Recycling Boom Provides Too Much of a Good Thing : Environment: Waste companies lose money in glutted market. Activists push for laws to ease crunch.

Jerry Powell, editor in chief of Resource Recycling magazine, contends that recycling is more popular than democracy. In many communities, said the fast-talking environmentalist, more people separate trash for reuse than voted in the last presidential election.

It is more popular than sex, argues Alan Davis, president of Conservatree Paper Co. “How many of you recycled anything yesterday?” he asked at a recent Los Angeles seminar on paper recycling. After nearly everyone in the audience raised a hand, he continued with a wink: “And how many of you, uh, well, you know . . .” Pause. Embarrassed laughter. “See what I mean?”

But popularity and success are two very different things.

Curbside recycling programs sponsored by local governments have grown phenomenally nationwide, with about 1,000 in 1988 and nearly 4,000 today. In California, 302 communities have curbside programs today, compared with 30 in 1977.

But once that stream of yellowed newspapers, rinsed-out glass and plastic bottles and heel-smashed aluminum cans leaves the curb, the picture changes. Markets for recycled materials--generally volatile at best--are more glutted today than they have been since this latest wave of recycling fervor hit the nation a decade ago.

With more recycling programs on line than ever, trash is piling up faster than it can be absorbed. Manufacturers, argue many activists, are focusing more on PR than research and development to find uses for the 33.4 million tons of trash that are collected for recycling each year. And the recession has lowered demand for recycled materials.

So, while it costs an average of $50.30 to process a ton of recyclables at a typical recovery facility, the sluggish global economy has pushed down the scrap value of that ton to about $30, according to the National Solid Wastes Management Assn.

“This last three years has been the toughest I’ve seen in the last decade,” said Tim Flanagan, director of recycling at trash giant Waste Management of North America-West. “Recyclables are not being land-filled . . . but more recyclables are being sold for their historic lows, because there’s so much recycling going on.”

The solution, say many garbage activists, is a legislative one. Push governments to buy recycled products and you will create a market. Push manufacturers to include recycled content in their products, and you will create a market. But whatever you do, create a market. Please.

“Recycling is working better in California than in other places, because we can export (recyclables) easily,” Davis said. “If you took out export, it’s not working anywhere, because there aren’t the markets.”

With the human part of recycling--the separate-your-trash, leave-it-on-the-curb push--a success and improving daily, environmental discourse has increasingly moved toward dry but important talk of commodity pricing.

Waste Management’s Flanagan, who has been in the recycling business for more than a decade, can recite from memory the “historic” depths to which certain commodity values have plunged this year:

In 1988 and 1989, scrap newsprint brought as much as $120 a ton. Waste Management, which runs curbside programs for 4 million households nationwide, has received as little as $30 a ton for used newsprint in 1992.

Aluminum, which is usually the most profitable recyclable material, is now fetching about 37 cents a pound scrap value; it drew between 50 cents and 60 cents a pound as recently as 1989, he said.

Glass recycling is more complicated, at least in California, because of state intervention on pricing and redemption. In the mid-1980s, recycled glass used to be worth $160 a ton; today it draws between $90 and $100 a ton.

“Recycling is part of our core business,” Flanagan said. “Obviously we’re concerned about profitability. In the past, 40% of the cost of operations were covered by the value of the material. Now it’s only 25%.”

Smaller recyclers are even harder hit. Many are die-hard environmentalists and upbeat business owners with little desire to cast a bad light on a popular practice, but even they are torn between sunshine and gloom.

“The (profit) margins on certain items are slim, slimmer than usual,” said Errol Segal, manager of Active Recycling in Los Angeles. “But if you put out a quality product, you can still survive. And we’re open seven days a week.”

Another recycler, who declined to have his name published, took great care to steer a conversation away from market doldrums.

“The last thing I want to do is tell people I can’t sell my glass,” he said. “I’d rather preach: Reduce, reuse, recycle. And teach kids. They can make the changes and come up with the answers.”

Still, he admits, “The cost of handling glass is twice what you get for it. It’s not like the old days.”

In the old days, there was not nearly as much garbage being diverted from the nation’s rapidly filling landfills. Municipal solid waste--industry argot for trash--grew steadily between 1960 and 1990, the most recent year for which national statistics are available. And so has recycling.

According to Franklin Associates, a consulting firm that details garbage growth for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 88 million tons of trash were generated in 1960, less than half of the 195 tons Americans threw away in 1990. That’s a jump from 2.7 pounds per person to 4.3 pounds.

Recovery of recyclable goods from the trash stream has increased from 7% in 1960 to 17% in 1990, and the predictions are for more materials to be diverted before reaching landfills. “Projected scenarios for recovery are between 20% and 30% in 1995 and 25% and 35% in 2000,” says Franklin’s latest update.

One reason to expect more recycling is an increase in tough state laws designed to combat shrinking landfill capacity. Many of the laws, like California’s, came shortly after garbage from suburban Islip, N.Y., traveled 6,000 miles by barge in 1987 in an unsuccessful hunt for a dump to call its own.

Two years later, the California Legislature passed AB 939. The law, with stiff sanctions of $10,000 for every day of violation, mandates that every community in the state must reduce its land-filled waste 25% by 1995 and 50% by 2000.

