Garbage Piles Up : Talking Trash: Cities Turning to Recycling

Bill Webb’s green truck is a familiar sight around here. It’s the one with all the bins in the back.

Each day, he drives down Seattle’s streets, picking up plastic crates filled with cans and paper and glass and, in some areas, plastic. Webb works for a recycling company, and that makes him and his job a hot item, indeed.

“I love this route,” said Webb, dumping another crate of cans into his truck. “They’re really dedicated.”

Across town, Don Dentz leads the way through a cavernous warehouse that is filled with trash. The huge garbage pile is being scooped onto a conveyor belt, where men pick through for aluminum cans and giant sifters drop glass chunks into metal receptacles. Bins are filled with thousands of milk jugs and soft drink bottles that have been plucked from the rubbish; the waste paper is in another pile.

Will Be Recycled

Much of the separated trash will be recycled.

Taken together, the two systems represent Seattle’s effort to reuse its own waste and, thus far, the program has been a huge success.

In the northern half of the city, residents separate different recyclables into bins, while in the southern half they put all their reclaimable refuse in one container. The city had expected a 35% sign-up rate for both programs by the end of 1988, the first year of the recycling operation. Instead, more than 65% of the city’s residents--close to 100,000 households--are participating, chief among the reasons being cheaper garbage bills for those who recycle.

“It is definitely one of the more successful programs,” said Ginny Stevenson, a spokeswoman for Seattle Solid Waste Utility.

While Seattle is held up as one of the model cities in the world of recycling, it is hardly an isolated case these days. Pushed by improving economics and by the effects of too much trash and no place to put it, recycling is sweeping the country.

Reclaiming materials is not a new science. During World War II, people collected rubber and aluminum for use in the war effort. During the ‘60s, the prime reason for recycling was to slow down the use of virgin materials, such as aluminum and timber. But now, the problems are more massive.

This country is awash in garbage, to the tune of 160 million tons a year, and only 10% of it is being recycled. The entire northeast quadrant of the United States is in its last gasp of landfill capacity, and the Environmental Protection Agency predicts that most landfills throughout the United States will be filled within 10 years. A number of states, such as New Jersey, must export large amounts of their trash to other parts of the country for disposal.

Given the crisis proportions of the garbage scene, the recycling boom is a natural outgrowth of necessity for a country that is at the bottom of the heap among industrialized nations when it comes to reusing its trash.

‘Hundreds of Ideas’

“It seems like every day, there’s some new article about a place that’s starting to recycle,” said Joe Salamando, editor of Recycling Times, a newspaper that reports on recycling markets. “There are literally hundreds of ideas being tried. It’s an interesting time to be in this business.”

One measure of how recycling is spreading is the growing number of communities being serviced by the two big names in garbage disposal: Waste Management Inc. of Oakbrook, Ill., and BFI of Houston. Waste Management now recycles the trash from 900,000 homes and BFI is second with 500,000. Several years ago, the two companies provided the service for only a relative handful of homes. BFI, for instance, only serviced 40,000 homes a year ago.

“We are very aggressively selling recycling as a municipal service,” said Peter Block, a BFI spokesman. “We have seen phenomenal growth in this area in the last 18 to 20 months. We’re in it because we expect to make money. We’re in it to stay.”

In the past, recycling efforts frequently stumbled because they were not cost effective. Not only was it expensive to collect and separate the usable items, but the cost of processing them into other goods often made them uncompetitive with virgin materials. As the cost of landfills has increased, however, recycling has become a more viable alternative.

Landfill Costs

For example, landfill costs recently went from $10 a ton to $31.50 a ton in Seattle, and it cost another $76 million to close off two landfills here when they had reached their capacity.

There are still many problems with recycling goods. The market for recycled newsprint, for example, fluctuates wildly. But many cities simply have no other choice.

In fact, it is now difficult to keep up with the number of cities that are either already recycling or gearing up to do so. There are hundreds of them, from small communities to large cities.

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley recently proposed a comprehensive recycling program that would eventually require all 720,000 single-family households in the city to recycle their glass and plastic bottles, aluminum cans and newspapers. High time. According to the National Solid Waste Management Assn., Los Angeles generates 6.4 pounds of garbage per person per day, the highest figure in the United States.

About 90,000 households in the city would begin recycling their trash as early as July under the plan. All other households would then be phased in within three years. In another two years, yard wastes would be added to the program.

Under the proposal, each household would be given three containers: one 12- to 14-gallon plastic rectangular box for aluminum cans, glass and plastic bottles; one 60- or 90-gallon container for yard debris, and one 60- or 90-gallon container for all other household garbage that is not recycleable. Newspapers would be stacked on top of the can-and-bottle bin.

