In his 20 years in the business, Gilliam has seen it all.
"One of the guys came in one day with a hand grenade," he says. It turned out to be a fake.
Contamination is a bigger problem. Mixing everything together is convenient, but leads to wet paper and bits of broken glass that can't be sorted.
"As we often say, you can't unscramble an egg," says Susan Collins, director of the Container Recycling Institute, a nonprofit research and advocacy group. She says what single-stream wins in volume, it sacrifices in quality.
"In terms of preserving the quality of materials so that the maximum materials collected can actually be recycled, single-stream is one of the worst options," she says.
Planet Money Episode 613: Trash!
13 min 51 sec
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Collins adds that about a quarter of single-stream recycling goes to the dump. For glass, that loss can be as high as 40 percent.
Even so, in the constant tug-of-war between quality and convenience, convenience wins. But as single-stream processing continues to increase in popularity, the trade-off will be fewer recyclables recycled.
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