Think you know how to recycle? A tour of Santa Cruz’s sorting facility reveals otherwise

On a recent Friday morning, about a dozen people gathered for a tour of the Santa Cruz Resource Recovery Facility. Along the perimeter of the recycling plant on Dimeo Lane near Wilder Ranch State Park, old surfboards lined the fence, picked out of a throwaway pile by staffers despite the facility’s strict no-scavenging policy. 

A huge pile of torn cardboard, peanut butter jars and plastic bottles sat under a canvas tent, waiting to be fed into a two-story machine that sorts the material with the help of human hands into glass, paper, metal and other plastics. The massive pile represented just three days’ worth of the city’s recycling.

As the tour got closer to the tower of waste, a musty pungency permeated the air. The stink was not a good sign. Too much contamination from food makes products difficult to recycle. It can also make the recycling plant’s machinery dirty. For these and other reasons, close to a third of the pile waiting to be recycled will likely end up heading to the landfill instead.

Through a series of guided tours this summer, facility workers hope to educate city residents on how to sort and prepare recyclables, reducing the amount of stuff people put in blue bins that ultimately ends up being sent to the landfill.

Yet the staff’s message extends beyond proper sorting techniques: They want residents to fundamentally rethink their reliance on disposable packaging. An ideal recyclable begins and ends for the staff of the Santa Cruz Resource Recovery Facility at Dimeo Lane when it does not exist at all. 

Every kid who went through Santa Cruz elementary schools in the past 30 years learned the mantra “reduce, reuse, recycle.” Now a growing body of scientific evidence says this is no longer sufficient. There is a fourth, even more important, R-word, “refuse” — as in refuse to use the material in the first place, said Caylie Soon, waste reduction assistant for the City of Santa Cruz. 

The city’s new mantra, “refuse, rethink, reduce, reuse, recycle, rot,” is an updated version for what the United Nations calls the “plastic pollution crisis.” This week, a U.N. conference is set to debate a plastic reduction treaty to drastically cut plastic production. Coinciding with the conference, a new study in the journal The Lancet describes plastic’s threat to humanity, quantifying damage to humanity’s health at $1.5 trillion annually. 

At the Dimeo Lane facility, six recycling professionals, heavily gloved, usually sort through all the recyclable material manually as it speeds down the conveyor belt toward a screen that allows the heavier stuff drop to the bottom as the lighter material rises to the top. From here, the plastics are sped along to the top of the machine, while the glasses and metals are then fed into compactors at the bottom. 

About 30% of waste that comes into the facility is not recyclable and bound for the dump, slightly less than the 32% average nationwide. That percentage is relatively unchanged over time, Soon said, because while more people than ever have made recycling part of their routines, there is more confusion about what is recyclable. 

Plastic bottles, jugs, jars and tubs are recyclable. Everything else needs to be checked against the city’s guide, Soon said.

During the tour, Soon spots a tangled string of Christmas lights in the foothills of the mountain of plastic and assorted waste. Christmas lights or garden hoses are the worst offenders of what Soon calls “tanglers.” Long, discarded objects can wrap themselves around gears in the sorting machine and force the entire operation to a grinding halt. 

Some of the problem of too much recycled material ending up in the dump stems from what is known in the recycling world as “wishcycling,” where people throw everything into the blue bin to feel better about themselves, Soon said. Wishcycling costs the industry $300 million a year, according to the California Management Review.

Some wishcycling is primed by information printed or stamped on products by plastic and oil companies. The “chasing arrows,” three circular arrows stamped on the bottom of plastics around a number, refer to the type of plastic resin used, not its recyclability. Such misleading information preys on people’s natural inclination to be good stewards of the environment, Soon said. 

Plastics like clamshells  — thin plastic takeaway containers that snap together — and cosmetics bottles are the most commonly wishcycled objects. One would think they are recyclable, but since the clamshell material is treated differently during the manufacturing process, they can end up weakening the end product when reformulated and combined with other plastics.

