Sara Baker was all-in on recycling. As a Boise city council member in the 1990s, she helped usher in the city’s initial recycling program that continues today, and she was excited to begin recycling additional plastics when the city’s program expanded to include Hefty ReNew orange bags in 2018.
“When they first started it I thought, ‘This is really a great idea,’” Baker told the Idaho Statesman in a phone interview. “I faithfully filled the orange bags. I tried to follow their directions. I was picking things out of the trash can because I felt compelled (to recycle).”
But in the last few years, she said she’s “gone rogue.” After meticulously separating her plastics, Baker, like other Boise residents, learned in 2020 that the orange bags – a program to deal with plastics Nos. 4-7 – weren’t headed to a Salt Lake City city company to be made into diesel, as city and Hefty officials had previously said.
Baker said she felt duped and hasn’t bought the orange bags in years. Years later, Baker and other Boiseans wonder whether the program ever resumed its mission to process plastics that Hefty calls “hard to recycle” and others say aren’t recyclable at all.
Hefty says it’s better positioned than ever to handle the plastic problem, but participation in the program has waned amid confusion about plastic recycling, growing skepticism of the industry and admissions on Hefty’s part that the most appealing end uses may not be the most environmentally friendly for Boise waste.
Boiseans skeptical of orange bags
Catherine Chertudi, a former city environmental programs manager who now works with Hefty on the ReNew program, helped launch the orange bag program in Boise before she joined Hefty. When it debuted, the city offered free bags, coupons and educational events to help residents figure out the additional recycling steps.
Officials said the orange bags would be trucked to Salt Lake City, where a startup called Renewlogy would turn them to diesel fuel. In March 2020, the city quietly acknowledged that Renewlogy had hit some snags with equipment to process the plastics. Instead of becoming diesel fuel, for about a year Boise’s orange bags had been sent to Utah cement kilns, where they were mixed with lime and coal and fired in a kiln to create concrete.
Baker said that revelation made her question why she was carefully sorting one plastic from another. She started putting all of her plastics in the bags, even flimsy water bottles and fruit containers that the city said should go to the trash instead.
“I started saying to myself, ‘If they’re burning plastic, why do they care if I put a water bottle or a clamshell in there?’” she said, referring to the kilns.
Chertudi, who is now a government liaison for the growing number of municipalities participating in the ReNew program, said the cement kiln plastics aren’t simply incinerated for heat or energy. They become part of the cement, and they fortify concrete made with the cement.
Chertudi told the Statesman that 79% of all orange bag waste last year was sent to companies that shred or melt it to form lumber, construction blocks or materials for drainage or roofing. The rest goes to kilns. But about 50% of Boise’s orange bags end up at cement kilns.
Unlike the city’s landfill or compost, where waste stays local, or the recycling program, where traditional plastics are shredded into feedstock for new plastic products, the orange bags are sent in various directions to Hefty end markets scattered across the country.
Republic Services, Boise’s trash and recycling company, processes orange bags at its Boise sorting site, but the company doesn’t manage the rest of their journey. Chertudi said Hefty pays for the shipping to end markets in most cases, and often pays the companies some portion of the cost to process the bags, since many of the buyers are still growing their businesses.
“The goal (of the program) is to be self-sustainable, but it’s definitely not there yet,” Chertudi said/.
She said consumer purchases of the bags, which cost about $10 for a package of 20, help fund the program, which is free for the city. Boise public works spokesperson Melissa Stoner told the Statesman that the only funds the city spends for the ReNew program are to pay staff to attend community events, where they sometimes answer questions about orange bags. Chertudi often attends those events, too.
Chertudi said Hefty is unable to say exactly where Boise’s bags — compared with, say, Omaha’s or Atlanta’s — end up. But she said the market has become much more stable than when Hefty started the program in 2016, about a year before China announced it would stop taking U.S. plastics.
