Tim Steller's column: Even in new Tucson project, recycling plastic is problematic

In this file photo Heidi Kujawa, left, founder and CEO of ByFusion, and others place seating n the San Gabriel neighborhood that's made from recycled glass on top of a recycled plastic bench. The 22-pound blocks are made of plastics considered unrecyclable by standard recycling plants.

All day, people drive up to Tucson City Councilmember Steve Kozachik's office in midtown, pull out bags of plastic garbage and dump them in a large, orange roll-off container.

It's been like this for many months, since Kozachik started a test program last year of accepting non-recyclable plastic and transferring it to a company that makes blocks used in construction.

"It's unbelievably popular," Kozachik said. "The roll-off is being emptied six days a week now."

The project has revealed a huge pent-up demand in Tucson to do something better with our waste plastic. And it appears to be a better process than traditional plastic recycling, using better methods and more types of plastic. Still, it leaves the deeper problem unsolved and may perpetuate the misperception that we are doing something significant and good if we steer a bit of our plastic away from the landfills.

In May, the city entered into a deal with the company that makes the plastic blocks, ByFusion, to set up a production site at Los Reales Landfill. The city will build a $2.4 million structure in which ByFusion will place its block-making machine to start churning out construction materials from our waste plastic.

The 22-pound blocks are used the same way as cinder block, but they are interlocking, like Legos, so they are easier to use. Non-recyclable plastics will be collected at four sites to make the block, and potentially could divert significant waste away from the landfill.

That would be a good thing, on one level. But it also perpetuates a misconception that industry has been spreading for decades — that recycling plastic makes buying plastic ok. It doesn't.

As PBS Frontline and National Public Radio revealed in 2020, the idea of recycling plastic emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a marketing effort. The oil and gas industry realized that the image of plastics was dangerously bad among the American public, which viewed it, correctly, as polluting.

Their solution: Promote the idea of recycling plastic. I say "the idea" because so little plastic has ever been recycled. They stamped the chasing-arrows recycling symbol on plastic containers, included a code for the type of plastic it is, and, functionally, misled the public into thinking plastic isn't so permanent after all, that it's OK to buy it if you put it in a recycling bin at the end.

But very little plastic is ever recycled, in part because it costs too much to recycle most plastics. In Tucson, only four types of plastic are recyclable through the municipal program — largely those used in bottles and jugs.

And much of the American plastic that goes into recycling bins ends up shipped abroad to an uncertain fate. For a couple of decades, China accepted our junk plastic by the containerloads, but it stopped in 2018. As PBS and NPR revealed, Indonesia replaced China as an importer for a time, and plastic exported there may be recycled, may be dumped, may be burned, and may end up in the ocean.

Worse, a recent study found that even the process of recycling plastic can be bad for the environment. The analysis of water discharge from a plastic-recycling plant in the United Kingdom found substantial microplastics were discharged with the wash water used in the plant.

It shouldn't be surprising that slicing up plastic to recycle it releases microplastic pieces into the environment, but now we know. Trying to save the environment, we still pollute it.

The ByFusion process ought to be somewhat better than normal recycling. That's because it uses steam to melt the plastic down and then compresses it into blocks.

"Finally we have something to do with this stuff that we know is a pollutant," Kozachik said.

But of course the ByFusion project also likely releases microplastics: The first step in the process is to shred the plastic. And the company acknowledges that using ByBlock will also lead to some plastic debris. An answer on the company's Frequently Asked Questions page notes:

"Every ByBlock purchase comes with a collection bag for construction debris. Because ByBlock is created using only steam and compression (no melting or extrusion) it is normal to have some pieces fall away when rough handling the material. These can be collected and sent back to ByFusion and we can use the debris to make more ByBlock!"

One of the authors of the recent study, Erina Brown, pointed out in an email to me that their research shows the initial milling and washing of the plastic is what releases microplastics in recycling processes.

She went on, "Unless I have misunderstood the meaning of this construction bag (which I understand to be essentially a large bag for manual collection of pieces visible to he human eye), this will be insufficient in collecting the likely majority of 'pieces fallen away' during any cutting — the majority of which I expect to be microplastics invisible to the naked human eye."

ByFusion did not respond to an email, phone call or text message I sent.

The fact is, plastic is plastic — once it is made, it is destructive no matter what we do with it. I asked Kozachik about that, and he noted that he has received some criticisms from people, but he says it's worth a minor amount of microplastics production to make use of all this previously unusable plastic waste.

"It would be wonderful if we could say, 'Stop using plastic.' It's not going to happen."

The oil and gas industry is counting on us not going that direction. They are depending on plastics as a "plan B" that will make up an increasing portion of their revenue as demand for more traditional oil and gas products decline.

And that's the real problem. A powerful industry needs us to keep buying single-use plastics, relying on us believing that they will be recycled somewhere somehow, when they very rarely will be, even with innovative products like ByBlock.

The plastic itself remains the problem.

Tim Steller is an opinion columnist. A 25-year veteran of reporting and editing, he digs into issues and stories that matter in the Tucson area, reports the results and tells you his conclusions. Contact him at [email protected] or 520-807-7789. On Twitter: @senyorreporter

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Columnist

Tim Steller is an opinion columnist. A 25-year veteran of reporting and editing, he digs into issues and stories that matter in the Tucson area, reports the results and tells you his conclusions. Contact him at [email protected] or 520-807-7789. On Twitter: @senyorreporter

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