“Plastic is a wonderful product because it lasts. It’s also a really horrible product because it lasts,” Haines Friends of Recycling board chair Melissa Aronson said, standing in the operation’s warehouse where recycled materials are compressed into neat packages. In a shipping container outside, more than seven tons of plastic waits to be sent to Seattle for recycling.

HFR has been stockpiling plastic since October 2021, as the market for buying recycled plastic is practically nonexistent, Aronson said. HFR usually sends one load of this size of plastic to Seattle each year.

Juneau’s municipal and private recycling programs have continued to ship plastics without interruption, Juneau RecycleWorks Operations Manager Stuart Ashton said this week. However, due to a poor market for recycled plastics, agencies in Juneau have been paying for their plastic to be recycled for roughly two years. If it becomes too expensive to recycle, plastic will start going to the landfill, Ashton said.

“We can store it here but the market is not turning around,” Ashton said. “It’s only going down. To process the plastic becomes too much for the city budget.”

The price of plastic fluctuates with oil prices, HFR board vice-chair Kate Saunders said. When oil prices are low, corporations opt for manufacturing new plastic rather than buying recycled product.

China also banned nearly all recycled imports six years ago, stopping shipments of hundreds of thousands of tons of US plastic. Ashton speculates that is another factor driving the poor plastic market.

HFR is looking into new technology to recycle plastic on-site and eliminate the problem of shipping altogether. One machine they are looking at would recycle number one, two, four, five and seven plastics. Currently, HFR only accepts number one and two plastics.

“A lot of people are getting really interested in Alaska because this is such a huge issue for us,” HFR’s Saunders said. “I’m not quite sure of our direction at the moment but with the amount of support and interest we’ve had from our community, I’m not going to let this go. We are going to come up with some kind of solution.”

The machine would cost between $65,000 and $75,000. HFR operates on a budget of $60,000 a year, and would have to get the money for the machinery from grants and donations, Aronson said. The majority of its budget goes towards paying staff, she said. HFR has one part-time employee and a volunteer force of 125 people.

Melted plastic from the machine could be used to produce plastic lumber for picnic tables, decking and benches. It is not strong enough, nor is it regulated, to be used for construction.

“The great thing about it is it doesn’t break down so it lasts way longer,” Saunders said. “You don’t have it rotting out.”

In the meantime, Aronson hopes that residents will continue to find ways to reduce their waste.

“What we hope is that people will figure out as many ways as they can to reduce their waste, and will reuse and repurpose as much as they can and recycle what they don’t,” Aronson said. “But we can keep things from going into the landfill because that’s just a mess that we’re leaving for future generations.”

The Haines Borough passed an ordinance banning single-use plastic bags in 2019. Since then, plastic bags have been “sprouting up in town again,” Aronson said.

“We just need to remind people. The plastic bags are horrible. All the plastics are bad. They get into the waterways, marine life chokes on them, they clog up equipment, they blow into trees, they’re just a mess,” she said.

HFR recycles over 600 pounds of materials a day and over 250,000 pounds a year.