Chertudi said Hefty surveys show 15% of residents in the Boise/Ada County program area use orange bags. That’s the highest involvement of any community the program is in. The Renew program serves most of Nebraska; the Atlanta metro area; Columbus and Dayton, Ohio, metros and the surrounding counties; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and, soon, suburbs north of Chicago. In those areas, the average participation is closer to 10%.
“There are always opportunities for growth,” she said.
But what constitutes “participation” is murky — it could mean someone putting as little as one single bag of plastics into their blue recycling bin each year.
Over the life of the program, Boise’s orange bag recycling has wavered, perhaps because of the relaxed push on city’s part, ongoing confusion about what to put in the bags, or larger concerns about the plastics’ usability. At times, participation has reached 20%, according to Chertudi.
According to data from the city, Republic Services collected 260 tons of orange bag waste in 2021. That fell to 242 tons in 2022 and to 226 tons last year.
Chertudi said the bags have become heavier and less contaminated — with trash, paper, metal, or Nos. 1 or 2 plastics — through the years, according to regular bag audits. Sorting centers like the Republic Services one on Cole Road are told to send “grossly contaminated” bags to the landfill. End markets receive the results of Hefty’s bag audits to know what sort of contaminants they may encounter so they can determine how to handle them.
Orange bag plastic uses are experimental, Hefty says
Chertudi told the Statesman that the Hefty ReNew program is still experimental, so end users — like Salt Lake City diesel creator Renewlogy — may not be permanent partners.
“The whole goal has been to energize and develop these end markets for these materials, because they didn’t exist at the beginning of this program, and we’re still in that innovation-growth mode,” Chertudi said.
She said the program has more interested end users than it has plastics. Some plastics are sent to companies for product development, but many end users already have their products figured out, Chertudi said.
Take construction blocks. They were used to make a bench at Manitou Park in the South Boise Village neighborhood. The bench was made by a California plastic-waste recycling startup, ByFusion, which shreds and fuses them together into construction-grade bricks it calls ByBlocks.
Chertudi said Hefty’s parent company, Reynolds Consumer Products, and Dow Chemical gave money to ByFusion to process some Boise orange bags. In return, Hefty received about 15 pallets of ByBlocks to use for public projects around Boise.
Chertudi declined to say how much the bench cost to make. She said it was more expensive than a typical parks design, which is about $3,800 for a metal bench, city Parks and Recreation officials said. She said that was due to ByFusion’s involvement and some customizations for the bench.
“The resulting bench is very attractive and heavily used,” Chertudi told the Statesman in an email. “It will last for many years! It can also be disassembled if it needs to be relocated, and at the end of life the blocks and the metal can all be recycled.”
Scott Phillips has used orange bags to make a variety of items, from art meant to catch your eye to practical items, like trash cans, countertops and planters, that you might never guess were repurposed plastic.
Phillips, who is also a Boise State University chemistry professor studying ways to make plastic polymers easier to recycle, creates all of his items — art pieces, furniture, coasters, even countertops — with plastics he sources from the orange bag program or local businesses for free.
Phillips said he hopes to scale up his studio, Remix Materials, to handle roughly 300,000 pounds of orange bag waste annually — about two-thirds of Boise’s yearly orange bag waste — but that could take several years. Some of his art pieces are already for sale online, ranging from $400 to $800 per piece, including custom-made steel frames. Phillips told the Statesman planters start around $45 for smaller sizes, and benches start around $430, though neither item was for sale on his website as of Aug. 1.
“When you look at the life cycle assessment of that, it would be off-the-charts good, because our shipping costs would be reduced, the environmental impact of shipping the materials would be reduced,” Chertudi said.
Phillips says his work is “not recycling, but making new materials,” a different direction for waste that has proven especially difficult to repurpose.
Are orange bags recycling or not?
Phillips calls his products “new material from nonrecyclable plastics.” Hefty calls the orange bag materials hard-to-recycle plastics. Chertudi said the differing terminology is a matter of semantics.
“What I might consider recycling and what the industry might consider recycling could be two completely different things,” she said. “We refer to it as recovery of the materials for better end uses, as compared to landfilling.”