Consumers wishcycle items such as clamshells at least 12% more than universally recyclable glass and paper items, according to California Management Review. As clamshell containers surged during the pandemic for takeaway dining, people tossed them in the recycling where they didn’t belong. The better option for people is to bring their own reusable container to restaurants or stores, Soon said. 

Some elements of what can be recycled and what can’t have less to do with science and more to do with economics. 

A lack of demand from buyers on the international plastic market is one of the main reasons the city won’t accept clamshell containers, Soon told Lookout in an interview. The manufacturers that do take the plastic are affected by supply volatility because of the irregularity in recycling practices, according to the California Management Review study. 

“We operate out of the theory that it’s better to do waste reduction and resource education rather than spend a bunch of money on a facility so we can process all the recycling, like there’s other ways,” Soon said.

The city earns around $1.2 million a year from selling its sorted paper, glass, metal and plastic. That includes money from the California Redemption Value (CRV), the state bottle recycling program, which compensates the city through a direct payment for containers, according to Resource Recovery Superintendent Guadalupe Sanchez. 

The remainder of the center’s $3.1 million annual revenue comes from fees paid to deposit recycling at the center. The Resource Recovery Center’s expenses were $2.7 million last fiscal year, netting the city a slight annual profit, according to city spokesperson Ashley Hussey. 

Wishcycling is not as big of a concern for the County of Santa Cruz because it contracts out waste services to GreenWaste, Mary Ann LoBalbo, program coordinator for the county’s department of public works, told Lookout. GreenWaste is a private company with plants in San Jose that serves 300,000 customers in communities from Pacific Grove to San Jose.

GreenWaste is able to accept clamshells because the company’s larger scale allows it to negotiate individual agreements with buyers even if there is not a high price for that particular plastic on the broader market, according to LoBalbo. 

GreenWaste’s information is proprietary, so LoBalbo said she was not sure where the company sends the raw plastic. GreenWaste confirmed to Lookout that it recycles clamshells but declined to share information on how it is able to do so. 

The city is able to resell cardboard and glass because there are established markets for those products and the city has contracts with nearby manufacturing plants that will purchase the materials, Sanchez said. Cardboard is recycled in San Jose, glass in Modesto, and scrap metal is done in different places around the area. 

Other objects processed at the Santa Cruz Resource Recovery Center are shipped across the United States and overseas. Aluminum stays in the country. Steel cans go to Oregon for reprocessing, laundry basket plastic is sent elsewhere in California and the city pays for paper products to go to Malaysia and Indonesia, despite attempts to find a domestic pulper.

Friends of LoBalbo’s who live in the city of Santa Cruz give her their clamshell containers for the county to recycle with GreenWaste, she said. But she wishes people would not buy stuff in clamshells at all. 

“We have got to have companies stop making plastics,” she said. 

In recent years, state lawmakers have taken steps to reduce the amount of goods that end up in landfills. California passed “extended producer responsibility” laws in 2022 for textiles, batteries, packaging and mattresses. The laws mandate all packaging material such as food wares like clamshells must be recyclable or compostable by 2032.

Soon thinks California can do more. She said she hopes the state can pass a plastic product stewardship law, making the largest plastic manufacturers financially responsible when their plastic ends up in the landfill. Companies like Coca-Cola or PepsiCo would have to pay jurisdictions like Santa Cruz for recycling their products. A stewardship law could also limit how manufacturers use the three-arrow recycling image on their products to prevent false advertising, Soon said. 

Even with those additional steps, trash and waste aren’t likely to go away anytime soon. Limiting what gets recycled incorrectly could help extend the life of the Dimeo landfill, according to Sanchez. “We only have 32 years of life left in our landfill, and then we’ll have to become a transfer station to somewhere else,” she said.

As the landfill’s clock ticks down, the solution to local waste challenges might lie not in state laws or international markets, but in refusing to participate in our throwaway culture entirely, local officials say. In such a world, washing out a jar could go from being a chore to becoming a radical act of personal responsibility and ecological wisdom. 

“Thirty-two years will come up pretty quick,” Sanchez said.

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