By: Tim Nelson, Land Services Director

Recycling has proven to be a dynamic industry over the past several decades, not only locally or around the northeast region of the State, but also across the entire nation and even internationally. What started out in the 1970s as a simple push to help clean up the environment has ultimately transitioned into big business and global commodity trading. Sometimes the shifts in the markets can have substantial impacts even on our local recycling programs, the latest and most impactful of which was a few years back when China stopped accepting shipments of recyclable materials from the United States. This shift resulted in a greater pressure all the way down to the local recycling programs to focus on the shipment of a higher quality of materials rather than larger amounts of quantities.

The Cook County Recycling Program has been in place since the 1980s and has experienced several upgrades both in the facility itself as well as with the collection program. Aside from the main Recycling Center in Grand Marais, there are several portable recycling trailers positioned throughout the County to encourage as much recycling as possible.   What has also changed from time to time is how the recyclable materials are marketed and where they ultimately end up. Since we produce such a limited amount of recyclable materials and have to transport them such a long distance once they are processed for shipment, we rely on area brokers to consolidate materials from around the region so they can be marketed to even larger brokers or shipped from there directly to processing facilities.

Over the past couple decades, Cook County has utilized no less than four different brokers, and currently transports all our processed materials to Hartel’s in Proctor, just outside of Duluth. It is the area brokers that guide the local programs as to what types of materials can be accepted and successfully marketed based on the current conditions within the larger markets. 

So just what is happening to the materials that are collected and processed in Cook County?  Once passing through our initial broker in Proctor, much of the material is shipped to other locations in Minnesota, except for the sorted office paper, which currently stays right in Duluth where it is remanufactured into tissue paper. The newsprint only goes as far as the City of Floodwood where it is transitioned into ground matting. Our cardboard gets transported to Becker Minnesota where it is remanufactured into new cardboard. Our magazines and glass bottles and jars are shipped to the Minneapolis metro area, where the magazines are processed into paper stock and the glass gets processed into new glass or re-used as crushed glass.

Three of our categories of materials are shipped to larger brokers in different areas of the United States, with the tin cans currently moving on to a broker in Gary, Indiana. Aluminum cans are shipped to a larger broker in St. Louis, Missouri, for further relocation to processing plants where they become new containers. The #1 and #2 plastics have to be shipped to whatever larger broker will accept them at the time a load is ready to go. Plastics have consistently been the most problematic to fully recycle, which is one reason why we are limited in the collection of plastics to just the #1 (PET) and #2 (HDPE) designations in our program. 

The main message to us when we reached out to our current broker, Hartel’s, in preparation for this article was to stress the importance of the quality of the materials being shipped to them rather than the quantity. With the increasing demand from all of the markets for higher quality recyclable materials, it is important to make sure that all of the materials are cleaned as well as possible and that all other waste is kept out of the drop-off bins either at the facility or the remote trailers around the County. The Cook County Recycling Center staff do their best to clean out all the contamination that comes in with the materials, but we risk having full bales rejected if they are deemed to be too contaminated.

In conclusion, recycling is a great way to protect the environment and to keep otherwise useful materials from ending up in the landfills, but we also must emphasize the importance of the other two “R’s” along with recycling, which are Reduce and Reuse. We all need to do our part to reduce the amount of materials we use and to make better choices in purchasing so that we do not have materials that end up in the waste stream, and to re-use what materials we may otherwise throw out or recycle.

Contact the Cook County Solid Waste Office at 218-387-3630 for further information regarding the Cook County Recycling Program.

County Connections is a column on timely topics and service information from your Cook County government. Cook County – Supporting Community Through Quality Public Service.