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Garbage In, Garbage Out
Even decades after having been mandated by law,
recycling struggles to carve a commercially viable niche
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Business New Haven
3/18/2002
By: Nancy Barnes
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Each Wednesday night, people leave their houses off New Haven's Orange Street to make their weekly trips to the curb. Their shadowy presence looms larger because they carry recycling bins. By daylight and after abundant noise, the empty, blue plastic bins rim the sidewalks, scattered willy-nilly up and down the street.
In recent years, the importance of recycling has retreated into the shadows. Once associated with fertile composts paying homage to Mother Earth - and that was bad enough - the public image of recycling degenerated into farce when Titanic heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio interviewed former President Bill Clinton on the subject two years ago.
What remains a sober fact is that businesses recycled long before the general public began to pick apart its trash. “My grandfather used to recycle newspaper and cardboard. He was doing it in the 1930s and '40s,” says Timothy DeVivo, who, with his brother Thomas, owns Willimantic Waste Paper Co., the state's largest independently owned recycling firm. “My dad used to do that: He got his paper from paper drives,” DeVivo says.
Yet, especially in today's flagging economy, the status of commercial recycling in Connecticut remains difficult to grasp. The very nature of economic contraction, international trade agreements and the ways in which recycling is measured are the cause.
“Garbage is a very good barometer of your economic times,” says Thomas Gaffey, who heads recycling for the Connecticut Resource Recovery Authority (CRRA). The CRRA operates two recycling centers. The one in Stratford accepts only residential container and fiber waste, while the center in Hartford accepts residential and some commercial waste.
Gaffey points out that in good economic times there are far more purchases and products associated with waste. For instance, there is a lot more corrugated cardboard, he says, as consumers consume more goods.
“Manufacturers and businesses are generating a lot more waste because they're doing a lot more business,” Gaffey says. But in a weak economy, business does not need as many recycled products - because it needs fewer products, period.
Gaffey notes that the price for bailed newspapers, which once rose as high as $60 a ton, now stands at between $15 and $20 per ton.
In addition to the state of the economy, international trade agreements play a part in how the recyclables sector operates. For instance, Gaffey observes that China has a lot of very low priced steel on the market. That depresses the price that sellers can get for domestic steel. A surfeit of Asian cardboard - the very thin, gray-brown cardboard that has been recycled so many times that its uses are limited to products such as cylinders for paper towels - has depressed the recyclables market as well, he says.
Clay McLean, who handles shipping for the Smurfit-Stone Container Corp.'s plant in Norwich, says that Stone won't buy Asian cardboard. Especially troublesome is green glass, Gaffey says. While the U.S. has a market for clear and amber glass that beer producers can use, it does not have a domestic market for the green glass that arrives in droves as bottles that carry imported wine. “The only items that can be recycled are the items the market will accept,” Gaffey says.
Businesses in Connecticut are required by the DEP to recycle 11 items: glass and metal food and beverage containers, newspaper, corrugated cardboard, white office paper, leaves, grass clippings, scrap metal, used motor oil, lead-acid vehicle batteries, and nickel-cadmium batteries.
Earth Angels
April 22 marks the 32nd anniversary of Earth Day. It is also the birthday of Lenin, St. Francis of Assisi and, according to a least one source, the ad man who coined the phrase “Earth Day.”
Originally celebrated in March, the official Earth Day date was moved up to April because, in late winter, too many areas of the country remained under cover of snow.
One company in Connecticut that moved early on to adopt a large scale recycling creed is the Southern Telephone Co. or SNET, now a division of SBC Communications Inc.
In 1974, SNET began a wire-recycling program, according to company spokesperson Seth Bloom, partially in response to a steel shortage. The wire SNET recycles includes all metal from outside, such as wiring from its poles and telephone boxes, and the wiring from its switching equipment.
Last year, the company recycled seven million pounds of wiring by selling it to scrap-metal dealers. The latter in turn sell the metal to other companies throughout the country for re-manufacture.
“We think it's a good thing for our company,” Bloom says. “The revenue source is not a significant sum, but it does cover costs for recycling.” Besides that, he adds, “It's the right thing to do.”
Bloom's remarks seem to echo those of Willimantic Waste's Timothy DeVivo, who says that smaller companies who might have thrown away their paper in the past are probably recycling it now. He says that businesses recycle for several reasons: as a result of public education, because it is the law and because it has become the politically correct thing to do.
“It's the old PC syndrome,” DeVivo says. “The attitude of just throwing it [waste] away is just old-school.”
