Debate Flares Over Push to Recycle Newspapers

When New York’s Suffolk County this week adopted the nation’s toughest newsprint recycling law, it joined a groundswell among community activists to induce the birth of a market that they believe has so far failed to develop on its own.

While several states have passed laws requiring newspapers to use recycled paper, and similar federal bills are pending, Suffolk County is apparently the first local government to enact legislation.

Publishers and paper manufacturers say the activists are getting ahead of the game.

“In fact, newspaper recycling is going great guns,” said Tonda F. Rush, vice president for industry affairs for the American Newspaper Publishers Assn. As recently as a year and a half ago, collection of old newspapers--ONP in industry jargon--was haphazard, she said. But municipal curbside recycling efforts have proliferated in that time, and the supply of old newspapers has outstripped the ability of paper mills to process it.

Rush said it may be as long as a year and a half before the mills will finish building the plants they need to handle the torrent.

Meanwhile, Toronto and Washington have considered ordinances requiring newspapers sold on city streets to use recycled paper.

In Oregon’s Multnomah County, a ballot drive for mandatory newsprint recycling was derailed only after the publisher of Portland’s Oregonian newspaper agreed to a voluntary plan.

By the end of 1990, California, Wisconsin, Missouri and Maryland will have mandatory newsprint recycling laws in place. Currently, publishers have agreed to voluntary plans in New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Massachusetts and Michigan. Rush of the ANPA said that in Kentucky, New Jersey and another half dozen states, voluntary agreements are under discussion.

Paper manufacturers say that, like the publishers, they favor recycling. But they, too, oppose mandatory recycling, citing the costs of compliance with a hodgepodge of state and local statutes. The American Paper Institute, a trade group, contends that recycling is working better than people think, and that it has increased at more than twice the rate of newsprint consumption overall.

“We expect that one out of every two newspapers in the United States will be collected for recycling by 1995,” says Red Cavaney, API president.

Publishers prefer voluntary plans and warn that creating a market by fiat will inevitably raise newsprint prices. Knowing that their customers are forced to buy the product, paper suppliers will charge more, the argument goes.

But publishers are considering challenging the Suffolk County law on constitutional grounds, arguing that mandatory recycling threatens the First Amendment right to freedom of expression.

“Look at it this way,” said Rush of the ANPA. “You’ve got a state capital that controls the raw material that’s necessary to publish the newspaper. And the government controlling that raw material is the same government that you’re writing about.”

Meanwhile, in neighborhoods across the country, citizens who dutifully pile their old newspapers at the curb are increasingly frustrated as the feeble new market founders and papers stack up in warehouses.

Demand hasn’t yet caught up with the supply generated by neighborhood recycling, contends Grant Ferrier, editor of the San Diego-based Environmental Business Journal. He recounts the example of an Ohio recycler who less than two years ago was getting $30 a ton for old newspapers; when he went out of business last year, he had to pay $10 a ton to have the old newspapers hauled away.

Tales like this have encouraged community leaders to take matters into their own hands. Some have even talked of adding deposits to newspapers, like the deposits on soft drink bottles.

Maxine Postal first began to worry about the bad rap that Suffolk County was getting in 1987, when the infamous Islip garbage barge prowled the world’s oceans for months, searching for a friendly port for its load of Suffolk County trash. Postal began to worry that “that’s what we were going to be famous for, exporting garbage.”

Then Postal, a county representative, discovered that her town of Amityville was planning to incinerate half the newspapers that she and her neighbors had been carefully separating to recycle.

“And that would be a death knell for recycling,” she recalled thinking. “Why would someone separate newspapers if they knew they would just be burned?”

Postal figured that the only way to create markets for recycled newsprint was to compel publishers to use it. Her law requires any newspaper of more than 20,000 circulation that is printed, sold or distributed in the county to use newsprint that is at least 40% recycled fiber by December, 1996.