Watch what kinds of plastics you bring to the Cook County Recycling Center – Cook County has stopped accepting mixed plastics after its plastic recyclables broker stopped accepting mixed plastics about a month ago. Several large bundles of mixed plastics are sitting outside the Recycling Center waiting for a place to go.
Cook County Planning & Zoning Director Tim Nelson, in charge of waste management and recycling, said that Cook and Lake counties were two of the last counties to accept mixed plastics, which contain plastics numbered all the way from 1 to 7. Cook County is now accepting only Nos. 1 (polyethylene terephthalate or “PET”) and 2 (high-density polyethylene or “HDPE”).
The good news is that Nos. 1 and 2 account for 80 percent of the plastics Cook County citizens have been bringing to the Recycling Center.
“Numbers 1 and 2 plastics are typically all of the beverage and liquid containers, including soda and juice bottles, milk jugs and the heavier-duty laundry and bleach jugs,” Nelson said. “The easiest way to identify what number any particular container may be is to look for the number inside of the ‘chasing arrows’ triangle recycling symbol on the package.” This is usually on the outside bottom of the container.”
The caps on Nos. 1 and 2 need to be discarded before being left at the Recycling Center. They are made with heavier-duty plastic resins that fall within Nos. 3 through 7. “It is ultimately better for us and the environment if we can recycle as much as we can with clean loads of No. 1s and 2s than to get bales rejected and not being recycled because of having too much of other plastics such as the caps,” Nelson said.
Nelson said the county had been using a broker out of Superior, Wisconsin for several years but changed to a broker in Proctor that gave them a much better redemption value for recyclable materials. “Up until about a month ago our broker was accepting and even paying us a redemption value for our mixed plastics, which was the first time that I’ve seen any broker pay for mixed plastics,” Nelson said. “We were then notified by them that they wouldn’t be able to accept the mixed plastics anymore but that it might be a temporary problem because it actually stemmed from China shutting off their markets to our materials. This goes to show just how global our economies are these days.
“As such, we continued to accept and bale up the mixed plastics in hopes that the markets would open up again and we would once again be able to send our bales to market. Unfortunately, we were subsequently advised by the broker to make the switch from mixed plastics to just the No. 1s and 2s, which have ample market for recycling here in the United States, because the prognosis for the mixed plastics market looks very bad.
“We still have several bales of the mixed plastic sitting in the parking lot of the Recycling Center that I’m trying to find a market for, and I am hopeful that I can find a place for those within the next month or two. Coincidentally, Lake County also made the switch away from accepting mixed plastics.”
Recycling Center and Cook County Planning & Zoning Department personnel are available to answer questions. The Recycling Center number is 387-3044 and the Planning & Zoning Department number is 387-3630.
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