Albany’s recycling problem
Thirty years ago, the city of Albany launched a recycling program, complete with a marketing slogan that urged residents to “Recycle, reuse, rethink.”
Sounds good. But after three decades, the city is still working on getting just the first concept down. Albany’s system, says a national expert who visited the region last month, is inefficient and costly.
In fairness, Albany isn’t alone in its shortcomings. Neil Seldman, cofounder of the Institute for Local SelfReliance and the National Recycling Coalition, who looked at programs around this area and spoke at Albany Public Library in October, said the region is a mix of “great things” and “inertia.” Communities like Bethlehem, which recycles or composts about 60 percent of its household waste, are still exceptions rather than the rule.
Even the best community programs, of course, are subject to market forces, and those forces aren’t particularly favoring local governments right now. China, which had been taking in and recycling much of the world’s plastic, abruptly ended those imports last year. And the Capital Region isn’t a mecca for recycling enterprises. It has only one major recycler, Sierra Processing, a sorting facility located at the Port of Albany and owned by the multinational Waste Connections.
It ’s worth taking particular note of Albany, though, for several reasons. It ’s the largest community in the region. It takes in trash from other communities and businesses at its Rapp Road landfill. And it ’s the lead agent for the Capital Region Solid Waste Management Partnership Planning Unit, which comprises many of the city ’s surrounding towns and villages and includes in its mission development of a long-range strateg y for dealing with the area’s trash once the landfill closes in eight years or so. Much of the region looks to Albany for leadership when it comes to solid waste. The city ought to be in the forefront of efforts to handle its waste as sustainably as possible.
In its role heading the regional planning unit, Albany also should be leading the way in developing a regional approach to solid waste. That effort has waxed and waned over the years depending on how much life the Rapp Road landfill had left. Every time another cell was nearly full and the city was asking the state for one more dumping permit, there would be talk of how, if only the city got a little more room to dump, if only it had a few more years to operate, planners would get on that long-range plan. All the expansions and extensions seem to have yielded is procrastination.
That’s not to say this should all fall on Albany. It falls on the regional planning unit ’s other members, too. And New York state must play a role, as well, by working with Albany and the surrounding region as a test case to develop model programs and expand recycling market options. As New York ’s capital city, Albany ought to be seen as a national model of a successful and sustainable program for handling solid waste. And after 30 years, it ’s way overdue.