When Carroll County’s recycling program set up bins to receive polystyrene containers, better known by the Styrofoam brand name, it became only the second jurisdiction in Maryland to recycle the material.

The county provides space at its landfill entrance, near its other recycling bins, for private contractor Dart Container Corp. to set up a bin for polystyrene, said Carroll County Recycling Manager Maria Myers. The program launched July 1.

Carroll County decided to recycle polystyrene after Myers read an article about Dart’s polystyrene recycling and contacted the company to see if it wanted to begin a project with Carroll County schools. Instead, the company offered the bins to collect recycling for the county, she said.

Recycling experts say polystyrene is difficult to recycle because the market for it is limited. Also, not all types of the material can be recycled.

But many people want to recycle as much as possible and Myers said she wanted to give residents that option.

“Folks really want to recycle everything they can,” Myers said. “They just think it’s the right thing to do to keep as much out of our landfills as possible.”

The only other county in the state to recycle polystyrene, Washington County, also contracts out its recycling to a private company, which sorts the recyclables and sells the materials on the scrap market, said Tony Drury, the recycling program coordinator with the county’s Division of Environmental Management’s Solid Waste Department. Washington County’s contractor determined which materials it could find markets for and what it would collect among recyclable material.

Washington County began its polystyrene recycling program last year, though figures were unavailable on how much of the ubiquitous, lightweight material the county has collected, Drury said.

In 2010, the county recycled about 55,000 tons of total material.

As more people see neighbors recycle, they also begin to recycle, said Steven L. Johnson, a professor at Temple University’s Fox School of Business in Philadelphia who has studied social trends. Then it becomes a regular routine for them as well.

“Once people see their neighbors recycling Styrofoam they’ll get on board,” Johnson said.

Recycling programs vary throughout the state, from weekly curbside recycling in Baltimore city to residents dropping off their recycling at bins throughout Washington County, recycling experts said.

Statewide, about 43 percent of all waste was diverted to recycling instead of going into landfills or incinerators, said Jay Apperson, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of the Environment.

Maryland should be doing even more recycling, said Tommy Landers, spokesman for activist group Environment Maryland.

“Recycling is one of the smartest things we can do,” Landers said.

Polystyrene is considered one of the more difficult materials to recycle, recycling experts said. Carroll and Washington counties both take only one type of polystyrene, known as Polystyrene No. 6, which is made into white takeout food cartons, cups and egg cartons as well as molded cushioning for electronic equipment. Neither center takes the polystyrene “peanuts” which are used to fill many boxes for cushioning. The peanuts are not Polystyrene No. 6, Myers said. She encourages people to take them to the Post Office or delivery companies, which can provide them to customers to use for packing shipments.

The polystyrene also has to be clean. Carroll County’s polystyrene is reprocessed at a facility in Pennsylvania, which mixes it with other materials to make building insulation and picture frames, Myers said.

Nationwide, several cities have banned local businesses from using polystyrene containers, and debate over a similar ban is under way in California. One of the big concerns expressed by polystyrene critics is that the material is not biodegradable and is believed to take hundreds of years to break down in nature.

A coalition of business groups in California say the bans hurt small restaurants that cannot find cheaper alternative containers for takeout meals and that banning polystyrene hurts both businesses that operate on thin profit margins and customers, who would have the higher costs of packaging materials passed on to them.

The market for recycled polystyrene is too small for a jurisdiction such as Montgomery County to accept, said Eileen Kao, chief of the waste reduction and recycling section of the Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection. The center received nearly 84,000 tons of recyclable materials in fiscal 2010.

“That is one material we don’t collect,” Kao said. “Our decision on the materials we accept for recycling is really based on those that have strong, stable markets.”

Montgomery County’s recycling program, which began in the 1970s, is considered one of the most extensive in the state in accepting a wide range of plastics and other materials, Kao said.

An estimated 44 percent of the waste generated in the county is recycled.

Montgomery County has made certain that before it accepts a recyclable product, a market for it exists, so the material doesn’t end up in a landfill, Kao said.

Polystyrene “is one of those materials for which in our experience we’ve not had the confidence that there are strong stable markets for that material in the long term,” Kao added.

If more stable markets become available, polystyrene will be added to the list of recyclable materials in Montgomery County, Kao said.

cford@gazette.net