Old books, fire alarms and toilets: How Boulder handles tough-to-recycle materials

Research shows that only about 5% of plastics used in the U.S. actually get recycled. The rest ends up in landfills, oceans and even in the bodies of humans and animals as microplastics.

Misinformation around plastics is to blame for all this waste, says Suzanne Jones, executive director of Boulder County, Colorado's Eco-Cycle, one of the oldest nonprofit recyclers in the country.

“That is because the petrochemical industry and the plastics industry have deliberately misled people into thinking that their products are recyclable when most of them aren't,” Jones says.

The plastics industry produces around 400 million tons of plastic per year. If a plastic product is stamped with a one or two inside the recycling symbol, it’s generally safe to toss it in your regular recycling bin. But products like soft plastic bags, disposable utensils and coffee pods need specialized facilities to break them down.

In Boulder County, residents can bring some of those materials that shouldn't normally go in a blue bin to Eco-Cycle's Center for Hard-to-Recycle Materials, or CHaRM, the first such facility in the country.

Justin Stockdale, the operations director of CHaRM, says that smoke alarms and campaign signs are what people bring in most often. Mattresses, fire extinguishers, bicycles, bike tires, Styrofoam, toilets and sinks are also common. So are books.

Single-stream recycling plants usually can’t process books when people throw them into curbside recycling bins. They typically end up in bins with plastic bottles or paper products. But when books arrive at CHaRm, they’re often reused.

Stockdale says there’s a primary book processor at the center who sorts through all the books that come in.

“He's gonna go through every one of these books by hand,” Stockdale says. “He's a bibliophile to the definition of bibliophile. Ben will sort these looking for titles worth maybe $5 and up, and then the remnants beyond that typically end up in a pulp mill coming back as tissue or toilet paper tubes.”

As for the books that don’t become tissue or toilet paper tubes, Stockdale says the center ships about a half million pounds of books per year to a variety of places to reuse.

Toilets, sinks and other ceramic items are sent off to a local rock-crushing facility to be broken down into rubble and used as road materials. Stockdale says putting this rubble in a new road saves space in a landfill and reduces demand for mining new materials.

Eco-Cycle processes about 60,000 tons of recyclables a year across Boulder County.

While most counties don’t run as robust recycling operations as Boulder, Stockdale says it’s important for all consumers to think consciously about what happens to their waste after they put it out on the curb.

“Where it's recycled, how it's recycled is equally important, if not more important than if it's recycled,” Stockdale says.