The Decline of Recycling
Region Falls Short of Goals as Waste Stream Shifts
HILL COUNTRY OBSERVE, March 2008
By Tracy Frisch - Contributing writer
About two decades ago, at the height of the 1980s solid waste crisis, Massachusetts, New York and Vermont all set themselves lofty goals for recycling.
But today, the states are nowhere near meeting those targets, and in recent years the rate of recycling has stalled or declined across the region.
Meanwhile, the market for recyclable materials has never been stronger, and the prices local governments can collect for these materials have hit all-time highs.
In Washington County, N.Y., for example, the number of tons of recyclables collected at the county's five transfer stations last year was down 55 percent from its peak in 2002.
County officials say that's partly because many county residents have opted in recent years to have private haulers pick up their trash, rather than carrying it themselves to the transfer stations. But the total tonnage of garbage arriving at the transfer stations declined by only one-third from 2002 to 2007.
At the same time, despite the sharp drop in the collection of recyclables, the market for metals, plastic, paper and cardboard is so strong that proceeds from selling recyclables nearly doubled during the same period. Sales brought in almost $425,000 last year alone.
A similar scenario is playing out in Saratoga County, where the quantity of material collected at the county's five recycling centers has dropped by half in recent years. Even so, sales of recyclables brought in nearly $850,000 last year - a far cry from the early days of recycling, when the county occasionally had to pay to get a mill or broker to take recyclables off its hands.
In Columbia County, western Massachusetts and southwestern Vermont as well, participation in recycling programs has been stagnant or waning in recent years.
"Recycling rates were at their highest in the mid- to late 1990s," said Jolene Race, director of the Solid Waste Department in Columbia County. Since then, the quantity of recyclable materials delivered to the county's nine convenience stations dropped off and is now relatively stable, she said. But as in Washington County to the north, some county supervisors lately have been suggesting turning the recycling program over to a private corporation.
Losing momentum
Recycling saves energy and natural resources, and it reduces air and water pollution. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that one-third of the nation's municipal solid waste - some 82 million tons per year - is now recycled, resulting in a reduction in carbon emissions equivalent to removing 39.4 million cars from the road.
Because of its environmental benefits, state governments have long embraced the concept of recycling, at least on paper.
New York's Solid Waste Management Plan, adopted in 1987, established a waste reduction and recovery goal of 50 percent.
But Resa Dimino, a special policy assistant to the state environmental conservation commissioner, said in an e-mail last month that waste recovery rates reached a plateau in 2000 and in some cases have fallen since then. The state hasn't released any recycling and waste disposal data since 2000, despite a mandate to issue updates every two years.
Similarly, Vermont has failed to meet its goal of diverting half of its municipal solid waste through recycling, reuse and composting by 2005. Instead its diversion rate got stuck at about one-third.
Massachusetts' solid waste plan set a goal of recycling 46 percent of its waste by 2000. That year, the state calculated a 34 percent recycling rate. Although the state asserts that it did reach its target of reducing waste by 60 percent two years ago, an examination of the amounts of waste produced and recycled in particular towns calls this claim into question.
A lower priority
So if recycling is good for the environment and lets local governments recover money from the sale of materials, why is it in decline?
One big factor, advocates and government officials say, is that more people are signing up for trash collection from private haulers, who often have little incentive to recycle. Picking up recyclables requires more labor and fuel, and some large hauling companies have a strong interest in steering more waste to their own landfill or incineration facilities.
In addition, advocates say there's been a decline in efforts to educate the public about recycling's benefits - and perhaps a waning of public interest as the novelty wore off and people came to believe the problem was solved. When Race joined the Columbia County Solid Waste Department 18 years ago, the agency had nine employees in its administrative office. Today it has three. As its budget dwindled, the agency lost its education staff - as well as the county sheriff's deputy who'd been assigned full-time to follow up on garbage-related complaints.
"Public education is paramount to the success of a program," said Joe Miranda, who's been Saratoga County's recycling coordinator for nearly two decades.
Miranda, who previously had a career in sales and marketing, sees the main part of his job as promoting recycling and brokering commodities. In the early days, he said, after recycling was first mandated under the state solid waste plan, lots of state money was available for recycling coordinators. As that money dried up, many counties simply did away with their coordinator positions, sometimes leaving recycling totally up to the private sector.
