Recycling in Washington: An inside look

Have you ever wondered where your recycling goes after it gets picked up at the curb? If your Washington neighborhood is serviced by Waste Management (WM), then your recycling is headed to one of their four recycling centers operating in Washington and Oregon.

These massive recycling centers separate recyclable material, like paper, aluminum, glass, cardboard, and plastic, and send them to end-markets where they’ll be recycled and repurposed into new products. While sorting out these materials sounds straightforward, the facilities receive massive amounts of recycling every day. The Cascade Recycling Center, WM’s facility in Woodinville, processes up to 650 tons of recyclable material every day from 250,000 households and businesses across western Washington.

In early November, WM opened up the Cascade Recycling Center in Woodinville for a public tour. Upon arriving, tour participants donned our bright yellow hard hats, goggles, and vests. After a brief presentation, we entered the recycling facility floor, where we watched as recycled materials of all shapes and sizes were analyzed, measured, weighed, and sorted.

The Cascade Recycling Facility is a feat of engineering, and a testament to the power of advanced technology. Optical sorting machines identify HDPE plastic materials from PET plastic materials through visual scanning, and use jets of air to separate up to 600 pieces per minute. Eddy current separators use magnets to fling aluminum cans over a barrier, while dividing out non-metal materials. Even the air is sorted, with massive vents sucking up airborne dust and debris and pressing the fine particulates into solid pucks to keep the air clear.

Optical sorters, trommel screens, shredders, excavators, accelerator belts, eddy current machines, and gravity separators are used to sift through everything sent to the facility, and separate them by material. Once separated and grouped together by glass, metal, paper, cardboard, or recyclable plastic, these materials are gathered up and sent to other facilities, where they can be used to make new products.

But even with all of this advanced technology, a large chunk of the sorting that occurs at the Cascade Recycling Center is the removal of non-recyclable materials that get tossed into recycling bins. These non-recyclable materials range from soiled cardboard to plastic film bags.

While walking through the facility, it was clear why removing non-recyclable materials is an essential step in the recycling process. Thin plastic film can easily gunk up any number of the machines working to sort through bottles, cans, and cardboard. Hanging here and there from the conveyor belts were remnants of plastic bags that had snuck in the facility, despite being on the “not-recyclable” list.

The Cascade Recycling Center is a massive ecosystem made up of dozens of coordinating machines, conveyor belts, and workers. Keeping this ecosystem healthy starts by making sure that people know what should and shouldn’t go in their recycling bins. But sometimes that’s easier said than done. Recycling rules can seem complicated, especially since cities, facilities, and states each have their own ordinances and recycling capabilities. Just as the Cascade Recycling Center has certain tools and machines, other facilities have their own unique sorting capacity. 

There are online resources to help determine a material’s recyclability based on location. The Washington Recycles tool, and King County’s What Do I Do With It tool, can help you identify commercially recyclable materials, and help you find locations that accept recycling, donations, and disposal. But as a few general rules from WM:

• Plastic film bags are not recyclable
• Keep food and liquid out of your recycling, and try to clean most food waste off of your recyclable materials before putting them in the bin
• You can recycle bottles, cans, paper, and cardboard

Streamlining the recycling process and raising our recycling knowledge are powerful tools in ensuring that we are responsibly using our existing resources and facilities. But in Washington, only 17% of all plastic packaging waste is actually recycled, and more than 50% of all consumer packaging and paper products are landfilled or incinerated. So even though facilities like the Cascade Recycling Center are able to sort and save most of the materials they receive, Washington is still producing a huge amount of waste that doesn’t end up recycled or reused. We can do more.

Enacting producer responsibility for packaging in Washington State is an essential step in reducing waste and making recycling work better. Facilities like the Cascade Recycling Center help ensure that we are recycling and reusing our resources. Producer responsibility legislation in Washington would support these facilities by ensuring that producers are financially responsible for the end-of-life costs of all packaging waste, meaning that producers would pay to make recycling programs more convenient and accessible to all Washingtonians.