SOUTH PORTLAND — The city of South Portland was one of four cities to have the contents of their recycling bins graded on contamination this summer.

Benni Magnussen McComish, Molly Skeffington, Sarah Weden and Jessica Wibby were the team of interns put to the task of evaluating the degree of contamination in single-sort bins in South Portland. They also developed ideas for community education surrounding what can and cannot be recycled.

The team presented their goals, process, data, outcomes, and recommendations at the Aug. 14 South Portland City Council meeting.

“Our overarching goal this summer was to reduce contamination rates in residential recycling in South Portland through public outreach and education,” Skeffington said.

Julie Rosenbach, South Portland’s sustainability director, said the town took part in the program with ecomaine to address problems experienced in municipalities with recycling contamination.

Falmouth, Scarborough and Windham also took part in the program.

Skeffington said that the team trained for two weeks at ecomaine. They trained on the sorting line, where they learned about the mechanisms through which Maine’s largest recycling facility sorts more than 40,000 tons of single-sort material each year.

The machines sort items into fibers (such as cardboard), rigid plastics, metals and glass.

“It was really eye-opening to see that employees are spending hours a day sorting,” Skeffington said. “If we make their lives easier by lowering contamination rates, that’s just another positive.”

Common recycling contaminants include plastic bags and straws, light bulbs and batteries, textiles, bubble wrap and food or yard waste.

Weden said the team identified about 1,300 bins with plastic bags in them during the course of the eight-week study, some of them repeats. Plastic bags can’t be recycled through ecomaine because they jam the facility’s sorting machines.

“We also saw a lot of napkins and paper towels,” Weden said. “Papers towels are already reprocessed and can’t be processed again.”

In 2017, China implemented the National Sword, which is a tighter contamination standard on its recycled materials imports. China had been the destination for about 40 percent of US recycling, or about seven million tons per year. This stricter policy lowered imports, which is costly for the US.

“This reverberated internationally, nationally, and locally here in South Portland,” McComish said. “Before 2017, China was accepting around 30 percent contamination rate. Now, they only accept 0.5 percent, which is really, really difficult to achieve. It costs South Portland around $100,000 a year to cover the cost of contamination.”

To grade the contamination of bins, the interns walked routes around the city and inspected items inside the bins.

“We looked inside, determined the contamination amount, and then tagged the bins with one of three tags,” Wibby said.

The bins were tagged green for good, yellow for some amount of contamination, and red for being too contaminated for collection.

“We rarely gave out reds, because then the recycling wouldn’t get picked up,” Weden said. “That’s really inconvenient and we didn’t want to deter people from recycling.”

The team only tagged bins red in rare cases in which the bins were full of trash or were dangerous.

The interns created a graph of the various states of contamination of bins during the course of their survey. They found that, as residents were notified of the state of their bins, contamination rates went down over time.

“You can see a clear upward trend in the amount of green tags we gave out,” Weden said. “By the fourth week, the amount of green tags had increased from 45 to 69 percent.”

In week one, there were 243 green tags, 290 yellow tags, and eight red tags. By week four, there were 492 green tags, 225 yellow tags and only one red tag.

As part of their study, the team made recommendations to the city on how to continue education and outreach around recycling contamination. They suggested the city promote a public pledge to recycling, to increase accountability and awareness surrounding consumption and recycling in the community.

“Keep the community involved,” Mc- Comish said. “And continue the dialogue about recycling.”

The team also suggested members of the community download the South Portland Recycles App, which serves as a handheld reference for what materials can and cannot be recycled. Residents can look up whether a plastic hanger, for example, is recyclable (it isn’t).

The council commended the team of interns for their study.

“They’ve done incredible work,” Councilor Kate Lewis said. “They’ve increased information, and saved the city of South Portland a lot of money.”

— Evelyn Waugh can be reached at ewaugh@mainelymediallc.com or 780- 9026.

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