The law is expected to increase the amount of garbage recycled in the state from 5.5 million tons a year today to 20 million tons a year by the turn of the century. And it was the impetus behind hundreds of new curbside recycling programs--including the enormous and troubled Los Angeles program, which was passed in 1990, and a Long Beach program that came on line this month.

Where are all of these new recyclables going? It depends on whom you ask. Floating through the recycling industry are stories of recycled goods being dumped into landfills--the same places from which they were supposed to be diverted.

Jerry Powell of Resource Recycling magazine has heard such stories for years. “These massive piles of land-filled recyclables? I challenge anyone to show them to me,” he said.

Brooke Nash, executive director of Solana Recyclers in Encinitas, recalls a modest protest four years ago by angry San Diego area recyclers. They dumped 10 tons of glass in a landfill out of frustration at the glass industry’s indecision about what to do with recycled materials.

“It was only 10 tons, and we collect more than 10 tons in a single day,” she said. “We’re not land-filling recyclables. It’s just not happening. I think you’d be hard pressed to find it in this state.”

But recycled materials are not being converted into new products fast enough for environmentalists and consumers. Consider what is happening with paper and plastics.

Paper and paperboard occupy the greatest chunk--32%--of the nation’s landfill space. But they are also among the most commonly recycled materials, with a 28% recovery rate.

Newsprint, in fact, is the target of the only law that “tells the private sector what to do” in terms of recycling, said Conservatree’s Davis. By the year 2000 in California, 40% of all newsprint purchased must have 40% post-consumer content. Post-consumer refers to material that someone bought as a product, used and turned back in for recycling.

Paul Relis, a member of the California Integrated Waste Management Board, said that newsprint mills are being modified to use recycled materials and plants are being built to keep up with the demand.

“What you have in the early stages is a transformation of a virgin materials industry into a new secondary consuming base,” Relis said.

But printing and writing paper, such as magazines and junk mail, are recycled only at a 6% rate. And that is where much of the improvement needs to be made. The paper industry says its voluntary goal of 40% recycling by 1995 will help greatly.

But to Davis, the numbers do not add up. In 1990, Americans dumped 55 million tons of paper into landfills. In 1995, if the economy recovers, 100 million tons of paper will be produced, Davis said. If 40% of that is recycled, 60 million tons will still be dumped.

“That’s more (dumped) than today,” he said. “Is that progress? That’s not progress.”

Plastics are even more troublesome. Franklin Associates figures that 2% of the plastics used in 1990 were recovered for recycling, leaving 16.2 million tons to clog up landfills nationwide.

“Plastics recycling is brand new,” says John Ruston, an economic analyst with the Environmental Defense Fund. “There is very little infrastructure and therefore (little) recycling and reusing of plastic.”

Because there are so many types of plastic made and so few recycled, reducing the flow to landfills is difficult. Soda bottles and milk jugs are the most commonly recycled, while yogurt and cottage cheese containers are not.

Activists say that the plastics industry has made little effort to figure out how to reuse its products. They point angrily to a month-old, $18-million ad campaign by the American Plastics Council--which tells consumers to “take another look at plastic”--as proof of the industry’s lack of commitment.

Susan Moore, director of communications for the plastics council, bristles at such arguments. The 2% recycling figure is unfair, she said, because it includes all forms of plastic rather than just containers. In fact, 14% of all plastic bottles were recycled in 1991, she said.

“There are hundreds of products using post-consumer plastic on the market,” she said, pointing to soda bottles and some detergent containers. And the ad campaign? “Yes, we are reaching out to our customers to clear up misconceptions and untruths. But we’re spending many, many, many millions more to build the recycling infrastructure.”

Many activists and bureaucrats believe that legislation is the only way that manufacturers will be pushed to use more recycled materials in their products. And they hope 1993 will bring more government actions, including mandates for government procurement of recycled products, tax breaks for manufacturers who use recycled materials, levies on manufacturers who use virgin materials and minimum-content laws that mandate the use of recycled materials in consumer products.

On a federal level, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which governs the regulation of newly generated waste, will likely be reauthorized. Many in the recycling and environmental movements hope the new legislation will clear up confusing definitions of “recycled content” in manufacturing and possibly set minimum content standards.

Relis, of the waste management board, is expecting an executive order from new President Bill Clinton to demand that the federal government meet its commitment to buy recycled products.

In California, the recycling community also expects that an Assembly bill vetoed by Gov. Pete Wilson in the waning days of the last legislative session will be reintroduced. The bill called for state agencies to purchase products made from recycled materials.

Next year, the state waste management board will hand out $10 million in loans to new or expanding manufacturing businesses that use recycled materials. Relis said that $200 million annually is needed to push industry toward recycling.

Still, like the plastic bottles that refuse to break down in landfills nationwide, hope is resilient in recycling circles.

“There’s no question about what recycling can do for the environment and creating jobs,” said Gary Peterson, director of environmental affairs for Recycle America, the recycling arm of Waste Management. “It’s getting through the maze of misconceptions, old ways of thinking and bottom-line dollars.”

NEXT: Recycling in Los Angeles.