While other cities and counties are reducing their recycling, St. Lucie is expanding with the new Wrap Recycling Action Program – WRAP.
“This program is a collection system,” said Rebecca Olson, the county’s recycling coordinator.
Recycling picked up in Port St. Lucie goes to the county’s Bailing and Recycling Facility in Fort Pierce.
People are not supposed to put packing, bagging and wrapping plastics in curbside recycling bins. Oh, those plastics are recyclable. But the problem is flexible plastics get into recyclables’ sorting and bailing machinery and cause damage. So, things such as plastic grocery bags shouldn’t go into the curbside bins … leaving people with the quandary of throwing away recyclable plastic.
To end that psychological discomfort – and to benefit the environment – the county has helpfully set up collection bins for packing, wrapping and bagging plastics at the Port St. Lucie Community Center and Morningside Branch Library.
“The idea is threefold,” Olson said. “The first is keeping these plastic bags out of our (recycling-machines) system. The second reason is we want them to be recycled. Third, just keeping them out of the waterways and environment.”
That’s a big issue, too, as awareness is growing about the hazards of plastics to the world’s oceans and waterways. Shore and marine animals are inadvertently consuming plastic and it works its way through the food chain. For example, throw a plastic wrapper into the water and it looks a lot like a jellyfish. That’s not just to human eyes. Sea turtles have been filmed eating bits of plastic apparently thinking they were jellyfish.
Olson said qualifying plastics for the WRAP program may be surprising to some. For example, air pillows.
“Like what comes in your Amazon boxes,” Olson said.
Bread bags and other food packaging.
“Produce bags,” Olson said. “Case wrap, like what’s wrapped around cases of water.”
The community center is at 2195 SE Airoso Blvd. The library is at 2410 SE Morningside Blvd. There are also WRAP collection bins at Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute and the county’s Solid Waste Division facilities on Glades Cut Off Road, both in Fort Pierce.
“We’re looking to expand to four more locations, but we haven’t decided where (those collection bins will) go yet,” Olson said.
These days St. Lucie County is in shrinking company with recycling. For example, a General Development Corporation city similar to Port St. Lucie – Deltona in Volusia County – ended its curbside recycling earlier this year. That city’s commission unanimously balked at rising costs and growing uncertainty that programs actually keep things out of landfills.
When curbside recycling got started in full tilt about 25 years ago, China quickly became an eager buyer of America’s spent paper and plastic. In short, Americans put things into bins and the ships that brought consumer goods from the Asian nation returned with the recyclables. Chinese manufacturers then used the recyclables to make products that were often shipped to the U.S. And those ships picked up the American recycling and took it back to China.
That was arguably a great system to reduce waste – until 2018.
On Dec. 31, 2017, the Chinese government announced new standards for inbound recyclables quality. That is, the country announced it would tolerate less “contamination” in recyclables than it had before.
“There are two types of contamination,” Olson said. One is packaging with uncleaned food residue, especially oils. Olson explained that a surprisingly small amount of uncaught food residue can spoil large batches of paper or plastic during the recycling processes. The other form of contamination is when materials are mixed, say a plastic bottle that works its way into a bail of paper.
When China made its announcement, the recycling markets went into freefall. Counties and cities throughout the nation were hit with more expensive recycling programs and less assurance they did any good. St. Lucie, Olson explained, had already set up a single-stream recycling program better positioned than many or most to handle the system shock. One reason is the about 123,000 properties that put out recycling bins in St. Lucie.
“Our residents are actually doing a really good job,” Olson said. “We have a low contamination rate.”
About 34 work at the county’s single-stream recycling program. Every year they sort out, bundle and sell about 384 tons of aluminum, 2,600 tone of plastic, and 17,700 tons of paper. The work is rewarding, Olson said. Rewarding as in the workers find unexpected rewards in the dropped-off recycling they sort. “There’s a lot of money people find,” Olson said.
The sorted recycling is put through bundling machines, then those bundles are sold to brokers. The recyclables market, like others, is variable. Olson said St. Lucie gains, loses or breaks even on a month to month basis. But overall, she said, the county is at least breaking even on its investments in recycling. “Just because it’s not profitable doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do,” she added.
Details about what can and cannot be put into curbside recycling bins is at www.stluciecountyrecycles.com.
