Recycling on the Rise, but Trash Rising Faster
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
June/July 2000
Download in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format (1.1 MB)
Features
Into the Mainstream, Out of the Limelight
How, Despite Overwhelming Public Support, the Waste Industry
by Michael Garfield
Recycling on the Rise, but Trash Rising Faster
by Brenda Platt and Neil Seldman
Reclaiming Their Driveways
Car-Sharing in Traverse City
by Sharon Flesher
Smells Like Money
Oakland County Residents Raise a Stink About Continental Aluminum
by Jeff Gearhart
Columns
In the Public Interest
Shameless: DEQ Neglects Valuable Wetlands, by Dave Dempsey
Healthy Home and Garden
Worm Composting at Home, by Andrew Domino
Huron Valley News
The Cost of Sprawl in Washtenaw County, by Jeff Surfus
Capitol Watch
Judge Rules for Washtenaw Residents in Groundwater Cleanup
Science for the People
Pesticide Exposure and Fertilization Rates, by Mary Beth Doyle
By Brenda Platt & Neil Seldman
{Editor's Note: As recycling has gone mainstream, recycling activism has gone dormant. A new report refocuses critical attention on the connection between recycling and environmental protection. Wasting and Recycling in the United States 2000 is a publication of the GrassRoots Recycling Network (GRRN), prepared by Brenda Platt and Neil Seldman of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). The following excerpt is published with the permission of the Grassroots Recycling Network.}
In the last decade and a half, waste prevention, reuse and recycling have made tremendous gains. The national municipal recycling rate has reached 28%, while many communities are surpassing 50% diversion from landfills and incinerators, and doing so cost-effectively. More than 9,300 communities had curbside recycling programs in 1998, up from 2,700 at the beginning of the decade. Reduction of private sector and industrial process wastes has similarly increased, with some businesses approaching 90% and higher waste reduction levels.
The benefits of waste reduction are more far reaching than previously thought. Recycling reduces costs, creates jobs and businesses, and improves the environment and public health in myriad ways. When a pound of municipal material is recycled, industry avoids wasting many more pounds of mining and manufacturing wastes caused by extracting and processing virgin materials into finished goods. Using recycled materials to make new products saves energy and other resources, reduces greenhouse gases and industrial pollution, and stems deforestation and damage to fragile ecosystems.
Waste reduction also reduces the negative effects of landfilling and burning materials. For landfills, these effects include groundwater pollution, release of global warming gases, and monitoring and remediation costs that will likely span centuries. Incinerators may even be worse, as pollution is borne directly to the air as well as to the land as ash; and energy wasted by not recycling is greater than the amount of energy produced via burning.
Despite these benefits, unsustainable patterns of wasting and consumption hinder further progress in recycling. Recent trends indicate wasting is on the rise and is outpacing the rise in recycling:
- After several years of leveling off and then dropping, municipal wasting increased again in 1997, both in absolute tons and on a per capita basis. Materials landfilled and incinerated rose 4.4 million tons in 1997 (the latest year for which data are available) as compared to 1996.
- Municipal recycling rates since 1994 have increased only slightly, after rapidly increasing in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
- The portion of plastic, aluminum, and glass containers landfilled and burned is rising. In 1998, 75% of plastic PET (no. 1) containers were wasted, up from 60% in 1995. The wasting rate for aluminum cans has climbed from a low of 36% in 1992 to 44% in 1998.
- Manufacturers are producing more products and packaging that are hard to recycle or lack recycled-content. From 1990 to 1997, plastic packaging grew five times faster by weight than plastic recovered for recycling.
- The waste hauling industry continues to consolidate, leading to less recycling. Big hauling companies that are vertically integrated with wasting facilities make more money by landfilling than recycling.
- Some states are considering rescinding recycling goals and policies. A few cities have opted to cut back their recycling budgets. Some industries - particularly the plastic industry - have not followed through on commitments to utilize more recycled material.
Several factors contribute to the increase in wasting. For one, manufacturers and sellers of products and packaging usually have no responsibility for handling materials once discarded. Secondly, recycling competes with raw materials processing and wasting industries on an uneven economic playing field:
- Prices of virgin materials and products (which compete with recovered materials) exclude billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies, and the true costs that resource extraction and manufacturing impose on the environment and public health.
