Las Vegas Sun
A Republic Services recycling truck makes the rounds in Las Vegas in December 2013.
Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2019 | 2 a.m.
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When it comes to recycling, Clark County is trailing.
Although resorts on the Las Vegas Strip have been lauded for their recycling efforts, the rest of the valley falls short of national recycling rates and has shown little signs of improvement in the last decade and a half, state data show.
Only single-family homes in Clark County are guaranteed recycling services, according to franchise agreements between municipalities and Republic Services, the waste management company that collects and handles trash and recycling for nearly all communities in Southern Nevada.
That means apartment complexes and multifamily homes across the valley are devoid of recycling bins, as are commercial facilities and businesses, unless property owners opt to recycle.
About 20% of waste produced in Clark County last year was recycled, nearly 10% lower than the recycling rates in Washoe County and Carson City and well below the national recycling rate of 35%, according to the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection’s 2019 Waste and Reduction Report. The statewide recycling rate has more or less mirrored the rate in Clark County, having barely risen above 21% since 2003 — despite that the state has aspired to recycle 25% of waste produced annually since 1991, according to statute.
“It’s an interesting issue in Nevada,” said Levi Kamolnick, director of the environmental advocacy group Environment Nevada. “We obviously have these massive landfills, which according to one report I read, won’t be filled up until hundreds of years from now. So I think with the cost there, it’s hard to see that as a priority for our elected officials.”
Clark County’s landfill, the Apex Regional Landfill run by Republic Services, is one of the largest in the country and will not reach capacity for another 300 years, said Jeremy Walters, community relations manager at Republic. It is also remarkably cheap to operate compared with Republic’s local recycling facility; on average, it costs 75-80% more money for Republic to recycle here than to send waste to the landfill northeast of the valley, Walters said.
Recycling costs are unlikely to go down soon because of policy changes in countries that have traditionally accepted much of the United States’ recyclables. Under a new Chinese policy enacted in 2017, Operation National Sword, the acceptable level of contamination for imported recyclables has dropped significantly, increasing cleaning costs for companies like Republic prior to sending materials to China.
“What happened recently in the last couple of years was that China, the biggest purchaser of recycling, had been warning us that we need to clean up our recycling,” said Mitch Hedlund, CEO of Recycle Across America. “So they put their foot down.”
Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and India, all of which had been purchasing the world’s recyclables in addition to China, have enacted similar policies in the last few years to reduce the acceptable contamination levels for recyclables, said Jennifer Lazovich, a lawyer for Republic. As a result of the changes, Republic is increasing its monthly recycling rate for residences in Las Vegas by 74 cents.
The recent changes in the market underscore one reason why Clark County hasn’t made significant progress on recycling: It is a commodity-driven market, subject to ebbs and flows in the global economy, said Brian Northam, environmental health supervisor for the Southern Nevada Health District. Absent state or local programs that intervene in the market or require recycling, there isn’t much that could be done to increase participation, Northam said.
“The biggest thing that would really increase recycling would be a change in the market for the profitability,” Northam said. “The only other thing that could do it would be to have a law written that would mandate it.”
Sen. Melanie Scheible, D-Las Vegas, attempted to pass a so-called “bottle bill” in the 2019 legislative session that would have created a monetary incentive to recycle glass, metal and plastic bottles. Under the proposal, wholesale sellers of bottles would have collected a 5-cent deposit from buyers, such as grocery stores, and consumers would have been able to earn back the rebate by returning bottles to a designated recycling facility. But the bill never made it to a vote.
Although proposals such as that have been shown to increase recycling, another challenge for recycling in Clark County is human error, Northam said. The county’s recycling rate is based on the amount of waste that gets diverted to recycling facilities — not what is disposed in recycling bins.
“Just because we get the bin out, doesn’t mean people know how to do it,” Northam said.
Northam, who has conducted outreach on recycling through the health district, anticipates that future efforts to increase recycling in Clark County will focus on cleaning up the stream of recyclables. Fiber-based products in particular, such as paper and cardboard, cannot be contaminated with food or liquids in order to be recycled, something residents who recycle must understand, he said.
Republic has worked on educational campaigns with municipalities about what items can be recycled, said Marco Velotta, a planner in the Las Vegas Office of Sustainability. The company beefed up those efforts in particular when it switched to single-stream recycling over the last several years, said Mike Harwell, assistant manager of business license operations for Clark County.
Nonetheless, Hedlund suspects that another factor is contributing to the county’s relatively low recycling rates: Republic’s control of both the landfill and of residential recycling services. While it is not unheard of for waste management companies to run both recycling and trash operations within a given municipality, Hedlund said that such arrangements could disincentivize recycling, which is typically the more expensive of the two operations.
“The best thing communities can do is go to a company that only survives on recycling working, because as soon as you’re in contract with a recycling company that makes money on the landfill side, there’s a whole bunch of things that start to happen that undermine the recycling of that community,” Hedlund said.
Republic did not directly respond to a question about whether it has a financial incentive to keep recycling rates low, saying that the company recycles because it is “the right thing to do for the people and the planet.”
Given that Clark County and Las Vegas do not intend to strengthen recycling requirements in their franchise agreements with Republic, it seems that change would need to come from state lawmakers or pressure from environmental organizations. Whether that will happen, especially considering that Nevada and Clark County face other environmental issues, remains to be seen, Kamolnick said.
“I really would like it if this issue could be more on the frontline, so to speak,” he said.
