This story is made possible through a partnership between Interlochen Public Radio and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
Traverse City resident Hunter Schliess throws a month’s worth of plastic bags, cups, cardboard packaging into a bright green recycling drop-off bin on a recent weekday morning.
Schliess brings items to these bins — the lot outside this county government building is one of seven drop-off sites around Grand Traverse County — because there’s no recycling bin at his apartment building.
“It’s easier to bring it here instead of anywhere else, or throw it away and have it end up in a landfill,” he said. “Hopefully it gets used for something else.”
In northern Michigan, that “something else” for plastic depends on a multitude of factors like what material it’s made of, who does the recycling and whether it’s cost-effective.
Most plastic ends up in the landfill, some joins local and national supply chains to be made into new products and the trickiest ones power a northern Michigan factory.
Only a small fraction of the estimated 17,000 tons of plastic collected each year in Grand Traverse, Benzie and Leelanau is recycled, according to the most recent public data. The national average rate for plastic recycling hovers around 5%.
“Plastic’s a great use. It has great attributes,” said Andy Gale, founder of the nonprofit Bay Area Recycling for Community in Traverse City. “It is the scourge of the Earth, though, when it comes to the waste of it at the end.”
The low hanging fruit
Most water bottles, laundry detergent containers, milk jugs and other #1 and #2 plastics are considered the easiest to recycle.
According to the region’s largest recycling provider, Green For Life, this kind of plastic gets sorted at their Traverse City facility, baled and then shipped downstate to Dundee where the company Clean Tech breaks them down into plastic pellets.
The pellets get sold back to manufacturers who produce new plastic bottles or containers with them.
Mark Bevelhymer, the regional vice president for GFL, said this type of plastic is great for recycling because they can accumulate large volumes of it and there’s typically high market demand. But markets fluctuate.
“Right now, there’s a tremendous amount of inventory in the marketplace,” Bevelhymer said. “But (Clean Tech) will take everything we have just due to our relationships.”
GFL also recycles #5 plastics like yogurt cups and medicine bottles, sending this material to Georgia-Pacific Recycling in Tennessee.
Those trickier plastics
Other types of plastics collected by GFL are taking a different journey. Some are heading to a local cement plant where they’re burned as fuel.
Material like thin films, takeout containers, or parts of toys don’t have strong end markets like #1 and #2 plastics.
So GFL shreds those plastics, blends it with other material like paper, then ships the mixture to St. Marys Cement in Charlevoix “on a daily basis” to power their high-temperature kilns, Bevelhymer said.
The plastic-based fuel partially replaces the factory’s use of coal, which is considered the dirtiest fossil fuel.
In response to questions from IPR, Resha Watkins, vice president of sustainability for Saint Marys’ parent company Votorantim Cimentos North America, wrote that this alternative fuel emits less greenhouse gases than coal.
Plus, “instead of these material streams going to landfill, they come to have a secondary use as fuel,” Watkins said.
But some experts are skeptical about that trade-off. After all, plastics are made from fossil fuels and burning this material still contributes to climate change.
“The problem I have with burning plastics is that we already burned a lot of energy and generate a lot of emissions to make that plastic, and then we're just going to burn it,” said Anne McNeil, a professor at the University of Michigan.
This shredding and blending of plastic for fuel also doesn’t count as recycling under Michigan law. Instead, it’s classified as a form of “waste-to-energy recovery” or diverting waste from landfills.
Choices and cycles
Some see plastic-to-fuel as a better alternative to the material ending up in a landfill. When plastics break down in a landfill, additives can leak out, sending dangerous chemicals into soil and groundwater.
“There isn't much of a market for a lot of these things, because you can't get enough of it, densified, transported. So that's why things like waste-to-energy is a good end use,” said Gale from the nonprofit Bay Area Recycling for Community.
Still, there are other options for certain hard-to-recycle plastics. Gale’s group collects thin plastic films and shrink wrap from boats, material that GFL would send to St. Marys.
“But we think that this is a decent enough material, clean enough,” he said. They’ll send this to a company called Trex, which makes backyard decking and furniture out of recycled plastic.
The thin plastic bags people leave at drop-off bins located in stores like Meijer also make their way to Trex.
Meijer recycled more than 10 million pounds of plastic film across all their stores in the Midwest last year, said Erik Petrovkis, director of environmental compliance and sustainability at Meijer.
“So if you're not using a reusable bag, at least you know that you can take that plastic film and it'll go on to good reuse,” Petrovkis said.
“Plastic’s a great use. It has great attributes. It is the scourge of the Earth, though, when it comes to the waste of it at the end.”Andy Gale, founder of the nonprofit Bay Area Recycling for Community in Traverse City.
Last year, Michigan officials reported a 25% statewide recycling rate. Increasing that to 30% by 2029 — as the state’s climate plan outlines — will require improving the local recycling markets.
That’s what Matt Flechter with Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy does as a recycling market development specialist. He’s working on closing the loop between businesses using or producing materials and the ones processing and sorting it across the state.
Flechter sees recycling as a choice between keeping materials in the local economy or leaving the waste for future generations to deal with.
But to make the most positive impact on climate and environment, Fletcher said people have to choose less plastic in the first place.
“Reducing the amount of paper, metal, glass and plastic that we use on a daily basis reduces our climate impact much more than deciding whether we're going to transport it 10 miles or 20 miles to an end market,” he said.
