[Congressional Record Volume 165, Number 182 (Thursday, November 14, 2019)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6597-S6600]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                          America Recycles Day

  Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I rise to talk about something that is 
really important, I think not only to our Nation and our planet but to 
me and my family personally.
  As cochair and cofounder, along with Senator John Boozman of 
Arkansas, of the Senate Recycling Caucus, I am proud to stand side by 
side with all the Members of our caucus on the matter of recycling and 
its importance.
  Today Senator Boozman and I have introduced a resolution to 
commemorate tomorrow, November 15, as America Recycles Day. I would say 
that every day should be America Recycles Day. For a lot of our 
families, that is what it is. I don't have any idea how many millions 
or tens of millions of families recycle every day, but it is a lot of 
people, and we need even more.
  For more than two decades, communities across our country have come 
together on November 15, and they do so to observe America Recycles Day 
and to celebrate their commitment to recycling.
  First, I want to thank all of those who have worked hard to make 
America Recycles Day a success for all of these years. I have been a 
huge advocate of recycling for the past 50 years. I first recycled, I 
think, when I was a lieutenant JG in the Navy stationed in Moffett 
Field in California, which is close to Palo Alto. I took my recyclables 
to a warehouse there in Palo Alto and have never stopped. I don't go to 
the one in Palo Alto anymore, but we recycle all over Delaware. 
Frankly, when I go around the country, I recycle. I recycled on the 
train this morning, somewhere around Baltimore, coming down from 
Wilmington.

[[Page S6598]]

  I really welcomed the opportunity to collaborate--I want to say more 
than a decade ago--with Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine. Together, we 
helped create the Senate Recycling Caucus in 2006. Since the retirement 
of Senator Snowe 6 years ago, I have been fortunate enough to have as 
my running mate and cochair Senator Boozman of Arkansas.
  In this year alone, our caucus has held four briefings to learn more 
about the current state of recycling in this country and to discuss 
ways in which the Federal Government might play an even more important 
role in encouraging additional recycling in the years to come.
  The State and local governments are heavily involved in recycling, 
and there is a huge role for them--I say this as former Governor--a 
huge and important role for State and local governments to be involved 
in this, but there are also opportunities for the Federal Government to 
play a constructive role. We are doing that, and hopefully we will be 
able to do that even better in the days to come.
  My sister and I were born in a coal mining town in West Virginia. We 
grew up later on in Virginia, where I was a Boy Scout and a Civil Air 
Patrol cadet. In scouting, we were taught to ``leave no trace.'' When 
we were hunting or fishing, my dad, a big hunter and fisherman, used to 
say basically to leave no trace behind so no one would actually know we 
were there. I think that admonition is one that has stuck with me 
throughout my life.
  I believe we have a moral obligation to be devoted stewards of our 
environment and our planet and to leave our planet in even better shape 
than we found it.
  Lately, I have been thinking about another quote. This one I really 
like is from Martin Luther King that a lot of people have heard. It 
goes something like this: ``Everybody can be great, because anybody can 
serve.'' This call to service reminds me of recycling because almost 
anyone can help better protect our environment by reducing the waste we 
produce, and we can do that, in part, by recycling.
  I have a chart here that indicates just some of the things I recycled 
of late. This is not a green Ford Explorer. I bought my wife a car--
actually, she bought it years and years ago, probably 15 years ago. We 
call it the Ford ``exploder.'' It never exploded. It was a great car. 
She used it for 9 or 8 years or so and passed it down to our son, 
Christopher. He used it for a couple of years and passed it down to 
Ben, who used it for about 3 years. Finally, it just gave up the ghost. 
I took it one day to a place where they recycled cars. I drove in. They 
put it on a huge machine that actually weighed it. I think of--you 
know, you get on a scale to weigh yourself. Well, this was like a scale 
for vehicles, including our Ford Explorer. They wrote out a check 
literally before I left to actually pay, I think $900, for recycling 
the Explorer. People do that every day in Delaware and other places as 
well.
  We have a waste facility in our State of Delaware, and one of the 
things they oversee is recycling. About every month, from spring to the 
fall, they hold recycling events. A lot of times they are in school 
parking lots, maybe high school parking lots. They do them on 
Saturdays.
  One Saturday I called ahead, and I asked: Do you guys recycle 
dehumidifiers? We had a dehumidifier. It was about 20 years old. It had 
been in our basement forever. They said: Yes, we do that--which is 
great, and we checked on paints, paint thinners, oil-based paints, and 
stuff. They said: We are doing hazardous materials recycling. So I took 
several cans of paint thinners.
  We had all these outdoor lights from our house over the years that 
kind of died out on us, and I didn't know what to do with them. Sure 
enough, they took these household lights, as well as all kinds of cords 
and everything, paints and stuff.
  Every Monday in my neighborhood, we have big canisters outside where 
we can recycle all kinds of things. I always had water bottles in there 
and other kinds of cans and so forth, newspapers, you name it--
actually, compost too. If you actually add up what we put in our big 
recycling bin every Monday for pickup, you look at what we put in our 
compost in our backyard, and you compare that to the actual amount of 
trash that is picked up at our house on Thursdays, there are many times 
more recyclables and compostables than there is actually trash.