- Prices for waste disposal (which competes with reuse and recycling for the supply of discarded materials) do not reflect the cost of perpetual landfill maintenance, among other externalities.
- The economic development benefits of recycling are often overlooked (recycling creates at least ten times more jobs than landfills).
We need a new paradigm for managing resources sustainably. Zero waste is a design principle for a society that makes products with a minimum investment of natural resources and energy, and in which the end-of-life options for those products are limited to reuse, recycle, repair, and compost. Zero waste implies that the goal of public policy should be to eliminate waste rather than manage it in waste facilities.
Fortunately, technological developments, citizen activism, and public policies in the last 15 years have laid the groundwork for a zero waste and sustainable future. Container deposit laws, curbside collection, recycling requirements, landfill disposal bans, and creative funding mechanisms have increased the supply of recyclable materials. States with minimum recycled-content legislation, buy-recycled programs, and creative funding mechanisms have also begun to spur demand for discarded materials and link recycling with local economic development. Much more remains to be done to reduce waste and increase reuse and recycling.
Recycling is fundamentally cheaper than wasting when all costs are considered. In addition to providing net pollution prevention benefits, recycling adds value and jobs to local and regional economies.
Recycling is a win-win proposition when we account for (1) upstream subsidies for virgin resource extraction industries, (2) downstream subsides for landfills and incinerators, (3) the true long-term societal and environmental costs of resource extractive and wasting facilities, and (4) the local economic development benefits and reuse and recycling.
Some state and local governments are improving accounting techniques for evaluating discard management options. Florida, North Carolina, Indiana, and Georgia are some states that promote some level of "full-cost accounting" (although these methods do not incorporate major categories such as subsidies and environment externalities). Local governments already using "full-cost accounting" techniques include Plano, Texas; Sacramento, California; and Seattle, Washington. Still, these techniques need refinement to truly account for appropriate remediation, contingent, environmental, and social costs.
Even on an Unlevel Field
But even with an unlevel playing field, many businesses and communities that prevent waste and recycle have reduced their costs. The U.S. EPA reports that in 1997, its WasteWise partners-businesses and institutions that commit to reducing their waste-saved an estimated $218 million in avoided disposal fees alone through recycling efforts. Avoided paper purchasing costs for all reporting partners in 1997 may have been as high as $60 million.
Local governments can also save. A recent U.S. EPA study of 14 communities recovering between 44% and 65% of their residential waste, found that 13 of these had cost-effective programs. Other research shows that costs for recycling decrease as recovery level increase. One factor for this is the costs for processing recyclables and yard debris are often much less than landfill or incinerator disposal tip fees.
Restructuring waste management systems can pay off handsomely. For example, Madison, Wisconsin, reduced trash routes by 32% and switched to smaller trash trucks, after introducing its multi-material curbside recycling and yard debris collection programs. These trucks cost less and have lower repair costs than the trucks the city needed to collect all discarded materials as trash. The overall collection cost went down in Madison compared to the cost of operating a single fleet to pick up unseparated waste. Falls Church, Virginia, reduced trash collection frequency from twice to once a week, one year after implementing a multi-material curbside recycling program. As a result, the city raised its material recovery rate from 39% to 65%, cut trash collection costs by more than half, and reduced annual per household waste management costs by more than one third.
In some communities recycling is viewed as an expensive burden. But often that is because these communities are recycling at low rates and are treating recycling as an add-on to their traditional trash system rather than a replacement for it. When communities reach high waste reduction levels, recycling becomes more cost-effective. Communities that maximize recycling save money by redesigning their collection schedules and/or trucks. Staff once devoted to trash collection now collect recyclables or yard trimmings. As communities attain ever higher recovery levels, planners and public works administrators are beginning to realize that recycling and composting can be the primary strategy for handling discards, rather than a supplement to the conventional system. The economics of recycling improves when, instead of adding to costs of recycling onto the costs of conventional collection and waste disposal, recycling becomes the heart of the system.