"Pay as you throw" in Pittsfield?
Pittsfield, Mass., which is home to a 240-ton-a-day trash incinerator, admits to a low recycling rate of about 15 percent. Public Works Commissioner Bruce Collingwood said the city of 45,000 lacks a staff person for recycling and any budget for recycling education.
Allied Waste, the hauler contracted by the city to do curbside pickup, delivered 16,000 tons of residential garbage to the incinerator last year. Between residential collection and the materials residents brought to the transfer station on the incinerator site, the city collected only 2,800 tons of recyclables.
Collingwood has been pressing to reduce the city's waste. Currently, Allied simply picks up as much trash as residents put out. To induce greater recycling and waste diversion, he proposed capping each household's free weekly garbage allowance at one 30-gallon can of garbage, with a fee for additional cans. A City Council subcommittee has approved Collingwood's plan, which is modeled after a state initiative.
"Pay as you throw" is one of the cornerstones of Massachusetts' waste-reduction effort. The logic is simple: If people have to pay for every bag of garbage they set out for collection, they will be more motivated to cut down on waste and recycle more.
Of Massachusetts' 351 towns and cities, 122 are now pay-as-you-throw communities, and more are signing up. By agreeing to implement the program, towns receive up to $4 per person as a start-up allocation from the state's bottle bill, down from $10 a head.
Joseph Lambert, who manages the pay-as-you-throw effort for the DEP, said a recent study confirmed the effectiveness of the program. On average, each person in the pay-as-you-throw towns surveyed generated 512 pounds of garbage per year, compared with about 900 pounds in towns that aren’t in the program. And the recycling rate for paper, cardboard and containers in the participating towns was 42 percent, compared with about 25 percent in other towns.
Many transfer stations beyond Massachusetts also use the basic pay-as-you-throw concept, charging by the bag, or less frequently by weight, for trash disposal. Since 1990, Columbia County, N.Y., has required the use of official county garbage bags at its nine waste stations; prices for the bags, from 50 cents for a 7-gallon bag to $5 for a 55-gallon bag, cover the cost of disposal.
Washington County similarly requires its residents to buy stickers, at $1.50 apiece, for the trash they carry to transfer stations. Each 30-gallon trash bag requires two stickers.
A wide gap in Williamstown
The negative effect of private garbage-hauling companies on recycling rates was amply documented last fall in Williamstown, Mass., where three Williams College students in an environmental planning class conducted a semester-long study of the town's recycling program.
The students found that people who use the town's transfer station recycled an impressive 58 percent of their waste, while the private haulers operating in town reported recycling only 14 percent of the waste they collected.
Scott Park, who oversees Williamstown's transfer station as well as its road maintenance, said he wasn't surprised by these findings. The community is "holding its own" with recycling, he said.
"The only improvement would be with the haulers," Park said. "I don't even know if they're really recycling."
In the students' face-to-face survey of town residents, only about half the people who have curbside pickup believed that their waste haulers actually recycled any of the materials they collected.
Student researcher Matthew Baron attributed the large discrepancy in recycling rates to two factors. He said the private haulers failed to educate their customers about recycling - and that townspeople who contract for waste collection have no financial incentive to reduce the quantity of garbage they discard.
The information on private haulers' recycling rates was available to the students because, in Massachusetts, waste haulers must get a permit from each municipality they serve, and many local governments require haulers to file annual reports. In Williamstown, haulers must submit a one-page form annually, stating the tonnage of garbage and two categories of mixed recyclables they have collected from their customers.
This type of reporting by private waste haulers is unheard-of in New York. In fact, the Legislature has not given the state Department of Environmental Conservation any authority to regulate waste haulers, except for those transporting hazardous or medical waste. The agency only has a mandate to regulate waste facilities such as landfills, incinerators and transfer stations.
A staffer in the state's waste reduction and recycling bureau described the regulation of waste haulers as "a large work effort that no one wanted to take on."
Little oversight
The situation frustrates some managers of government-run trash programs. "Our rules and regulations seem to be 10 times tougher than if you were in the private sector," said Race, the Columbia County coordinator. Some years ago, Race said, an intern at the DEC directed her to include the private haulers operating in her jurisdiction in the county's annual solid waste report. But when she contacted the seven or eight haulers that then served the county, only two of the smaller haulers would comply with her request; the others refused.
