recycling trash – The OM Blog by Heizer, Render, & Munson

OM in the News: The Hidden Problems of Recycling

I am not an adamant tree hugger, but my family certainly takes our household recycling seriously, as I am sure many of you do. So it came as a bit of a shock to find that our local garbage company (which sends separate trucks for normal garbage and recycled goods), took our recycling can and mixed it with the normal can. It turns out they ship it all to the same landfill since the city can’t afford to sort and recycle anymore. The New York Times now reports (March 16, 2019) that “recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country.”

Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator. The Memphis airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. (The airport is keeping its recycling bins in place to preserve “the culture” of recycling among passengers and employees). Hundreds of cities across the country have quietly canceled recycling programs.

Prompting this nationwide reckoning is China, which until 2018 had been a big buyer of recyclable material collected in the U.S. That stopped when China determined that too much trash was mixed in with recyclable materials like cardboard and certain plastics. After that, Thailand and India started to accept more imported scrap, but even they are imposing new restrictions. With fewer buyers, recycling companies are recouping their lost profits by charging cities more, in some cases 4 times what they charged last year.

Amid the soaring costs, cities and towns are making hard choices about whether to raise taxes, cut other municipal services or abandon an effort that took hold during the environmental movement of the 1970s. The troubles with recycling have amplified calls for limiting waste at its source. Measures like banning plastic bags and straws, long pushed by environmental groups, are gaining traction more widely.

Classroom discussion questions:

As a student, what is your obligation to recycle now that you know it may be economically inefficient?
Should taxpayers subsidize recycling?

OM in the News: The World’s Trash Used to Head to China

Since the 1990s, the world has shipped its waste paper, discarded plastic and unwanted metals to China, where they are destined to be used as raw materials to help power the country’s export-driven manufacturing boom. In 2016, China imported about $18 billion worth of what the government calls solid waste.

But China doesn’t want to be the rest of the world’s trash can, writes The New York Times (Dec. 4, 2017). Over the summer, regulators in Beijing started an unusually intense crackdown on what they called “foreign garbage,” citing health and environmental concerns.

As with so much else in the global economy, China’s decision is rippling through a vast supply chain that stretches from big waste companies in Texas to the “cardboard grannies” in Hong Kong that pick through mounds of paper and plastic. Scrap dealers are rushing to find buyers elsewhere in Asia, but the Chinese market is so large that it cannot be easily replaced. “It’s almost like they turned the spigot off overnight,” said the president of Waste Management.

As China revved up its manufacturing machine to power growth over the years, officials were willing to tolerate some of the downside of scrap, namely the pollution of local soil and rivers by low-end recycling practices. But China’s economic might increasingly means that it no longer needs to make such environmental sacrifices.

In the U.S., the new rules mean more garbage could stay at home. While that could be good news for some recyclers, it could also mean more waste in the country’s landfills. Recyclers might also have to upgrade their facilities to handle the waste, leading to higher costs for American municipalities and taxpayers.

Classroom discussion questions:

Why is this an issue for operations managers?
What should U.S. municipalities do the offset the impact?

OM in the News: How Oslo Turns Garbage into Energy

Half of Oslo is heated by burning garbage

Oslo, writes The New York Times (April 30, 2013), is a city that imports garbage. Some comes from England, some from Ireland. Some is from neighboring Sweden. A British tax on landfill makes it cheaper to send it to places like Oslo. “It helps us in reducing the escalating costs of the landfill tax,” says a spokeswoman for Leeds, England. Oslo even has designs on the American market. “I’d like to take some from the United States,” says the director of one plant that turns garbage into heat and electricity. “Sea transport is cheap.”

A recycling-friendly place where roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage — household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and dangerous waste from hospitals and drug arrests — Oslo has a problem: it has literally run out of garbage to burn. The fastidious population of Northern Europe produces only about 150 million tons of waste a year, far too little to supply incinerating plants that have capacity of more than 700 million tons. The problem is not unique to Oslo, a city of 1.4 million people. Across Northern Europe, where the practice of burning garbage to generate heat and electricity has exploded, demand for trash far outstrips supply.

Garbage may be garbage in some parts of the world, but in Oslo it is very high-tech. Households separate their garbage, putting food waste in green plastic bags, plastics in blue bags and glass elsewhere. The bags are handed out free at groceries and other stores.

Still, not everybody is comfortable with this garbage addiction. “From an environmental point of view, it’s a huge problem. There is pressure to produce more and more waste, as long as there is this overcapacity,” says one Norwegian environmental expert. Retorts the head of Oslo’s waste recovery agency, “Recycling and energy recovery have to go hand in hand.”

Discussion questions:

1. How do some US cities deal with massive amounts of garbage?

2. Why are sustainability efforts such as this of interest to operations managers?

OM in the News: Sustainability Means Emptying Your Own Trash Can?

In my 40 years working in industry, government, and academia, I can’t remember anyone ever asking me to empty my office garbage can. Not that it would have been beneath me, as I am personally in charge of all trash disposal in my own home. But yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article “Memo to all Staff: Dump the Trash”, caught my eye as it was packaged to workers as a sustainability issue (see Ch.7).

Its not just in the State of Texas, the City of Phoenix, and Brewer Science (a Missouri semiconductor company) that employees are being asked to tote their own trash and recyclables to common bins. The idea has also caught on that professors (yes profs!) at the U. of Washington and at Dartmouth College empty their own baskets as part of an environmental initiative.

There are some savings, of course. Texas saves $825,000 annually on labor costs. Brewer’s janitorial staff is now just a quarter of its original size. But Dartmouth presented the new program as part of a broad sustainability package, whose primary goals “are to increase campus recycling and reduce waste”, according to its VP.

Some question the college’s rationale. Psych prof Catherine Cramer is quoted as saying: “The real goals here, however prettily wrapped in sustainability rhetoric, are rather obvious”. She wonders if “its good use my professional time”.

Just to be clear, though. Not everyone in Texas is in the program. The governor and legislators have kept their original trash service.

Discussion questions:

1. Discuss the economics of transferring work from low-paid employees to higher-paid professionals.

2. What is your own campus doing to enable the sustainability/ recycling efforts?