  We like to do that where I live. Hopefully, we will learn from other 
communities and States, and hopefully they will learn from us.
  One of the reasons I love recycling so much flows from my belief that 
all of us can do our part to preserve limited resources and reduce 
landfill input, while at the same time helping our environment and 
creating jobs.
  Mine is a little State. I tell people, even today, that we are the 
49th largest State. That means only Rhode Island is smaller than us. We 
are about 100 miles long and 50 miles wide, so recycling is 
particularly important. We just doesn't have a lot of space for 
landfills. We have about 1 million people, and it is just a matter of 
having enough space. That space limitation is actually what prompted 
Delaware to pass the Universal Recycling Law in 2010. It requires that 
all waste haulers who provide residential trash collection also have to 
provide for the collection of recyclables. Think about that. That was 
the law we passed about 9 years ago, I think under the leadership of 
either Governor Markell or Governor Minner. We started a little bit of 
recycling. We started getting serious about it when I was Governor. 
They really ramped it up in the last decade, which is wonderful.
  Since the law's passage, the First State--that is Delaware, if you 
didn't know--has continued to recycle somewhere around 40 percent of 
all of our waste, most recently recycling a little bit more than 43 
percent in 2017.
  I have a friend who, when you ask him how he is doing, he sometimes 
replies: Compared to what? Well, compared to more than a decade ago, in 
2006, the First State diverted about half as much--23 percent of our 
waste from landfills. So we pretty much doubled that over the last 10 
years. Hopefully, we will come close to doubling it again in the years 
to come.
  Today the recycling industry faces unprecedented challenges, 
especially with respect to plastics. The United States used to ship a 
lot of our recyclables, as you know, to China, but beginning in 2017, 
China decided to ban 24 types of what are called scrap imports and 
deployed strict contamination requirements for the scraps they will 
accept. They didn't want to have glass mixed up with metals, mixed up 
with plastic and paper. They are looking to reduce contamination like 
that, and they made their rules a whole lot stricter in that regard.
  Now, because of the policies China implemented in March of this year, 
local governments and municipalities are facing an uphill challenge to 
keep their recycling programs alive. According to the EPA, the United 
States recycles less than 22 percent of our discarded materials, which 
makes me feel better in Delaware because we are like twice the national 
average now.
  According to a peer-reviewed study published in 2017, more than 90 
percent of plastic has never been recycled. Let me say that again. 
According to a peer-reviewed study published in 2017--2 years ago--more 
than 90 percent of plastic has never been recycled. That means we have 
only recycled about 9 percent of our plastic around the world. Of the 
8.3 billion metric tons of plastic produced, 6.3 billion tons--that is 
about three-fourths of all that is produced--becomes waste. The rest 
gets recycled; the lion's share of it does not. Most of it ends up in 
landfills, and too much of it, unfortunately, ends up in our oceans and 
environment.
  I have a couple of our colleagues on the Environment and Public Works 
Committee. The Presiding Officer is one of them, and we have Senator 
Boozman. The three of us are all members on the committee. I think 
Senator Dan Sullivan from Alaska and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse--a 
Republican and a Democrat--have been working hard, along with Tom Udall 
from New Mexico, who is on the Commerce Committee, to try to address 
some of these plastic contaminations.
  If we continue down this path, the world economic forum predicts that 
we are on track to have plastic pollution in our oceans outweigh the 
fish in our world's ocean by 2050. Let that sink in for just a minute. 
By 2050, if we continue on the track we are on, we are

