Recycling Has Come a Long Way

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by Sally Deneen

Recycling has leap-frogged ahead, meaning if you haven't checked the recycling scene since the mid-1990s, it's possible that much of what you thought you knew is wrong. Not only can you recycle more things, but your discards are very much in demand, perhaps more than you realize.

Recycling and reuse businesses now employ about as many people as the auto industry, if not more, according to a 2001 "U.S. Recycling Economic Information Study" commissioned by the U.S. EPA and several states through an agreement with the National Recycling Coalition. At least 1.1 million people now work in the industry, more than triple the jobs in mining. BusinessWeek in February pegged the number of auto factory workers at about 950,000. Demand from industrializing China and India is helping spur the U.S. recycling industry, which now provides a "major source of raw materials," according to Jerry Powell, editor of Resource Recycling magazine.

"Without recycling, given current virgin raw material supplies, we could not print the daily newspaper, build a car, or ship a product in a cardboard box," says Powell. "Recycling is not some feel-good activity; it is one of the backbones of global economic development." To his way of thinking, recovering cast-offs and putting them to good use "are key ingredients to industrial growth and stability."

Is the Job Getting Done?

And yet, there is a problem. It becomes obvious when peering into a garbage can at a community festival or in the dumpster behind your local shopping mall. Curiously, while recycling has grown to more than 9,000 curbside programs nationwide, a greater percentage of recyclable plastic bottles and aluminum cans are ending up in the regular garbage.

Aluminum can recycling has dropped steadily, from a 1992 high of 65 percent of cans to 45 percent by 2004, according to the Container Recycling Institute. The Aluminum Association puts the latter figure at 51 percent. Plastic bottles fare worse: While nearly 40 percent of PET plastic bottles were recycled in 1995, only about half that many - 21.6 percent - were recycled in 2004, according to the National Association for PET Container Resources. Powell says recycling levels exceed 50 percent for such materials as corrugated cartons and steel.

Paul Gardner got an unanticipated glimpse into why recycling rates are slipping in Minnesota, thanks to a phone survey of 800 Minnesotans that included this single recycling-related question: "Do you think manufacturers need more cans, bottles and paper?" Only 36 percent said "we need more," and those folks tended to have a high-school education or less and be younger (ages 24 and under).

"The more education you have, the more likely you are to be cynical about recycling," concluded Gardner, who is executive director of the Recycling Association of Minnesota. "We don't know [why], to be honest, though the purpose of the survey question was to see how many people in the state still cling to the idea that there is a glut of recyclables, because we need all the material we can get right now and more." He adds, "We've got some work to do, since almost three-quarters of Minnesotans think that we don't need to recycle more. Twenty-four percent of our garbage is still recyclable paper, so we have more to get."

Confronting the Naysayers

Gardner also spends time combating impressions sometimes bandied about in the media, most famously in "Recycling Is Garbage," a 1996 cover story in the New York Times Magazine, in which libertarian writer John Tierney argued that recycling could be "the most wasteful activity in modern America." Tierney wrote, "Recycling does sometimes make sense for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill."

"We've been fighting negative images ever since then," says Gardner, who tries to counter attacks from similarly themed articles, including "Why Recycling is Garbage" (Forbes 1997) and "Recycle This!" (Weekly Standard, January 2006). The Weekly Standard argued that there is plenty of sand, trees, petroleum and farm products to produce new glass, paper and plastic, so recycling is a waste of time that robs Seattle households of 16 minutes per week on sorting cast-offs.

Last January, Seattle began mandatory recycling. That means businesses and multi-family residential buildings face up to three warnings, followed by a $50 ticket if their garbage contains at least 10 percent recyclables (as of mid-February, no tickets had been issued).

Mandatory recycling is folly, contends the Weekly Standard. "To say we will someday run out of trees is the same as saying we will someday run out of corn," the magazine opined, adding that the motivation behind recycling is "we get a warm and fuzzy feeling."

Gardner and other recyclers shake their heads at such arguments. Recycling proves much more than an alternative to landfills, though high costs of garbage disposal in some areas certainly fuel interest; Seattle saves $4.4 million a year by recycling what otherwise would be trucked a few hours south to an Oregon landfill, says Brett Stav, a spokesperson for Seattle Public Utilities.

Recycling one aluminum can conserves 300 watt-hours, enough to run a 100-watt bulb for three hours. It takes five percent of the energy to make a new aluminum can out of an old can compared to making a new can out of raw materials. "Any time you make new stuff out of old stuff, it takes less energy, less chemicals, less water," Gardner says.

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