Meg Enkler, recycling education coordinator for the DEP, says that last year about 24 percent of products that would have been thrown away in Connecticut were recycled. That number, which represents both commercial and residential recycling, is down slightly from the year before and is well below the 40 percent goal that the state set for 2000.
Though required to recycle, industries do not have to present commercial reporting figures to the DEP, Enkler notes. She says that the commercial recycling picture is further confused because some large commercial facilities, such as department stores, have their own cardboard bailers and ship their commercial fiber directly to an end-market user. “We may not get all the statistics on commercial recyclables,” she notes.
The fact that Connecticut has a bottle law also puts a damper on the figures the DEP is able to compile, Enkler observes. The state's bottle law - which requires that distributors collect and market glass and metal containers as recyclables - does not include a provision for reporting the products that they sell for recycling to the DEP, Enkler says.
And bottle bills seem to work. For instance, nationwide, the aluminum can recycling rate dropped to 54.5 percent in the year 2000, its lowest point in ten years, according figures released by the Container Recycling Institute. Yet, in the ten states like Connecticut that have bottle laws, estimates for the percentage of aluminum cans that were recycled that year range between 70 and 80 percent, Kyle Paulson, a research associate at the Institute, says.
“Connecticut really is a state with a lot of environmental firsts,” Enkler insists. She says Connecticut was one of the first states to enact recycling.
“I'm just laughing because it's such a common problem,” says Lynn Rubenstein, executive director of the Northeast Recycling Council (NERC), when confronted with Connecticut's haze of commercial recycling requirements. “That's true in most of the states - they don't have access to commercial data. This is one of the perennial tensions in the recycling world.”
Rubenstein says that the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) invested a tremendous amount of effort in developing a national, standardized system to count residential and commercial recyclables. By that time, she says, states already had well-established expectations about what items they wanted to count.
“There are political and policy reasons why states are just not prepared to do an about-face,” she says.
Rubenstein says that municipal governments often have what she terms a “control relationship” over its residents. Local government may hire the hauler that collects its residential waste, for instance. “Frequently, there is a control relationship so that they [the municipalities] have access to residential information. Very few municipalities offer those services to businesses,” she says.
Like other states, Connecticut relies on municipalities to provide its recycling data. “Some towns do an excellent job,” says the DEP's Enker. “Others don't.”
One recycling coordinator - and not every town in Connecticut has a full-time employee in that position - is New Haven's Simone Mason. In addition to providing data to the DEP on residential and commercial recycling, this full-time city employee is responsible for outreach efforts concerning recycling as well as the enforcement of state and municipal recycling laws.
Businesses as well as the haulers who carry their commercial waste are subject to penalties if they break recycling laws, Mason says.
“A lot of companies don't recognize that recycling is a state law,” Mason continues. “And the hauler, by state law, is required to set up a recycling program for businesses. Some haulers will sometimes say, 'I won't do it if I have to put out a truck to collect the material.' But, guess what? It's the law. Everyone plays a part.”
Mason says that practically every commercial operation has some waste that needs to be handled specially. “People think there's nothing that can't be handled in a restaurant,” she says. “What if they fry food? There's grease. What do they do with that?” Mason says that the Western Massachusetts Rendering Co., located in Southwick, Mass., is one company that harvests it.
In the nonresidential sector, Mason gives high marks to Yale University, which operates its own fleet of trucks for its recycling program and also to SBC Southern New England Telephone Co. for its wire reclamation project.
Like NERC's Rubenstein, Mason says the greatest myth about recycling is that it is expensive.
“When companies implement a recycling program, they complete a diversion that will cut the cost of their waste disposal,” she says. And, ever hopeful that more companies will increase their recycling efforts, she says that she has even devised a program so that companies can afford the toter - carts that hold recyclables - by modifying the number of waste pick-ups and offsetting the costs of the solid waste containers which, absent a recycling program, companies require.
Willimantic Waste's DeVivo agrees. “Usually a business earns a profit on recyclables because they're saving on trash,” he says.
In the 1980s, the syringes and bodily fluids associated with infectious diseases spurred genuine advances in hospital waste-disposal procedures. Today, recycling computers is problematic because computer monitors contain lead.
Willimantic Waste, which handles scrap metal and some plastic bottles in addition to secondary fibers, does not recycle computers.
DeVivo knows of two companies - one in Massachusetts and one in Pennsylvania - that do. He does not know how many computers from Connecticut become exports to Third World countries, although DEP's Enkler says of recyclables broadly, “A lot of our recyclables go out of the country, too.”
Given that and all the complexities within today's recycling market, the country compost that became a cri de coeur from the flower children - who decades ago were so eager to save the planet - now seems as bathed in innocence as it once was in light.
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