[[Page S6599]]

going to end up having more plastic pollution by weight than fish in 
our world's oceans. That is not a good thing.
  Last time I checked, Delaware is blessed with more five-star beaches 
than any other State in America. If we don't begin to change our 
recycling habits, the waves that grace our pristine beaches will be 
better known for washing up plastic waste than giving surfers those big 
waves to ride.
  Almost every year I participate in something called Delaware's Annual 
Coastal Cleanup, along with thousands of people. We start down at 
Fenwick Island--right in the southernmost part of Delaware, a great 
beach town, and right north of the Ocean City, MD, line--to clean up 
our beaches and our waterfronts, from the Delaware and Maryland line 
all the way up almost to Pennsylvania in the north.
  While we are still waiting for the numbers from this year, last year, 
in 2018, my fellow volunteers and I--thousands of us--together 
collected 2.7 tons of waste, including plastic water bottles, straws, 
takeout containers, tires, and you name it. This was from just one 
weekend of work along 70 miles of coastline.
  Sadly, those 2.7 tons of trash collected last year in Delaware pale 
in comparison to what we are seeing around the world. Our 2.7 tons of 
trash is like the tip of the iceberg, compared to all the rest of this 
washing up in places around the world.
  I think we might have one more chart. Some of you have also heard of 
the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which now covers a surface area on the 
Earth 250 times larger than my whole State of Delaware and contains a 
whopping 80,000 tons of trash. Here it is. Can you imagine? Look at all 
that trash.
  It is out in the Pacific Ocean, and I would like to say that it is 
getting smaller. I don't think it is, but it needs to, and we need to 
be a part of that in making some progress.
  As we celebrate America Recycles Day tomorrow, I just want to 
encourage you to join Senator Boozman and join our colleagues and their 
constituents and join us in looking for new ways to dramatically 
increase recycling in our country and around the world. We need 
solutions that are a win-win for our economy on the one hand and for 
our environment on the other hand. I believe recycling is one of those 
win-win solutions.
  By the way, you may be surprised to learn that recycling and 
manufacturing industries are beneficial for our economy, accounting for 
more than 750,000 jobs and approximately $6.7 billion in tax revenues. 
That reminds me of one of my favorite sayings: ``It is possible to do 
good and to do well at the same time.'' It is possible to clean up our 
planet and make the planet safer and create jobs and economic 
opportunities.
  It is not a Hobson's choice. It is not one or the other. We can do 
both. I believe that if we work hard, we work together, and we work to 
leverage points of consensus rather than points of disagreement, we 
will continue to make progress. Recycling is something that I think 
every American can do to make a difference.
  I once read somewhere how many aluminum cans we drink and use and 
consume. It could be tea, it could be soda, it could be milk or variety 
of waters, but if people just would recycle their aluminum cans, it 
would have a terrific effect on, believe it or not, carbon dioxide. It 
is put up in the air. So that affects climate change as well.
  There are a lot of good effects. Recycling is something that every 
American can do to make a difference. I would ask you to start today. 
If you have already gotten started, figure out how to do better. On 
America Recycles Day, our children and our grandchildren will be glad 
that we did it in the years to come.
  Again, I am grateful to be here today with my dedicated cochair, my 
compadre, Senator Boozman. I thank him for his leadership and for 
providing, with our staff, great ideas to make this particular America 
Recycles Day an even bigger and better thing than before.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arkansas.
  Mr. BOOZMAN. Mr. President, I thank Senator Carper and his staff and 
my staff for the tremendous job that they have done in recent years in 
really trying to educate, through the caucus, the rest of the staff and 
Members as to the importance of recycling. As a result of their 
efforts, it really is making a big difference.
  We hear a lot about Republicans and Democrats not getting along on 
this and that, not getting anything done, and I think this is a great 
example of something that is very, very important. It is not 
glamourous, but it is things like this that really can make a huge 
difference, as Senator Carper alluded to. We appreciate him and 
appreciate his friendship.
  Well, tomorrow, November 15, is America Recycles Day. So we are 
asking Americans to join us as we come together and reaffirm the 
importance and the benefits of recycling on this occasion. We all know 
that recycling is a commonsense way for us to be responsible stewards 
of our environment. Recycling also strengthens our economy and creates 
hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs throughout our country. This 
is something that I believe everyone can agree is truly a win-win 
situation.
  Most Americans are familiar with traditional recycling efforts at 
their city and county levels, which encourage citizens to recycle 
household goods or business goods, such as paper, soda cans, and 
bottles. However, recycling is much broader than these common 
practices. Recycling is a $200 billion industry in our country, and it 
entails much, much more than just traditional municipal recycling 
programs.
  My State of Arkansas is home to many examples of companies that are 
contributing to a robust and growing commercial recycling industry. I 
will give you an example.
  Nucor, a leading steel producer located in Blytheville, AR, has the 
capacity to recycle 6 million tons of steel per year--6 million tons--
and over 27 million tons nationwide, making it North America's largest 
recycler. Nucor has also taken its efforts a step further by teaming 
with local recycling facilities to help tackle some of the biggest 
challenges associated with the practice in rural communities.
  Nucor donated a recycled cardboard baler to Abilities Unlimited, a 
local nonprofit that runs a nearby recycling facility. This investment 
has proven mutually beneficial to Nucor and to the community. This 
facility now provides an outlet for the steel company and community 
members to recycle in a much more cost-effective manner.
  In fact, Nucor plants in Arkansas have the capability to recycle 
about 60 tons of cardboard annually thanks to this baler. More than 195 
tons of cardboard, 21 tons of paper, and 71 tons of mixed plastics have 
been recycled through this partnership.
  Another industry leader leading the way is Walmart. As the world's 
largest retailer, Walmart has put recycling front and center by raising 
its packaging standards to include more recycled content and to 
eliminate specific nonrecyclable packaging materials by 2020. Earlier 
this year, Walmart announced its intention to achieve 100 percent 
recyclable, reusable, or industrially compostable packaging by 2025. 
Its leadership in this arena will help to create more demand for 
recycled content and open the door for other companies to follow suit.

