Recycling in the Frontier: Alaska’s Plastic Problem

By: Megan Cronin

“North to the future.” Alaska’s state motto conjures up images of a vast northern frontier ripe for exploration. Yet, when it comes to recycling, Alaska is anything but forward-looking.  

As of June 2019, “clamshell” containers, like the kind generally used to package berries and other fruits, can no longer be recycled in Anchorage or dropped off at any recycling sites. Other communities in Alaska have stopped collecting “plastics marked No. 3 through No. 7,” a category which includes yogurt containers and medicine bottles. Officials say these changes are the result of new policies in China. In January 2018, China implemented the “National Sword” policy. The Policy banned “imports of 24 types of recyclables and sharply restrict[ed] the amount of contamination in other imported waste materials.” As a result, the cost of processing recycling has increased for many municipalities. Unfortunately, Alaska is not the only state to feel the impact of China’s recycling policies. Communities in Georgia, Washington, and California have felt the ripple effects of the National Sword program.

Unsurprisingly, small towns and rural communities have been impacted the most by the National Sword program. While larger cities, like New York and Philadelphia, have been able to augment the impact of China’s policy by increasing prices, smaller communities, like many in Alaska, have struggled to find a solution. In Anchorage alone, it is expected that these changes will cost the city an additional $40,000 in 2019. While curbside recycling will still be offered in Anchorage, many smaller communities in Alaska cannot afford the pricing increase.  And world-wide, more and more plastics have wound up in landfills and incinerators. In Anchorage, the problem is especially prescient as most plastics end up in the landfill. Anchorage Recycling Coordinator Suzanna Caldwell is concerned about this trend as she estimates that the landfill, a “finite resource,” only has “about 30 years of life left on it.”

“Unfortunately, Alaska is not the only state to feel the impact of China’s recycling policies.”

But China’s National Sword policy is only part of a larger recycling problem in Alaska. Most Alaskans do not have access to curbside recycling. In Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city, it is estimated that nearly 70% of households do not have curbside recycling. This means that recycling largely falls on the shoulders of a few impassioned citizens to collect and sort recyclables on their own. Yet even individual efforts seem untenable in many of Alaska’s more remote communities where towns struggle to deal with waste management, let alone recycling.

Still, some in Alaska remain focused on the future. Recently, students at University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) helped implement reusable food containers in the University’s main dining hall. The containers can be reused between 300 to 500 times before being recycled and have helped UAA to “eliminate tons . . .of single use food containers.” Students have embraced the containers, using them 25,000 individual times in 2018 alone.