PORTSMOUTH — When it comes to disposing items like pizza boxes, water and beer bottles, even old copies of this newspaper, practically every ecologically conscious person would pitch them in a recycling bin.

Until fairly recently, communities’ recycling products had value in developing countries, namely China, where they are broken down into raw materials. American communities would receive some surplus revenue from the sale of their recyclables through their waste removal contractor.

Peter Rice, director of public works in Portsmouth, said the city’s current fixed contract with Waste Management costs $80 per ton of trash waste. He said prior to the last five to 10 years, the return on the city’s recycling would mostly offset the cost of trash removal.

However, China, which purchased $5.6 billion worth of scrap and recycling products in 2017, according to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI); drastically reduced its imports of the world’s waste, sending the recycling commodities market into a tailspin. ISRI says China enacted stricter restrictions on imported waste products limiting contaminants, like trace amounts of food waste or wet paper, to no more than 0.5 percent, a standard ISRI claims is “impossible to achieve.”

According to the U.S. International Trade Commission from January to April 2017 to January to April 2018, American scrap exports to China, including recycling waste, dropped more than a million metric tons, or 36 percent. Plastic exports were the hardest hit, losing more than 3 million metric tons, or 92 percent in sales.

“Our cost is whatever the market value for the recycling material is,” Rice said. “There have been some instances where we’ve had a high rejection rate and when materials are rejected it significantly adds to the cost. Since we’ve brought the issue to people’s attention the community has been more conscious and we’ve seen the rejection rates go down. They’ve been very supportive and we need to continue our education efforts.”

Garrett Trierweiler, senior manager of public affairs for Waste Management of New England, said WM initiated the “Recycle Often. Recycle Right” campaign to provide municipal and commercial customers guidelines on how to get the most out of their recycling programs five years ago. He said to achieve the stringent quality levels for commodity markets, WM is working to upgrade equipment, add labor and slow processing lines at recycling facilities.

“Contaminated recyclables and the recent downturn in the value of recyclable materials has significantly reduced revenue and put a strain on our ability to operate our facilities economically,” Trierweiler said. “We are committed to maintaining the true impetus of recycling – the conservation of resources and the diversion of recyclable material from disposal. To achieve that, generators of recyclables need to share in the cost of processing and then share in the revenue generated from the sale of that material.”

So is recycling this edition of Seacoast Sunday still the most environmentally responsible thing to do? Not entirely. Especially, if there’s a coffee ring on it.

Jennifer Andrews, sustainability project director at the University of New Hampshire Sustainability Institute, said individuals and their communities can use the upheaval in the global recycling market to re-evaluate their consumption of single-use products.

“The good news for us in a way is the major shift in the market illuminated a problem that was always there, but was convenient and easy to solve when we could just ship all our recycling to China,” Andrews said. “We can’t recycle our way out of the problem and previously the conversation was too focused on recycling as an answer when it needs to take place further upstream.”

As potential solutions, Andrews praised innovators in the recycling world, such as FIBERITE and ecomaine for providing alternative uses to recycling products that would otherwise be destined for a landfill if they are too contaminated. FIBERITE is a South African company manufacturing manhole covers made from mostly contaminated recycled materials and ecomaine is a nonprofit waste removal provider serving 73 communities in Maine providing long-term solid waste solutions in an environmentally responsible, economically sound manner.

Andrews said it will take a lot more ingenuity and commitment from towns and waste removal contractors to invest in domestic recycling plants and create new uses for contaminated recycling products. She said waste-to-energy may be worth pursuing but not until issues surrounding negative environmental impacts and health hazards to neighbors in proximity to such facilities are addressed. She said volatility in the recycling market would not lead to a retreat from recycling on an individual level.

“It’s premature to go there and it would be short-sighted on the part of towns to scrap their recycling programs too because landfill space is at a premium and if more towns end recycling that cost will also skyrocket, so it’s not a zero-sum game,” Andrews said. “This will take some creativity and innovation on the part of a number of stakeholders putting their heads together despite the increased costs in the short-term.”

Dover’s Director of Community Services John Storer is banking on innovation in recycling disposal. He said Dover’s waste removal contract with Pinard Waste Systems expires at the end of June 2020. He said Dover pays $700,000 to $800,000 annually on waste removal and an additional $67.50 per ton of trash dumped.

Storer said he anticipates Dover’s next waste removal contract will increase as much as 50 percent and he was somewhat surprised Pinard had not approached the city about redoing its existing five-year contract due to market changes. He said Dover has begun a campaign to educate residents about ensuring the quality of their recycling.

“We’re relying on enhanced cooperation from residents to keep the recycling we have as is, but we have to remain fiscally responsible to residents,” Storer said. “When you had one large foreign market that essentially shutdown, hopefully, the necessity will bring new innovations but we have a year-and-a-half until we get there.”

In the interim, municipalities’ recycling woes are only increasing. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s most recent data, in 2015 the United States produced roughly 262 million tons of municipal solid waste, up 4 million tons from 2014; with 91 million tons being recycled or composted in 2015.

In Exeter, the problem forced Waste Management to activate the “unusual changes and cost clause” in its contract with the town and bumped up the price per ton of waste removal to $100.30 per ton effective Feb. 1, citing the changes in the Chinese market. Jennifer Perry, Exeter’s director of public works, said it was the first time WM activated this clause but the town’s contract allows for 3 percent increases every year.

“It’s a continuous effort to remind residents what can be recycled,” Perry said. “It’s up to residents to stay abreast on what is allowed and not allowed as recycling streams evolve because we were complacent for so long thinking we could recycle most things because we weren’t concerned about contamination.”

In response to the impact of single-use plastics in particular, state Sen. David Watters, D-Dover, signed on with a group of legislators co-sponsoring House Bill 617, which would form a legislative committee to study recycling streams in New Hampshire. He said the ultimate goal is to bring forward legislation to make plastic producers pay for their environmental and health impacts on the wholesale level.

“Plastic production has never been cheaper with the methane captured from (hydraulic) fracking and its uses are expanding exponentially,” Watters said. “We simply can’t sustain this usage because of plastic’s negative impacts on body chemistry, animals and fish after it has started to break down in soil and washes into water supplies.”