  Lastly, I want to highlight the recycling accomplishments of Bryce 
Corporation, a trailblazer in flexible packaging. This is the packaging 
commonly used for chips, juice pouches, pet food, lawn and garden 
materials, cleaning supplies, and many other products. Bryce employs 
about 750 people at its Searcy facility and has achieved an 
environmental footprint that the Central Arkansas community can be very 
proud of.
  At this location alone, Bryce has maintained a 98-percent landfill-
free status and has supported the circular economy by recycling over 15 
million pounds of plastics each year. The material recycled from this 
facility is repurposed into other products, ranging from plastic 
pallets to automotive parts. Bryce Corporation's innovative efforts are 
a sterling example of recycling done right, and I am grateful for the 
example it has set for the rest of the country.
  Our country has certainly faced its fair share of recycling woes and 
setbacks, but I have always maintained that in adversity lies 
opportunity. I believe there is much to be learned from

[[Page S6600]]

the meaningful work that these companies are doing in Arkansas, and I 
commend them on leading on the issue.
  The United States has the ability now to improve its waste management 
and recycling infrastructure and better leverage the economic and 
environmental benefits of recycling.
  I look forward to continue my work with my cochair of the Recycling 
Caucus, Senator Carper. Again, I thank him and his staff and my staff, 
who are doing such a tremendous job, and the other members of the 
caucus who develop meaningful, long-term solutions that address the 
challenges facing the industry.
  I encourage all Americans to use America Recycles Day as an 
opportunity to reflect on the critical importance of recycling and to 
consider what we can do to support our environment through our own 
individual efforts.
  Mr. CARPER. Would the Senator yield for a moment?
  Mr. BOOZMAN. Yes, sir.
  Mr. CARPER. Thank you for sharing with us the terrific ideas of what 
businesses around Arkansas and the country are doing to recycle. They 
do it for a variety of reasons. It is the right thing to do, and a lot 
of them are committed to being good environmental stewards. It can also 
be to their economic advantage. Instead of having to pay to have stuff 
being carted away to a landfill, the ability to recycle materials is, I 
think, desirable.
  We used to have a big Chrysler plant in Delaware, in Newark, close to 
the University of Delaware and close to the Maryland line. The plant 
was about 60 years old, and in the middle of the great recession, 
Chrysler went into bankruptcy, and we lost that plant. It closed, and 
about 3,000 jobs were gone. We had a GM plant as well about 15 miles 
from there, just outside of Wilmington, and the same thing happened. 
About 3,000 jobs were gone, which was just really, really tough.
  Having said that--in your words again, in adversity lies 
opportunity--the folks at the University of Delaware called me. After 
Chrysler had gone into bankruptcy, they announced that they were 
selling the plant. They were looking to sell it, and the folks at the 
University of Delaware and the president of the university, Pat Harker, 
called me and said: Do you think the Chrysler people might be 
interested in selling that plant to the university?
  It was just about a half mile south of the University of Delaware in 
Newark.
  I called the people at Chrysler and said: You may have an interested 
buyer here.
  They ended up coming to an agreement on the terms of the purchase, 
and that old Chrysler plant has been recycled. The plant was largely 
taken down--not entirely, but largely taken down. The money that the 
University of Delaware earned and generated from the sale of the 
recyclables--the construction stuff that the plant was made out of--
more than paid for taking down and leveling the plant.
  Now the University of Delaware has a site of several hundred acres, 
and they are redeveloping that as a science, technology, and 
manufacturing facility with a lot of tenants and more to come. So there 
really is opportunity in adversity.
  The other thing I would say is that we got some shredding machines. I 
had a picture up there of an old shredding machine, and we bought a new 
one not long ago. So we ended up with a lot of shredded paper. As it 