Hefty’s cement-kiln end use has drawn criticism from Boiseans and some others in the recycling field. Chertudi said the usage helps to provide a necessary good, and the kiln byproducts — like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and particulate matter emitted by cement factories — are closely monitored by the Environmental Protection Agency.
“We all need concrete in our lives,” Chertudi said. “Our houses are built on foundations of concrete. Our roads, our sidewalks are concrete. So it’s still a better use than sending it to a landfill.”
“Is it the highest and best use?” she added. “Not compared to other opportunities. But it’s still a good use of the materials.”
Kate O’Neill, a plastics recycling expert and associate dean of the College of Natural Resources at University of California-Berkeley, told the Statesman in a phone interview that she is skeptical of orange bag end uses — particularly the cement production.
“Even with new technologies, it’s still unclear as to what happens with any toxic residue that’s left over,” O’Neill said. “It’s not recycling in a traditional sense.”
Hefty says it has diverted 2,600 tons of orange bag plastics from landfills in the U.S. since 2016. Chertudi said the goal is to find end uses that can continue the cycle for plastics, such as with plastic lumber that can be reshredded and molded into lumber again when its quality deteriorates.
That’s one of Phillips’ goals, too, along with “making stuff that’s pretty.”
“What I don’t want to do is make stuff that looks like recycled plastic,” he said.
His benches feature plastic parts where they make contact with the ground, but incorporate wood as an attractive design element. The result is a piece of furniture that looks good and will resist rot.
Phillips said plastics initially solved a lot of environmental and safety problems when they replaced items like glass shampoo bottles, which can shatter and cause injuries; and ivory, which promotes destruction of wildlife and habitat. He hopes Remix can reduce the amount of plastic waste while creating useful items.
“Plastic polymers were always made to last forever, because nobody was thinking about it,” Phillips said. “We have to figure out how best to use plastic and not just throw it away.”
Should you use orange bags?
The question from Boise-area residents who recycle is: Is the orange-bag program worth their time and money?
It’s hard to say. For one thing, the bags’ various end uses have differing degrees of environmental friendliness.
Hefty posts annual third-party “lifecycle assessments” online that show the impacts of different end uses versus putting orange bag items in landfills. The most recent assessment publicly available, from 2022, showed that for Boise orange bags, kilns actually had the lowest net global-warming potential. Recycling the plastics into construction blocks actually had a slightly worse overall impact than bringing the plastics to landfills, thanks to energy expenditures necessary to take the orange bags to a construction-block manufacturer.
According to the assessment, the maximum distance orange bags could be trucked to make construction blocks and still break even on global-warming potential is about 300 miles. That’s roughly the distance from Boise to Salt Lake City or Bend, Oregon.
Chertudi said Hefty is working to create a network of end markets much closer to the communities where it has orange bag programs. Phillips’ business is a promising endpoint for Boise plastics.
Baker, the former Boise City Council member who became frustrated with Hefty’s program, said it’s been hard for her to turn her back on recycling after decades of hearing about its benefits.
She said she could be persuaded to start sorting her plastics again so long as she knows the bags aren’t just headed to the landfill, which, except in cases of serious contamination, the aren’t. Baker also said more of the coupons and free bags the city once provided wouldn’t hurt.
O’Neill, the Berkeley plastics researcher, said recycling is still worthwhile, but what’s more important is trying to avoid creating demand for single-use plastics by reducing the amount you use and reusing what you can before sending it to recycling.
Chertudi and Stoner, the public works spokesperson, agreed. Stoner said the city hosts “reduce and reuse” events like its Repair Cafés, where Boise residents can bring broken items to be repaired by experts rather than thrown away or recycled. The city’s CurbIt waste program encourages people to opt for reusable items, like coffee cups, instead of single-use plastics.
Chertudi said those efforts, like orange bag recycling, may be small, but they still have an impact.
“So many times we feel, in the recycling world, stymied by the enormity of trying to do something,” Chertudi said. “Even this small little step can be meaningful.”
