Recycling Now

Since Mayor Bloomberg, citing budget shortfalls, suspended New York City's glass- and plastic-recycling programs last July, my building's recycling bin has turned into just another garbage can. The suspensions are supposed to be temporary—one year for plastic, two for glass—but the growing pile, swollen with bottles, raised the specter of New York leading a nationwide retreat, as other cities confronted fiscal crises.

In January, hope arrived with the news that Hugo Neu, a scrap-metal company, was offering to pay New York for its bottles and cans. The other six bidders for the new recycling contract said that the city would have to pay them: The next-lowest bidder, Waste Management, Inc., was asking close to $7 million per year. Why the difference? "First and foremost," says Wendy Neu, vice president at Hugo Neu, "everything about us is geared toward recovering as much as possible from the recycling stream. That's the difference between us and a waste hauler who owns landfill." Mark Izeman, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, notes, "One reason the Bloomberg administration gave was that there were no markets. This shows there are markets and there are companies interested."

Another untapped source of public revenue is unredeemed bottles and cans. "Every nickel that goes unredeemed in New York goes straight into the beverage industries' coffers," says Guy Polhemus, founder of We Can, New York City's only large-scale redemption center. "The companies don't want to take back containers, and no one is forcing them to," Polhemus adds. By "conservative government estimates," says Judith Enck, policy adviser to New York's attorney general's environmental protection bureau, "statewide, these unredeemed nickels amount to $83 million per year." (The Container Recycling Institute estimates $135.7 million from October 1999 to September 2000.)

Meanwhile, the Bloomberg administration sent an eviction notice to We Can last December to make way for a housing project, even though "homeless people rely on We Can to provide a livelihood," says Daniel L. Alterman, attorney for the redemption center. We Can, too, may now be homeless, since the city claims there are no other lots available for it. "Citizens need to let the mayor and their council members know that redemption centers like We Can are critical not only for the homeless but also for a bigger, better bottle bill that will add non-carbonated beverages like water and juices to the redeemable list," Izeman says. Laura Haight, of the New York Public Interest Research Group, warns that "if we want recycling back at all, much less by July 2003 and 2004, we will have to hold our city council members and the mayor politically accountable."

I visited We Can one cold January morning to find a line of men and women waiting to redeem and a mountain of cans in clear garbage bags. I thought of what Guy Polhemus had told me: "If we go, we take with us an organization that has paid out $30 million to redeemers over 15 years and recycled 80,000 tons of waste."

At the national level, U.S. recycling remains healthy, bolstered by laws or goals in many states, such as California's requirement that 50 percent of the waste stream be diverted for recycling or reuse rather than dumped in landfills. Yet out of 4.6 million tons of wastepaper produced annually by New York City alone, only 1.1 million tons are recycled. Below, some other options being tried.

Pay-As-You-Throw

Pay-As-You-Throw programs, already implemented in more than 5,200 communities around the U.S., require households to pay a set amount by volume for garbage collection, while pickup of recyclables in many programs is free—giving an immediate incentive to reuse, recycle and compost. The result: an average 16 to 17 percent reduction in community waste levels, according to Skumatz Economic Research Associates. One exception: High-density apartments, where trash is deposited communally, are more difficult to adapt. (See www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/payt/index.htm, and www.wastesaver.com.)

Non-Profits

Non-profit Eco-Cycle, in Boulder, Colorado, now 27 years old, began as a few yellow school buses picking up recyclables and is now an organization raking in a 35 percent residential recycling rate with 800 neighborhood volunteers. Eco-Cycle runs the county's materials recovery facility (MRF), which processes recyclables. (For a visual tour of an MRF, see www.ci.seattle.wa.us/util/services/recyclingtour.) "Non-profits don't have to deliver to shareholders and don't have to nickel-and-dime customers," says Susan Hubbard, CEO of St Paul's Eureka Recycling, a non-profit that runs a multi-family-dwelling recycling program. "Instead, they can invest in education, working through volunteers to reach the city's communities and learn their needs," Hubbard explains.

Drop-Off Centers

Drop-off centers solve much of the problem of collection and sorting costs. At Boulder's center for hard-to-recycle materials, residents can turn in cell phones, toner cartridges, computer monitors, television sets, hardcover books and VCRs. In Seattle, two stations recycle bicycles, lawn mowers, vehicle batteries and even oil filters. In San Francisco, 18 percent of the population say they use drop-off centers for bottles, cans and paper. Carmen Cognetta, a member of New York's recycling task force, says that the city has a proposal before the state legislature to fund a recycling authority to set up drop-off centers, using unclaimed deposits rather than letting beverage companies have the nickels.

Building Markets

According to an analysis by John Schall at the Tellus Institute, if New York's tristate metropolitan region reclaimed half its raw materials from the waste stream instead of virgin resources, this would annually reduce environmental effects by $1 billion. The challenge is to create markets for waste. In California, San Francisco has worked with Alameda County to establish a non-profit mattress recycling company, while the East Bay cities worked with a company to recycle plastic into bender board. Santa Clarita is turning used disposable diapers into shoe insoles and roof shingles. California's bottle bill requires bottles to consist of 35 percent recycled glass.

Eleven states currently have bottle bills, with return rates that can be as high as 95 percent (in Michigan), according to Bill Sheehan of the GrassRoots Recycling Network. Of these bills, all include plastic and glass redemption for carbonated beverages, most exclude bottled water and one state, Delaware, excludes aluminum cans. Although New York does have a bottle bill, many stores break the law and refuse to accept redemptions.

"The biggest missing element in use patterns is corporate responsibility for the life cycle of products," Sheehan says. Germany shifted responsibility for packaging waste to the producer in 1991, and other European Union member countries are following suit. Italy, Japan, Switzerland and Taiwan have laws that make manufacturers take back and recycle electronic products. (See Green Guide #52.) Ultimately, the companies that make and package our goods, rather than consumers, should cover the costs for the collecting and disposing of waste.