Palmer Township pilot bag-recycling program helping to cut costs

PALMER TWP., Pa. - Plastic bags that used to be considered contamination in Palmer Township's recycling program are now helping cut costs, thanks to a pilot program that started May 1.

The township accepts flexible plastic, such as bags for cereal, groceries and potato chips, in its curbside recycling. The plastic goes to TotalRecycle in Berks County, where material that used to go to a landfill can be processed into material for decks, walkways and playground surfaces.

"It's definitely been successful for the township," Palmer Recycling Coordinator Cindy Oatis said. "The extent, I can't quite measure yet." After six months to a year, she said Palmer will have a better handle on just how well the program is working.

Recycling the flexible plastic is only a curbside option in Palmer now. The township recycling center does not accept the bags, which Oatis said causes problems for conventional processing equipment.

"It clogged up machinery and took operations down until they cleaned out the plastic bags and film," she said. "This was considered contamination."

TotalRecycle's equipment takes this out of the recycling stream before it gets into the sorting machinery, Oatis said. TotalRecycle is a division of hauler JP Mascaro & Sons.

Recycling is a market-driven business. Commodity markets, which can be volatile, dictate the value of materials collected. Evaluating the cost-effectiveness of a program takes time.

"We are starting to see a shift in our cost of recycling," Oatis said, partly because of the flexible-plastic program.

"This is material that used to be contamination, which costs. Now it's being recycled, so it takes down the cost," she said.

Palmer residents have helped the flexible-plastic program work, Oatis said.

"Out of the gate, it was very strong," she said. "It's all about education and that's true with any recycling program."

Recycling markets changed because of COVID-19, which upset supply chains around the world. While the business goes through ups and downs, Oatis said recycling is important now and will be more so in the future.

"Recycling is not dead," she said. "There was a three- or four-year period when the media focused on how bad it was and those sound bites were in many ways antiquated by the time they made it into the mainstream."

The market for recycled materials fluctuates, Oatis said, but the downturns do not mean recycling is failing. It is just part of the system, just as prices for oil and metals fluctuate.

"Recycling employs a lot of people in this country," she said. "It is good for the economy and that is why (Pennsylvania) Gov. Tom Wolf made it an essential industry during the COVID shutdowns."

"Recycling is not going away," she said, and as more material is collected and re-used, the industry will grow in importance.

"We need to collect this material to keep building," she said. "That's the cycle of recycling."