Recycling By The Ton: Northern Michigan's Most Eye

What does a year of recycling look like in northern Michigan? Bay Area Recycling for Community (BARC, formerly Bay Area Recycling for Charities), a leading area nonprofit organization with a reputation for recycling everything from mattresses to refrigerators to entire houses, recently peeled back the curtain to give local residents an idea of just how much waste a robust recycling program can keep out of the garbage.

Earlier this year, BARC shared a report on its 2022 efforts "to divert dangerous and potentially valuable materials from landfills." From mattresses to refrigerators to boat covers, BARC racked up some eye-popping recycling statistics over the course of last year. Today, The Ticker takes a closer look at these numbers and what they might mean for local efforts toward more sustainable, eco-friendly practices.

17,950: Pounds of film plastics that BARC collected and recycled throughout 2022. Film plastics include everything from grocery bags to bubble wrap to food packaging to the plastic used to wrap packages of toilet paper, bottled water, and other everyday products. Contrary to popular belief, most curbside recycling programs don't accept plastic bags or other types of film plastics. That's because those types of programs rely on recycling center sorting equipment to separate your recycling into different categories, and plastic film can easily get caught and tangled in the machines. In fact, it's largely because of the difficulty of plastic film recycling that approximately 85 percent of the 40 million tons of plastic waste the United States produces each year ends up in landfills.

In 2022, BARC introduced a new film plastics recycling program and collected nearly 18,000 pounds of material – approximately the weight of an average elephant. Consumers also have the option to bring plastic bags and other film plastics to drop-off locations at participating retail stores. Several retailers in the Traverse City area – including Meijer, Wal-Mart, and Target – offer this service. (You can search for drop-off locations here.)

146,320: Pounds of marina film plastic that BARC diverted from landfills last year. In addition to film plastics from consumer products, BARC encourages local residents and businesses to recycle the plastic they use to protect and wrap their boats during the offseason.

196,388: Pounds of electronic waste kept out of landfills by BARC in 2022. Like plastic film, e-waste is challenging to recycle – albeit, for a different set of reasons. Where film plastics cause problems for recycling sorting machines, e-waste poses hurdles in recycling due to the presence of harmful chemical contents in many of these devices and machines. For instance, an old PC computer can contain up to eight pounds of lead, along with other toxic chemicals like mercury, arsenic, and cadmium. When disposed in a landfill, electronics can leak these and other chemicals into the soil, air, or groundwater, creating health hazards. Through its e-waste program, BARC seeks to repurpose electronics wherever possible.

The state of Michigan also has its own Electronic Waste Takeback program, which "supported the recycling of 11,567,000 pounds of potentially hazardous e-waste in 2020" – equivalent to 1.1 pounds of electronics per Michigan resident.

8,129: BARC's final count of batteries recycled in 2022. Remarkably, Americans still throw away an estimated 3 billion batteries every single year.

2,187: The number of lightbulbs BARC collected and recycled last year.

751,100: Pounds of corrugated cardboard recycled by BARC in 2022. That haul outweighs the Statue of Liberty by about 300,000 pounds.

10,000: Mattresses and box springs collected in 2022 through BARC's mattress recycling program. Mattresses are notoriously difficult to repurpose or recycle due to their cumbersome shape and design, multi-material construction, and other factors. Additionally, many trash collection companies won't take mattresses because they are difficult to compress and compact, which means they take up lots of space in landfills and are also difficult to incinerate. BARC and other mattress recycling programs take mattresses apart in an effort to repurpose some of the components or materials. In 2022, BARC salvaged 92,627 pounds of cotton and 132,020 pounds of metal from recycled mattresses.

$500,000: The amount of grant money BARC secured in 2022 to expand and improve its mattress recycling approach. While the organization has offered mattress recycling for years, the process has, until now, demanded that mattresses be taken apart by hand and materials salvaged manually. Per BARC, the $500,000 grant will enable future automation of that process, thereby opening doors for more mattress recycling activity in the years to come. "In the next five years, our goal will be to quadruple the number of mattresses we can divert from landfills into reusable commodities," the organization shared in its by-the-numbers report.

BARC's eye-popping numbers are part of a trend of growth in recycling activity statewide. A year ago, an analysis done by the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) determined that, between 2019 and 2022, recycling activity in Michigan increased by approximately 35 percent. Even in that short period, the state's recycling rate (the proportion of overall waste being recycled statewide) grew from 14.25 percent to 19.3 percent – an all-time high. Furthermore, between 2019 and 2022, the state doubled the number of households with access to recycling services – including both curbside recycling pickup and recycling drop-off sites; 3 million households, which encompass approximately three-quarters of the state's population, now have recycling access. Statewide, Michigan's recycling industry processes more than 440,000 tons of material each year.

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