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Report: Recycling rates down in Oregon

Advocates blame plastic, issues with Asian nations

By ERIN ROSS, Oregon Public Broadcasting
Published: November 17, 2019, 9:15pm

SALEM, Ore. — Oregon is not very good at recycling, and it’s getting worse, according to a new report. Overall recycling rates in the state have steadily declined for the last several years, even as the amount of waste generated per person in the state has grown.

The report, published Thursday by the group Environment Oregon, uses data released yearly by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. It finds that Oregon faces major barriers to meeting its recycling goals. Nationally, recyclable plastics are being replaced with lower-value plastics. In Oregon, polystyrene (the flaky, foam-like material used in single-use coffee cups) isn’t recyclable, and a proposal to ban it statewide failed last year.

This doesn’t mean that Oregonians aren’t passionate about recycling. The biggest barrier to recycling in Oregon is structural: less of the material placed in recycling bins can be repurposed by domestic facilities, and exporting recyclables to countries like China has become more difficult.

“The bottom line is, we need to take more of these products out of the waste stream,” Celeste Meiffren-Swango, the state director of Environment Oregon, said.

It’s not just an Oregon problem, it’s a national — even global — issue. For years, recycling in the U.S. has relied on Asian countries to take our waste. Many countries, finding that arrangement unprofitable, have started incinerating the recycling, dumping it in landfills, or simply stopped accepting recyclables from the U.S. altogether.

The few countries that still purchase U.S. recyclables are increasingly facing unexpected health impacts stemming from too much waste and no way to process it.

One silver lining: after Oregon raised the deposit on beverage containers covered by the bottle bill, recycling rates of glass, aluminum, and plastic bottles rose dramatically. Still, Oregon is having trouble finding places to purchase and repurpose even those recycled goods. Increasingly, that waste is being burned in “waste-to-energy” facilities.

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