Plastics Are A Growing Waste Problem For Farmers

(moo)
Dairy farmer Tim Toule has about 80 cows on his farm in Loudon.
Feeding them requires acres and acres of hay and corn and a convenient and economical way to store all of it.
For Toule – like many other farmers – that means plastic.

"these are double wrapped ones (sound of plastic) there’s two layers of this on them."

Toule tears off plastic from a 56 pound roll that he uses to cover his round hay bales.
Next to his bales is a huge machine that spits out silage into what are called ag bags, which are made of a tougher plastic.

"(sound) the idea is to keep the air out of your product cause once air enters it you get molding and spoilage and then it’s no good."

The ag bags are about eight feet in diameter and 200 feet long.
They look like giant white earthworms lying in his fields.
Toule typically fills up five a year; each one holds 300 tons of feed.
And that adds up to a lot of plastic.

"typically I use about a thousand pounds a year, between my bales and my bags"

That doesn’t include the 50 pound plastic bags of fertilizer, or the plastic containers used for cleaning products.
Most of the plastic containers for cleaning products are recyclable, but the rest?

"we take them to the town dump…and I live in Loudon so it goes to the Wheelabrator site and the incinerator."

In most other parts of the state, all that plastic ends up in landfills.
Using large amounts of plastic is no different for nursery growers either, says Doug Cole, president of D.S. Cole Growers in Loudon.

"if you think of all the greenhouses you see, polyethylene is used as a roof for the greenhouses, it’s a double layer of plastic that has ultraviolet inhibitors in it."

Cole says there are also plastic bags for potting soil, and all those plastic pots and treys and containers.

“The problem with flower pots, the challenge is that they’re polypropylene, and typically polypropylene is not as common as polyethylene it’s tough to get someone to use it and want to recycle it, as far as I know all the people that are interested in it are in the Midwest, so there’s nothing local.”

Cole is referring to plastics identified as number 4 and 5, in those little triangles that appear on most plastic consumer products.
And most municipal recycling facilities in New Hampshire and across the country - recycle only plastics labeled one or two.

“It’s a waste of the resource of the energy in oil to be burning it or sticking it into a landfill when it can be reused”

That’s Lois Levitan with Cornell University, she’s leader of the Recycling Ag Plastics Project.
She says the lack of recycling is of particular concern to farmers, because they deal with such large bulky sheets of plastic too.
Most facilities want it baled, which requires expensive machinery.
Levitan says some municipal solid waste facilities in the northeast won’t even take the plastic, leaving farmers with little choice.

“in many states whether its legal as it is in New York, or not, they’re either burning them in an open field, or they’re plowing them into the ground, or just sticking them to the woods, and upset about it, they don’t want to be doing those things."

It’s illegal in New Hampshire to burn in open fields.
Plastic tends to smolder, which releases toxic dioxins in the air.
Richard Uncles, with New Hampshire’s Agriculture Department says he doesn’t think farmers here are burning the plastics.
But he says even if farmers can find a buyer for these plastics, there’s another problem.

“the problem is they tend to be contaminated at least in the view of the plastic processors with soil, organic matter, manure feed and that is a problem for the people who grind it up and make waste plastic.”

Processors would have to be producing a certain kind of plastic product, like plastic lumber for decking, or bumpers for cars, not plastic cups or medical supplies.
State agriculture officials are hoping to work with the Recycling Ag Plastics Project to come up with a solution.
Public meetings to discuss this issue are scheduled for Monday and Tuesday.
For NHPR news, I’m Amy Quinton.