Recycling in Cibola – Part 1

GRANTS, NM – Recycle Cibola! is a group of volunteers who came together in February of 2010 to start an organized recycling program in Cibola County.

Over the years, Recycle Cibola! has worked to promote recycling in Cibola County through outreach and educational events, providing information about recycling and other ways to support a green and healthy environment. The group is a community-advocacy organization that works to keep recycling efforts in Cibola strong.

Hollis Fleischer is the Co-coordinator for Recycle Cibola! She spoke about why recycling is important to Cibola County, “Essentially by recycling materials you reduce our reliance on creating new materials, new bottles, new cans. Creating new materials requires you to go and get the metals that you need, mine the metals, it also takes a whole lot of energy to produce new materials, then if you reuse and reprocess old materials and create them into bottles and cans again. A good example is a tree, basically you don’t have to cut down trees in order to make paper and cardboard. So, you are saving those natural resources, and that’s a very good thing to do for the environment.”

According to Fleischer recycling in the area was not done often, prompting their advocacy for the local community. “Unfortunately, our recycling I think is maybe one percent, it’s very low. And the national average is much higher, the average in New Mexico is much higher… We are not a big city we are sort of a rural area we don’t have as many people. The plan was to try to combine all of our areas – McKinley County and Cibola County – and have a hub and that would be the landfill. And then all the rest of us, Grants, Gallup, Milan all of those little cities and villages they put all of their recyclables at this hub, and the hub processes them, and the thought was that you could make it more efficient, maybe even profit producing by combining all of that. It has not happened.”

Fleischer also spoke about how recycling can increase the lifetime of a landfill, “You are also saving landfill space by not putting in as much trash, by taking the recyclables and not putting them into the landfill.” She said, “what that means is you make the landfill spaces, which are called cells, and the cells cost $1 million to $1.5 million to create. So, they are fairly expensive to create, and to maintain and to process all the materials that go into that hole in the ground basically is what the cell is… there are a lot of materials all those recyclable materials that you can divert away from the hole in the ground and save that space.”

On November 3, the Northwest New Mexico Regional Solid Waste Authority suspended the collection of all plastic in the recycling program. The suspension is due to NWNMRSWA being unable to sell the plastic that they were collecting and processing.

Fleischer said the NWNMRSWA began to lose money in collecting plastic, and they have many bales of plastic that they are unable to give away for free. “The Northwest New Mexico Regional Solid Waste Authority, which is otherwise known as the landfill in Thoreau – they are the ones that process our recycling. They said that there has not been a market for anyone to buy the plastics [that is processed]. They used to have a buyer, they no longer do, and that’s why [Garry Morre, Manager at the NWNMRSWA] said that they could no longer accept plastics for recycling.”

Fleischer said, “I would love to see plastics to be recycled… The big issue is, once you’ve collected all of the plastics, do you have someone to sell it to? Because, if you don’t, a number of things happen. First of all, you have all the costs you’ve incurred in collecting all those materials. If they can’t sell the materials, they have all these costs; all this money that they’ve spent and they are not getting any income back to offset the costs.”

Recycling does not pay for itself, Fleischer said. “So even if you could sell the recycling and get some money for the materials that you have collected, that doesn’t mean that’s going to cover all the costs that you’ve incurred by bringing the roll-off containers to the drop off locations, bringing the full containers back, and processing and then selling them.”

According to Fleischer, the cost of recyclable materials has varied depending on the market and across the county the cost of recyclables has changed due to various reasons, “It depends on the market, what the market will bring for a bale of cardboard, or plastic bottles. There have been vast changes in the market. China used to be a major buyer of recyclables from the United States and a long time ago easily five, six, seven years already. They started rejecting our recyclables saying that they were contaminated, too contaminated. So, there was a kind of scrambling around to find other buyer for our recyclables, and this is something that the whole country is facing.”

How to Recycle in Cbola

Fleischer went through the process of collecting recyclables and how they are processed.

Recycle Cibola! has set up locations for individuals to drop off their recyclable materials for no cost, for example, Smith’s and John Brookes are currently recycle locations. These materials are collected in the blue rolloff containers which are moved to and from Thoreau by the NWNMRSWA. When these roll-offs are full, NWNMRSWA pulls out the full roll-offs and leaves an empty roll-off to collect more materials. They then take the full roll-offs to the landfill in Thoreau where they are taken to a storage/processing space. The materials are then put through a horizontal baler which crushes and condenses the materials, and then those bales are sold to a buyer of the materials. Originally, the NWNMRSWA used to collect and process corrugated cardboard, mixed paper, aluminum and steel cans, and plastics numbered one and two. Today the NWNMRSWA is only collecting corrugated cardboard and brown paper, and mixed paper.

Recycle Cibola! and other recycle programs view these costs for recycling and processing a necessary risk, “Recycle Cibola!, and a lot of people who are in favor of recycling, think that it’s a cost that we need to have. Just that we have a cost to dispose of trash properly, because we don’t want to pollute ground water, we don’t want to have illegal dumping. So, we pay to process our trash responsibly, and in our view that’s the same approach we should take to recycling. It is going to cost us some money, it’s important to do because it saves energy, it saves resources, it allows us to be ecologically responsible. And if we don’t do it, then bad things are really going to happen, and our future generations aren’t going to have much of an Earth to inherit.”