Recyclers Are Saying: ‘Bin There, Done That’

A woman strolls through a garden on a sunny day just a sea squall away from the Atlantic shore. She stops at the end of a stone path that snakes through 60 acres of fabulous flora, south Jersey’s snappy answer to Shangri-la.

It’s time to check out the trash.

A dozen bins and barrels with names like “The Earth Machine” and “Presto Bin” are arranged in a semicircle. These are your new recycling containers for the coming century. They represent the next step, the quantum leap in grass-roots garbage reduction. They are designed to turn your potato peels, half-eaten jalapenos and other organic trash into a compost darker than chocolate and more nutrient-rich than the priciest of potting soils. A compact model powered by worms fits nicely under the kitchen sink.

Are you ready for this?

Food waste and wasted food--Americans chuck more chow into the trash than anyone else--have become one of recycling’s new frontiers. San Francisco this year becomes the first major U.S. city to offer curbside recycling of all uneaten edibles, from prosciutto di Parma to Spam on sourdough. New York prisons recycle gruel batted away by finicky felons. Maine makes it mandatory for schools to keep kids from hurling their lime Jell-O into bins bound for landfills, if not at each other.

And more communities are embracing programs like the one here in Monmouth County, which has subsidized the sale of 5,000 backyard composters in the past five years. It has enlisted 70 “master composters” to staff hotlines so people can rot their garbage with odor-free elan and rake it back into the planet as a healthy soil enhancement, cutting the weight of their curbside waste by a quarter or more.

This isn’t quite an act of environmental altruism, however, but a movement born of desperation, one aimed at recycling the concept of recycling. After a decade in which people were conditioned to rinse their bottles, bundle their papers and collect their cans, the rise of recycling as we know it has stopped.

California, New Jersey and 11 other states that set 2000 recycling goals are facing a harsh turn-of-the-century truth: Time’s up, and they aren’t even close. In California, 80% of the municipalities face $10,000-a-day fines unless they drastically slash their trash before this year ends.

“You’re going to get more and more of an anxiety level as we get closer and closer,” says Dan Eaton, chairman of the California Integrated Waste Management Board.

California--once known as a mean, green, keen-to-be-clean machine--expects its first drop in dump diversion since recycling became law in 1989, once waste managers untangle the often fanciful trash tallies of every town, some of which claim to recycle 120% of their garbage. New Jersey, which invented statewide curbside recycling, felt its first dip in landfill diversion in 1998. Even in states such as New York, which claim a modest uptick, the growth is the lowest ever.

As a result, a protean struggle to reanimate the movement is fixated on finding new things for Americans to recycle, from city sludge to obsolete semiconductors to the wreckage of yesterday’s pasta disaster.

Which is why waste managers from elsewhere seek out meccas like Middletown and other middle-class towns in Monmouth, long a state leader in everyday environmentalism. It has a subculture of salvagers who recycle rainwater, beam with delight at the sheer height of their home compost heaps and even slip into supermarket dumpsters to rescue and rot outdated groceries bound for landfills.

Their serenely determined leader is county recycling coordinator Virginia Lamb, who hauls boxes of worms to schools so kids can bond with slimy invertebrates who really can help with the chores. She promotes the joys of composting with a jaunty panache that would make Martha Stewart green with ivy.

Yet in a sign reflective of recycling’s hard times, the amount of trash that the county diverted from landfills--after eclipsing the magic 50% figure by mid-decade--fell to 43% in 1997, the last year anybody had trustworthy numbers.

“It’s really sad. It came along 10 years ago and everybody loved recycling. And then it lost some of its glamour,” says Lamb, standing in front of the impeccably arranged composting exhibit in the county’s Deep Cut Botanical Gardens, an old estate of the late mobster Vito Genovese.

A Business, and a Rough One at That

Once a cause, recycling has become a business, and business right now stinks like week-old orange roughy. Oil prices were so low for years that virgin plastic costs less than recycled plastic. This is why Coca-Cola Co. reneged on a promise to recycle when it began abandoning glass bottles, and why Miller Brewing Co. has stunned the recycling world by selling beer in a plastic bottle that not only isn’t recycled, but isn’t easily recyclable.

“Markets right now are horrible,” says Nora Goldstein, editor of BioCycle, a recycling trade journal.

Landfill space, on the other hand, is cheaper than dirt. Garbage pits are bigger, more plentiful and so tightly sealed that they can preserve a half-eaten hot dog for future generations to gag on. And today’s local dump is even less offensive because it is often a time zone or two away. The deregulation and consolidation of the waste industry in the last five years have created a handful of behemoths who use states as axis landfills the way airlines turned cities into transit hubs.

Don’t Recycle It, Send It to Pa.

Cash-strapped towns look at the low bids and say: Take it away. That’s why it’s more economical for Canada, Puerto Rico and 28 states to entomb trash in tumbledown, tax base-craving towns in Pennsylvania, the nation’ largest repository of out-of-state rubbish. And why Toronto targets trash for Michigan.

