E.L. Harvey & Sons scrambling amid new Chinese recycling standards
Photo | Grant Welker
Plastic awaits recycling at E.L. Harvey & Sons' Westborough facility.
When Chinese firms virtually stopped buying recycled mixed paper from the United States, the effects didn't take long to become visible at E.L. Harvey & Sons' Westborough facility.
Forced to suddenly find new buyers, the century-old company began stacking tightly packed bales of paper products – totalling 6,000 tons – biding its time while it scrambled for new markets. Early last year, the bales sprawled across what appeared to be the size of a few basketball courts.
Now, finally, the stockpile is down to a fraction of that size.
“Thank God we have a big enough facility to store it,” said Benjamin “B.J.” Harvey, the company's executive vice president.
Still, E.L. Harvey & Sons is not out of the woods. Roughly 250 tons of mixed-use paper are still sitting outside in the elements, now worth nothing as recyclables and good only for compost.
E.L. Harvey & Sons, like other recyclers across the country, is still adjusting to a major shift in the industry when China enacted such strict standards on how clean imported mixed-use paper would need to be, meaning virtually none of it can still be shipped there from the United States.
Finding new markets
That mixed-use paper market is huge, making up roughly half of the 90 million tons of recycled material in the United States each year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
China once made up almost the entirety of recycled material from E.L. Harvey & Sons sent overseas. But at the start of 2018, the Asian country laid out new standards for importers: only 0.5% of incoming material could be contaminated, down from 5%.
“It has to be basically perfect,” Harvey said.
The abrupt change in China's buying patterns have put the fourth-generation business in the spotlight in a series of news stories. B.J. Harvey has found himself regularly talking about how his family's business has carried on despite regularly taking financial losses on shipping out recycling once earning $75 to $100 a ton.
“It's just been more and more difficult to move product out of here,” he said.
With China no longer a major buyer – and not expected to be again any time soon – the company has found new markets primarily in India and Vietnam for mixed paper. Most of the plastic E.L. Harvey & Sons recycles goes to facilities in Canada, New York or North Carolina, with some going overseas.
Helping the industry
The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has been working to help make up for the sudden shift and assist E.L. Harvey & Sons and the seven other designated single-stream recycling facilities across the state.
Last year, the department gave $2.1 million to 42 cities and towns to help start new programs, including wheeled-carts for curbside collection of recyclables and kitchen food waste for composting. A new glass-processing facility in Groton split a $257,000 grant last year, and in February, the state gave funds to help four companies to better process and manage wood, plastics, and mixed recyclables.
“It's a harder job than it was,” Brooke Nash, the DEP's municipal recycling branch chief, said of companies working with new contamination standards.
Meanwhile, E.L. Harvey & Sons has been swallowing a financial loss for mixed paper while still making money from other recycling operations.
“We manage the business like you manage your 401(k),” Harvey said. “You diversify.”
Mixed paper makes up about 40% of the recycling that comes into E.L. Harvey & Sons, with about 15% glass, another roughly 10% or so cardboard, and the rest of mix of metal and plastic.
Roughly 15%, Harvey said, is simply trash.
Tires and greasy pizza boxes
It's not hard to see why E.L. Harvey & Sons and others have a hard time keeping recyclable material clean enough for anyone to reuse.
On a tour of the Westborough facility, B.J. Harvey passes by a towering pile whose contents include an Easter basket and a small wheel that looks like it was once part of a child's bike.
“This right here is trash,” Harvey motions to the pile.
Greasy pizza boxes, jars of pasta sauce and other clear cases of contamination have been the target of a public awareness campaign launched last summer by the DEP.
A website, recyclesmartma.org, answers frequently asked questions and makes clear what people should and should not be tossing in recycling bins. A search tool with 400 common items answers whether an object should be thrown in the trash or recycled.
Research conducted by the state four years ago showed people often had confidence they knew what was recyclable and what wasn't, but their actual knowledge didn't stack up.
“We call that wish-cycling sometimes,” Nash said.
The National Waste & Recycling Association estimates 25% of what ends up in a recycling bin is contaminated.
MassRecycle, an industry group and advocate for recycling, finds contamination to be the result of a mix of factors.
Single-stream recycling can give people a impression that too many items can be tossed together, said Gretchen Carey, the group's president.
“It's a huge challenge,” Carey said of contaminated recyclables. “It's our biggest challenge.”
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