Miranda, the recycling coordinator for Saratoga County, similarly lacks the means to produce a comprehensive annual report for the state. Some 80 percent of the county's homes have curbside waste collection by private haulers.
"I am clueless," he said. "I'm at the mercy of a system that's very hard to track."
Unable to obtain figures from the haulers, he tried an indirect approach: He tried to piece together estimates of the county's waste stream by looking at the quantities of garbage that landfills and Hudson Falls incinerator accepted from waste-hauling operations in Saratoga County. For recycling numbers, though, he stuck to what the county's recycling centers collect, since waste-hauler collections remain a big unknown. Given these difficulties, Miranda said, "I question New York state's ability to quantify its recycling accomplishments with any degree of accuracy at all. Just trying to do it at the county level is impossible."
Vermont: Setting a broader goal
In Vermont, some waste managers have the ability to take a very different approach. Rather than just serving the people who visit a transfer station, their job is to bring waste reduction services to all of the people, businesses and institutions in their locality, and thus effect greater change.
Vermont's solid waste districts, which are individually chartered by the state legislature at the request of their member communities, can adopt and enforce laws, assess fees and impose penalties.
The concept hasn't been embraced in southwestern Vermont, however. To the north, the Chittenden Solid Waste District, which includes Burlington, has passed ordinances that require private haulers to provide recycling for their customers. Tom Moreau, the district's director, said that when you "hold their feet to the fire, they perform."
Because Vermont's solid waste districts are funded through a per-ton fee on garbage, the districts have a strong interest in getting accurate reports from waste haulers in their jurisdictions. The per-ton assessment, which is around $17 for two western Vermont districts, provides an unusually secure funding stream that supports infrastructure, staffing and education for recycling, composting, toxics collections and other waste diversion efforts.
An association of managers of the state's solid waste districts employs a full-time compliance investigator whose job is to enforce district ordinances.
The Chittenden district, for example, requires by law that all waste haulers take every truckload across a district-approved scale and report electronically every month. When the Chittenden district caught a "very significant hauler" lying about its loads in 2000, the company had to pay a total of $176,000 in back fees, interest and a fine, Moreau said. "We made them open their books," he said.
Moreau said the Chittenden district is able to capture 65 percent of the recyclable materials in its waste stream. The district provides every household with a blue box in which to put recyclables for curbside pickup. About 90 percent of county residents put out recyclables at least once a month, the district estimates.
In Bennington County, though, some communities have balked at giving up their autonomy by joining a solid waste district. Eight towns in the county, including Manchester, are working together loosely but have no coordinating staff and provide no education. Their recycling rate of less than 11 percent stands out as particularly low when compared with those in the rest of the state.
Changing the paradigm
Most government-run recycling efforts in the region today are focused at best on making incremental improvements to the systems they already have in place. But some say that if the region wants to make more meaningful progress toward reducing waste, it needs to move beyond the concept of "waste management."
For at least a decade, some advocates have been focusing on a new concept called "zero waste." The idea is to start with the most ambitious goal imaginable and set up multi-pronged efforts to prevent materials from becoming garbage in the first place.
Big corporations have pioneered much of the work on the zero-waste concept so far, by treating waste as a design flaw rather than an inevitable fact of life. For example, Epson, the maker of printers, scanners and other computer-related equipment, reported in 2005 that it had saved $73 million by eliminating nearly its entire waste stream. Similarly, Quaker Oats of Canada was able to cut its waste stream by 90 percent after conducting a waste audit.
Some governments have begun to embrace the concept, notably the cities of Seattle, San Francisco, Vancouver and Toronto and the province of Nova Scotia.
Jim O'Gorman, the manager of the Rutland County Solid Waste District, said Vermont needs to change its perspective. The already district boasts one of the highest recycling rates in the region, and it's virtually alone in being able to track all of its waste.
"We're looking at the model from the wrong end," O'Gorman said. Most of the state's solid waste districts are members of the Product Stewardship Institute, a group O'Gorman described as working with manufacturers "at the front end" to avoid having to deal with their products and packaging "at the waste end." One important premise of the zero-waste movement is that producers, not just end-users, bear much of the responsibility for waste.
O'Gorman said he sees little steps in the right direction, such as retailers collecting old printer cartridges and cell phones. But much more is possible, he said.