During the first five years the program is projected to cost about $46 million a year, with an estimated $13 million earned back through the sale of recyclable material and reduced landfill costs.

When Philadelphia finishes phasing in its recycling program in 1991, it will include 630,000 households. Cincinnati will begin a program in July for 100,000 residences.

One of the Leaders

San Jose already has a program in place that recycles the waste of 177,000 homes, and is considered one of the leaders in the field. The entire state of New Jersey now is required to recycle its waste, while the city of Newark even recycles old tires, shredding them for export to Greece.

All of Florida’s 67 counties must have recycling programs by July 1, with the mandate of reducing landfill use by 30%. Five other states--Oregon, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York and Rhode Island--already have, or are implementing, comprehensive statewide programs.

In the Marin County city of San Rafael, recycling is taken to the limit: Food too old for human consumption is fed to pigs.

“They are really happy and live on a nice farm,” said Sue Oranje of Marin Sanitary Service, owners of the recycling pigs.

Of all the problems associated with recycling, perhaps the knottiest is plastics. True enough, plastics aren’t the largest contributor to what is euphemistically known as the nation’s “waste stream.” Newsprint is the owner of that dubious honor.

The problem with plastic is that it takes hundreds of years for it to decompose in a landfill. And while the plastics industry points out that it makes up only 7% of the waste stream by weight, it is closer to 30% in volume. Because of that longevity and volume, plastics have become something of a bugaboo in the world of trash disposal.

Small wonder, then, that two things are happening simultaneously: Laws are being enacted that ban plastics as food wrappers and the recycling of plastics--particularly soda bottles and milk jugs--is on the rise.

Perhaps the strictest laws to date were passed last March in the Minnesota twin cities, Minneapolis-St. Paul. Both city councils approved ordinances banning most nonreturnable and nondegradable plastic food packaging. The law will take effect next summer.

In Suffolk County, N.Y., a law was passed earlier this year banning plastic grocery bags and certain kinds of plastic in restaurants, bars, delicatessens, roadside stands and other retail food establishments.

“The object, of course, was to encourage recycling,” said Bradford O’Hearn, communications director for the Suffolk County executive.

The law has hit some legal snags, but O’Hearn said it is only a matter of time before it goes into effect.

Those kinds of laws are clearly worrisome to the plastics industry, which in 1988 produced 16 billion pounds of packaging. As a result, the industry has vigilantly pursued a campaign in which it presents itself as a strong proponent of recycled plastics.

“As the landfill problems have worsened, those legislative acts have gotten our attention,” said Susan Vadney, a spokeswoman for a plastics trade group called Council for Solid Waste Solutions.

Some companies, such as the Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble Co., are experimenting with the use of recycled bottles to market some of its cleaning products. There have been a spate of announcements recently about major plastics companies entering into joint agreements to begin recycling operations. The largest so far was the announcement last month by Du Pont that it would join Waste Management Inc. in a recycling operation.

Some Skeptics

But there are skeptics in the crowd.

“They have done the best public relations job that anyone could imagine on the plastics recycling issue,” said Salamando of Recycling Times, citing as an example that the Du Pont-Waste Management Inc. venture doesn’t even have a site selected yet.

Another doubter is Tim Croll, development director of Seattle’s solid waste division.

“They do one thing and it is like the Second Coming of Christ,” he said. “They do a good job of promoting the things they do.”

Whatever the case, other questions about plastics and recycling are sure to arise in the not-too-distant future. One is whether government incentives will be there to entice businesses to recycle. Another is the question of biodegradable plastic for such items as disposable diapers. Last year, Americans used an estimated 16 billion plastic disposable diapers.

But opponents of biodegradable products say it doesn’t make any difference anyway because anything buried in a landfill will not decompose readily in the airless, moistureless, tomb-like environment.

Combined Solutions

The consensus, however, seems to be that dealing with America’s trash will require a combination of solutions.

“I think it will probably settle out that there is not going to be a single answer,” said R. Lawrence Swanson, director of the State University of New York Waste Management Institute. “It will include recycling, a need for incineration in some form and a need for landfilling.

“I think each community is going to have to look at its own situation and see what that mix might be. In the next 10 years we’re going to see a lot of stops and starts before we settle on some rational decisions. I think the big thing coming out now is we can’t continue in the mode we’re operating in today--throwing things away with no thought of where it is going.”

Also contributing to this article were staff writer Frederick M. Muir in Los Angeles, and researchers Rhona Schwartz in Houston, Lisa Romaine in Denver, Tracy Shryer in Chicago, Charles Hirshberg in New York, Edith Stanley in Atlanta and Anna Virtue in Miami.