“Whether it be tires, cans or bottles, cheap disposal always works against recycling,” says Eaton. “The whole underpinning of recycling was based upon what was perceived to be lack of landfill capacity.”

The infamous garbage barge that left New York in 1987, then spent two months at sea while six states and two countries refused its funky freight, was the catalyst for recycling in America. New Jersey’s law ordering statewide leaf pickup that year was copied and expanded to include paper, plastics, aluminum and glass. By the mid-1990s, however, some critics said fleets of recycling trucks were costly, polluting palliatives that did little but ease the eco-guilt of conspicuously consuming suburbanites. And the garbage industry said the landfills were really still roomy.

“What created the recycling movement isn’t with us anymore,” says Mike Alexander, an official with the Northeast Recycling Coalition, one of five state regional alliances. “The perception that we were going to bury ourselves in trash--the great symbol of the garbage barge with nowhere to go--that’s gone.”

California diverted 34% of its trash in 1997, far short of 2000’s deadline of half. Eaton put 1998’s tentative total at about 33%.

Or maybe not. As experts try to quantify recycling’s impact--21 states have waste-reduction goals in the next few years--they are finding many rubbish routes too twisty to track. A hauler in Los Angeles County, for example, may pick up trash in three cities and dump it in a fourth.

“It is a spider web in appearance, in terms of pricing, relationships and location,” says Patrick Schiavo, state recycling liaison to communities. “It’s really hard to tell where we are going.”

Americans who recycle may be surprised to find that 100 million others just chuck it all. One percent of Montana residents have access to recycling, compared to 100% in Connecticut and 55% in California, according to BioCycle. Recycling can mean reliable curbside pickup in one town and do-it-yourself trips to recycling centers in others. Some pick up plastic, but many have stopped. Fewer make consumers separate glass by color.

In fact, more places are allowing people to toss all recyclables into one bin. Critics say mingling raises the cost and hurts the quality of reusable junk, and it reflects a general malaise in recycling.

Like other places, Monmouth caught and fined some haulers for illegally tossing recyclables into landfills, says county waste coordinator Larry Zayenga. “With deregulation, it’s harder to track where this stuff goes.”

States themselves use so many different accounting systems that matching them up is like comparing orange peels to apple cores. New Jersey considers junked cars recycled garbage (though snooty New Yorkers might class them as Jersey lawn ornaments).

In addition, the federal government fails to include a local factory’s trash tonnage as municipal waste, and industry groups that compile their own recycling statistics conveniently overlook what happens to bubble wrap and boxes used to package products from abroad, says Michele Raymond, publisher of State Recycling Laws Update. “The recycling rate in this country is not 31%,” she says. “I don’t trust any numbers provided to the states.”

Some Try to Crack Down

Some places try to get tough. California recently pressed some companies into promising to comply with a 1991 law mandating a quarter of recycled content in plastics. But the soda pop companies continue to flout that law and similar statutes in Wisconsin and Oregon. Eaton says he may take on the Cokes and Pepsis soon, but the plastic lobby has proved itself fairly shatterproof.

On Feb. 28, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan will host an international conference on managing the trash of the new global economy, with a particular emphasis on the Pacific Rim. In recent years, nearly 30 nations, most of them in Europe, have demanded that manufacturers take back both products and packaging they generate--meaning, for example, that Sony has to accept the Styrofoam that surrounds the stereos it builds if it wants to sell them in Norway.

Right now, the only product in America that the private sector is required to take back is household batteries.

“I don’t think we as a state have flexed our economic muscle and said: ‘We’re going to only take recycled materials,’ ” Eaton says.

Tough laws from the golden age of garbage recovery have become as impotent as toy light sabers. And new laws rarely make it out of the statehouses. The number of waste- control bills jumped by a third from the 1998 to the 1999 legislative year, Raymond says, but nearly all died. A record 43 bottle deposit bills were introduced; none passed.

Raymond says the laws failed because garbage doesn’t scare consumers these days, even though U.S. rubbish output is setting record highs, a ticking time bomb planted in the booming economy. Even low-cost landfills may not be so bottomless. Industry leader Waste Management just took a billion-dollar loss for the second straight year because it sold more dump space than it had, leaving some towns holding the Hefty bag.

And--start spreading the news--the Tiffany of trash may be coming to a landfill near you. New York City has a dump taller than the Statue of Liberty and this year intends to export the huddled messes to the rest of America. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, with the sort of provincial hubris only New Yorkers and Klingons seem to summon, has said taking trash from the Big Apple is a small price for sharing a planet with such a wonderful city.

Pennsylvania and other leading waste baskets have tried to block alien imports, but the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that such laws constitute restraint of trade. Another reason why towns like Middletown are trying to inspire a recycling renaissance.

“Lots of places are finally realizing they have goals to meet. They must cut,” says Raymond.

