hundreds of recycling rules.

But more than ever I try to teach priorities.

The environmental benefit isn't evenly distributed across every item in your recycling bin.

Some materials matter much more than others.

My wife now does something that makes me smile every time we're in Barcelona.

She routinely reaches into the public litter baskets, rescues aluminum cans, and drops them into the recycling containers located every block or two.

She also no longer feels guilty about throwing away a questionable plastic item.

That's progress.

The Ptolemy-Liability Trap: Simplified Recycling Lifecycle Narratives Tend to Revolve Around You

The Vermont free-mail, coupon-funded newspaper "Hometown" is published and mailed by the Burlington Free Press - which, with its Headliner newspaper, follows the opposite, paywall approach, online. So I'm in a bit of a quandary in presenting the snapshot, below, of the opening paragraphs of the article. Well, it's a fair use claim, and also it's common practice for newspapers to show the "lede" (opening paragraphs), so here's what catches my attention this morning.

Burlington Free Press Thanksgiving "Hometown" Edition

Joel Banner Baird of Burlington Free Press may well have started a "recycling" story for the same reason that @AdamMinter told me those stories normally appear around holidays.... they are easy to write, require little more than a google page one of research, and seem to appeal to everyone. They are not time sensitive, so a reporter can write it a week ahead, and get home for the holidays faster. But at least in the opening paragraphs, Baird bluntly avoids the normal "gotcha" narratives common in holiday journalism (someone made millions of dollars recycling trash was the go-to in the 1980s, your recyclables didn't really get recycled in the 1990s, lather-rinse-repeat for every buyers-market, sellers-market cycle). It leads, but does not bleed.

The opening interview with Michael Noel (nice holiday namesake) of TOMRA, the master-redemption center recycling provider and owner of most supermarket reverse-vendor container machines, avoids falsely choosing between either "It was the best of times."  

...Or, "It was the worst of times".

Which is the most environmentally sustainable Container for my holiday beer?

Michael Noel tells Joel Banner Baird "The short answer is, it's complicated". That is an honest answer to the decades of environmentalists (spoilt brat) privileged demands to "choose" the "best" beer container, vs. the equally misguided alt-right "recycling is Bulls**t" waste-makers. Both camps are uber-susceptible to cognitive dissonance (or perhaps vice versa, those prone to cognitive dissonance probably lean toward extreme positions). The more they choose one answer (only use this one vs. nothing matters, environmentalists are wrong), the louder they both get. Outrage is not Expertise.

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Scrap Metal Fraud: Diary of Export Heart Attack

Dear Diary,

This is a story of a scrap dealer, who has to make payroll while meeting Responsible Recycler standards in an international marketplace.  This is all true, all happening in the past two weeks.

China 2005

Monday... We are still dealing with the aftermath of a missed wire transfer from a USA client.   We took the wire (about $60K) for granted and wrote some big checks against it.   Someone at the sender's local bank claimed to be asleep at the switch (though I think it should be investigated whether the money was withdrawn from the client account on the day of the wire, and the bank was kiting it for 24 hours).   Bank fraud can mean the bank's fraud.  We were hit with about $1600 in bounced check fees and panicked phone calls with our own payees.  I took screen shots of our account showing the wire was late and the correspondence from the client sending us the money that their account had cleared it the day earlier.

Rachael, our CFO, makes the case that the wires are outrageous, taking $20-30 from the sender client and then $18 at our receiving bank... wonders whether we should use more paper checks to avoid the accumulated bank fees.

Tuesday:   To make up for the panic among our suppliers for the bounced checks the previous Friday (one of our loads was actually held and not unloaded until we sent another wire to cover the bad check, truck idling), we issue more checks to get the payables under 30 days.  To do that I need to sell some of the $150K in scrap metal that we have processed in the building.

Wednesday:  We re-double sort the green board to eliminate the "jelly bean" boards (yellow, purple, red, and blue boards typically made in China and typically having much less gold content), to get a better price than our last load sent to the R2 compliant buyer.   That takes extra staff time, and it's part of the reason we have so much metal value in inventory that I now desperately need to cash out.  The high grade printed circuit boards had been processed by our USA buyer for sale to Umicore or Boliden in Belgium or Dowa in Japan... it takes 90-120 days for our buyer to get the reconciliation on their load, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They evidently got some loads back with way less gold than they expected and were told that the culprit was "jelly bean" boards.  They factored their loss over average loads going forward, and my company took a $6,000 hit.  They admitted they didn't know whose boards had how many jelly beans, it was an average spread out to cover their losses.