When municipalities reacted to the pandemic early in 2020 by reducing what they deemed non-essential services or issued a total lockdown, several programs were affected from public transit to recreation facilities. Even a number of recycling endeavours suffered from the financial axes and already those effects are making themselves known.
While saving money in the public purse was one motive, another reason why recycling centres were either shut down or faced reduced hours was the concern over staff becoming exposed to materials that may have had evidence of the coronavirus on them. At the same time, households alarmed about hearing how long COVID-19 could live on materials like cardboard or metal, threw away a lot of those items to decrease the likelihood of catching the virus. Those items even include electrical products from cellphones to computers.
Fears over the lifespan of a virus on potentially salvageable materials has played havoc on curbside pickups. According to environmental lobbyists Wastedive, which assembled a list of U.S. cities that have abandoned those pickups, most of them were due to cost, although the pandemic was pegged as a primary motive in such cities as Baltimore and El Paso.
The result was a massive buildup of garbage, including substances that otherwise could have been recycled, according to the Solid Waste Association of America. The organization cited that in March and April, U.S. urban citizens threw away 20 percent more waste than during the same period in 2019.
Recyclers making a living out of reselling reclaimed materials might have benefited marginally from any of the abandoned items that have reached them, namely metals and paper. But those gains have been offset by the abundance of plastic waste, which has been harder to export now that countries like China have recently banned their importation.
Lack of international customers and the drop in the petroleum industry (that uses oil to create plastic) has cut down the price of the substance considerably. The result is that plastic has become much harder to resell, forcing industry pundits to find new ways of recycling such items domestically. One of those methods of late have included convincing big-box retailers to switch back to single-use bags to replace reusable equivalents, arguing that a bag used repeatedly will increase the likelihood that a consumer might be exposed to the virus. Ironically, the increased use of single-use plastic bags have only added to the growing pile of recyclable substances that for the most part, remain untouched.
The pandemic has also compromised the services of another segment of the recycling market: bottle depots. Echoing the same concerns that those at recycling centres expressed, many depots fearing the exposure of any coronavirus that may have collected on pop bottles, beer cans and milk jugs and threaten the health of workers that handle those items, several depots across the U.S. shut down during the first phase of the epidemic.
With the advent of several vaccines making their way across the planet, the forecast is that life after COVID-19 might take place within a year. But the economy will take considerably longer and might even show signs of bouncing back until late in 2021. Only then might that growing mound of recyclable waste be properly dealt with.