Recycling Means Business
Recycling is an economic development tool as well as an environmental tool. Reuse, recycling, and waste reduction offer direct development opportunities for communities. When collected with skill and care, and upgraded with quality in mind, discarded materials are a local resource that can contribute to local revenue, job creation, business expansion, and the local economic base.
On a per-ton basis, sorting and processing recyclables alone sustain 10 times more jobs that landfilling or incineration. However, making new products from the old offers the largest economic pay-off in the recycling loop. New recycling-based manufacturers employ even more people and at higher wages than does sorting recyclables. Some recycling-based paper mills and plastic product manufacturers, for instance, employ on a per-ton basis 60 times more workers than do landfills.
Value is added to discard materials as a result of cleaning, sorting, and baling. Manufacturing with locally collected discards adds even more value by producing finished goods. For example, old newspapers may sell for $30 per ton, but new newsprint sells for $600 per ton. Each recycling step a community takes means more jobs, more business expenditures on supplies and services, and more money circulating in the local economy through spending and tax payments.
Recycling has had a major impact on job creation in local and state economies:
In North Carolina, recycling industries employ over 8,700 people. The job gains in recycling in this state far outnumber the jobs lost in other industries. For every 100 recycling jobs created, just 10 jobs were lost in the waste hauling and disposal industry, and 3 jobs were lost in the timber industry.
A survey of ten northeastern states found that they employ 103,413 people in recycling.
A 1992 survey in Washington found that this state had created 2,050 jobs recycling-based jobs since 1989.
Massachusetts employs more than 9,000 people in more than 200 recycling enterprises. About half of these jobs are in the recycling-based manufacturing sector. These businesses represent more than half a billion dollars in value added to the state's economy.
In California, meeting the state's 50% recycling goal is expected to create about 45,000 recycling jobs by the year 2000, over 20,000 of which are slated to be in the manufacturing sector.
Regional studies of employment and the remanufacturing industry indicate that recycling activities employ more than 2.5% of manufacturing workers. Extrapolating these findings to the entire nation, recycling and remanufacturing activities could account for approximately 1 million manufacturing jobs and more than $100 billion in revenue.
Reuse is Best Use
Product reuse is even more job-intensive than recycling. It is a knowledge-based industry, with a premium placed on accurate sorting and pricing, and good inventory management. One reuse company is Urban Ore in Berkeley, building materials to books and art. Materials are sorted and cleaned, and sometimes repaired. For the most part, what does not sell becomes scrap. Urban Ore calculates value-added monthly, which ranges from 30% to 60%. This reflects the large contribution its staff and handling system make to its monthly income. As in recycling, Urban Ore is the first link in a value-added chain that involves and employs hundreds of remodeling and landscape contractors, artists, inventors, builders, collectors, property managers, homeowners, and second-hand dealers.
The reuse industry competes with mass-marketed commodities such as diapers, tires, and plastic, glass, and metal drink containers. Each year Americans spend billions of dollars on these new products. Some of this money remains in communities where the products are purchased, but most leaves the community for the home offices of the corporations. A handful of companies dominate the markets for soft drinks, disposable diapers, and new tires.
By contrast, reuse industry alternatives - refillable bottle washing plants, cloth diaper services, tire retreading enterprises - create wealth and jobs for local communities. Such reuse companies tend to be small and locally owned and operated, providing local jobs and increased capital retention. Reuse is thus a tool for miniaturizing global and national economies, making them more sustainable.
There are 1,700 tire retreading operations in North America. About 95% of these are small businesses. Reusable diaper services employ 10,000 to 12,500 people. Each business employs 5 to 50 workers. A complete switch to diaper services would generate 72,000 jobs nationwide in this service industry alone.
Other reuse efforts can have similar impacts. For instance, if building deconstruction were fully integrated into the demolition industry, at least 100,000 jobs could be created in this sector.
The Grassroots Recycling Network (GRRN) is a North American network of recycling and community-based activists who advocate policies and practices to achieve zero waste, to end corporate welfare for waste, and to create sustainable jobs from discards. GRRN can be reached at (706) 613-7121, at zerowaste@grrn.org, or at www.grrn.org. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) is a nonprofit research and educational organization that provides technical assistance and information to city and state governments, citizen organizations, and industry. ILSR can be reached at (202) 232-4108, ilsr@igc.org, or at