turns out, the weekly recyclers, when they come through our 
neighborhood and collect, they are happy to take the paper, but they 
don't want to take the shredded paper. What they said that we ought to 
do is to put it in our compost.
  My wife came up with this idea of composting 10 years ago. Somebody 
was nice enough to build a 4-by-6 and about 3-feet high bin and then 
lined it with materials, and we put grass in it, recyclables, leaves, 
and we ended up with this great mulch. We have, I think, taken what a 
lot of people have seen as waste product and ended up actually turning 
it into something to make our lawn and our trees and our shrubs even 
healthier.
  It is all good. I am just thrilled to be on the floor with my friend 
and to be able to thank those who are recycling and remind others, if 
you are not, that you are missing out on the fun. Come and join us. You 
will be glad you did.
  Mr. BOOZMAN. I think you make a great point in the sense that we do 
things for the right reasons. That is so important. Also, it is 
important, too, that not only can we do it for the right reasons and 
benefit our environment, but it also can be cost-effective to our 
businesses.
  A good example of that is Walmart. Several years ago, they wanted to 
reduce their fuel cost and then also reduce the harm in the sense of 
the landfills and things like that. They looked and saw that on their 
trucks, the limiting factor was not weight. It was bulk. You know how 
you go to the store and you buy something and it has got this huge box 
or whatever and it has got the little bitty product in it. They said, 
you know, we don't need to be doing that.
  So they told their vendors that they would like to go in that 
direction, and to their credit, the vendors cooperated. As a result, 
they were able to put more products on the truck, thus reducing fuel 
costs--again benefiting the economy--and having less bulk for consumers 
to deal with eventually. That was putting less pressure on the 
environment because, you know, some people don't do a good job of 
recycling.
  These things can be so good for not only doing the right thing but 
also improving the bottom line and making sure that we really are 
putting less pressure on the environment.
  We appreciate your leadership. You have been doing this for a long 
time, as Governor and now as Senator, helping to put these things 
together. We very much appreciate it.
  Mr. CARPER. If the gentleman would yield the floor for a moment, I 
said earlier in my remarks, to paraphrase it again, that it is possible 
to do good and do well at the same time. It really is. I am just happy 
that more and more people are doing that.
  While we are having this conversation, I just want to mention that 
when we showed up at the recycling event at Glascow High School last 
Saturday afternoon, they took a bunch of our stuff to recycle--papers, 
bottles, cans, paint thinners, a dehumidifier, and all kinds of stuff. 
One thing they wouldn't take was our Styrofoam. We have one place in 
Delaware--and we are not a big State; 100 miles long and 50 miles 
wide--we have one place in Delaware that will take Styrofoam.
  What I would love to do in the months to come and in the new year is 
for us to start on recycling projects and focus on that because it is 
not a problem only in Delaware; there are a lot of places where it is 
hard to recycle Styrofoam. We can try to figure it out. Maybe somebody 
around the world or somebody in other States has figured this out and 
they are doing it. We need to learn from them, find out what works, and 
do more of that. In my State, we have a hard time dealing with it.
  Mr. BOOZMAN. We look forward to having a robust bunch of programs.
  It is so important to educate people on what is recyclable because 
not everyone knows. Different things are recyclable from one area to 
another area. So we need education on that, and that will make it much 
more efficient, with people putting in the correct things.
  So we have some obstacles to overcome, but the good news is, there 
are people working together, and we are moving in the right direction.
  Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I think I will yield back the time.
  Mr. BOOZMAN. With that, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CRAMER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

                          ____________________