Many are watching San Francisco, which experimented with food recycling among 3,000 residents and now is going citywide. The waste will be composted and marketed to the sticks as feed, mulch and fertilizer.

“Urban communities are going to have to go after food to meet those goals,” says Jack Macy, city organics recycling manager.

Not only food, but other overlooked chunks increasingly clogging the waste stream--particularly the untold tons of rubbish being left by the technology revolution and the construction debris from this decade’s housing boom.

Next year, Massachusetts becomes the first state to ban cathode ray tubes from dumps and Vermont is mixing old roof shingles with highway asphalt.

Yet nothing is more tantalizing than food. Raymond studied 18 communities that had managed to meet 65% recycling rates, and most credited composting. Yet those towns are the exceptions. “The bottom line is, most communities are doing nothing,” she says.

The bottom line remains recycling’s biggest hurdle. Unlike a decade ago, the prevailing feeling today is that recycling must pay for itself. “We really can’t go much further until the marketplace starts pulling this stuff out of the garbage,” says Frank Peluso, a New Jersey recycling official.

Yet when someone pulls a piece of two-by-four from a construction site dumpster and starts whittling it into landscape mulch, or turns city sludge into fertilizer, a business that levels trees or dredges wetlands for peat moss fights back.

“It’s the fear of economic displacement,” says Eaton. “You don’t see that on the surface. Companies that enjoy tremendous market share are not just going to stand by.”

Three-quarters of the home insulation sold in this country is fiberglass, most of it by Owens-Corning. Yet Seattle-based Louisiana Pacific has been aggressively marketing an insulation foam made out of old newspapers and aims to grab 15% of the market in three years.

Because fiberglass was dominant for so long, many building codes are based on fiberglass standards that don’t fit cellulose. So the companies are waging major industrial war over the wording of statutes in places like Miami’s Dade County.

“There’s more mudslinging in the insulation field than any other,” says Rick Davenport, vice president for marketing at Louisiana Pacific’s Greenstone subsidiary.

Jousting to Reuse Printer Cartridges

Such wars are legion. Entrepreneurs have built a $10-billion industry by collecting old toner and inkjet printer cartridges and refilling and reselling them at half the price. Big printer companies are going bananas, watching their markets get eaten alive by cheap reincarnations of their own high-margin items.

Hewlett-Packard has resorted to slipping free UPS pickup slips into its products so customers will return spent cartridges, which are quickly melted down into buttons and cafeteria trays. Printer giant Lexmark began discounting to people who signed promises to return the empties. The refillers lobbied local lawmakers for protection, and California was among several states to order their agencies to buy only recycled cartridges.

Both sides claim to be nature lovers in what is purely a market brawl, and recycling’s future rides largely on the outcome of such bouts. Profit is by necessity the new soul of an old movement, says Will Ferretti of the National Recycling Coalition, a trade group.

“My membership, a large portion of whom were volunteer advocates 20 years ago, have now worked themselves into paying jobs,” he says. “They are doing it with greater effectiveness and efficiency. I don’t agree with those who say because it lost its movement status it’s lost its steam.”

San Francisco’s Macy disputes the notion because most business models don’t take into account the costs and benefits to the health of humanity.

“Some people feel that recycling should be cheaper than disposal,” he says. “Well, why? It has long-term benefits.”

That is not evident to towns that live on the edge of the annual budget. For many, garbage has lost its glitter. Towns in Florida and Virginia are considering scrapping recycling. New York cut weekly pickups to every other week. The New Orleans suburb of Harahan in November simply dropped curbside recycling.

“We actually have to badger some towns to submit reports,” Monmouth’s Zayenga says. “It’s a lower priority. You should be able to walk into any convenience store and see trash bins side by side with recycling bins.”

Virginia Lamb’s job is to keep trying. Visiting schools, recruiting composters, roping Rotarians into discovering the subtle delights of rot. Networking nationwide with the faithful.

With a little looking, the composters can be spotted in backyards from Monmouth to Alameda. They are churning bins full of things from junk mail to jelly doughnuts to get the right mix of nitrogen, oxygen, water and carbon. To proudly produce a pile of something akin to really impressive dirt.

Lamb studied environmental science in the days when eco-warriors dragged trash into city hall. Now she’s an insider, with a compost booth at the county fair, a planet-improving Web site and a mission statement printed on a spinning paper wheel of tips: “Compost Happens.”

Yet the primal human urge to flick a candy wrapper at a snail darter habitat remains a barrier as big as the 200-year-old hemlocks in Middletown, where the county offers people a portal to the new world of recycling.

If they’re willing. In the office of the Deep Cut Botanical Gardens, a banana peel sprawls on the crumpled coffee cups in a waste basket when it could be outside, returning nutrients to the earth.

And out in the parking lot, a man who identifies himself as Andy Como, a retired New York lawyer, laughs nervously when asked about recycling.

“I live in an apartment,” he says, edging away. “I just throw everything down the incinerator shaft.”

Times staff writer Allison Cohen and researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.