Business of recycling gets messy
Costs rise to handle waste from blue bins
ELKRIDGE, Md. — Tucked in the woods 30 miles north of Washington, D.C., is a plant packed with energy-guzzling machines — giant conveyor belts, sorters and crushers saving a thousand tons of paper, plastic and other recyclables from reaching landfills each day.
The 24-hour operation is a sign that after three decades of trying, a culture of curbside recycling has become ingrained in cities and counties across the country. Happy Valley, however, it is not.
Once a profitable business for cities and private employers alike, recycling in recent years has become a money-sucking enterprise. The District of Columbia, Baltimore and many counties in between are contributing millions annually to prop up one of the nation’s busiest facilities here — but it is still losing money. In fact, almost every facility like it in the country is running in the red. And Waste Management and other recyclers say that more than 2,000 municipalities nationwide are paying to dispose of their recyclables instead of the other way around.
In short, the
business
of American recycling has stalled. And industry leaders warn that the situation is worse than it appears.
“If people feel that recycling is important — and I think they do, increasingly — then we are talking about a nationwide crisis,” said David Steiner, chief executive of Waste Management, the nation’s largest recycler, which owns the Elkridge plant and 50 others.
The Houston-based company’s recycling division posted a loss of nearly $16 million in the first quarter of the year. In recent months, it has shut nearly 1 in 10 of its biggest recycling facilities.
Falling oil prices, a strong dollar and a weakened economy in China have sent prices for American recyclables plummeting.
Conservation advocates question if the industry is overstating a cyclical slump.
“If you look at the longterm trends, there is no doubt that the markets for most recyclables have matured and that the economics of recycling, although it varies, has generally been moving in the right direction,” said Eric Goldstein, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council who tracks solid waste and recycling in New York.
Still, the numbers speak for themselves: a three-year trend of shrinking profits and rising costs for U.S. municipalities — and little evidence that they are a blip.
As progressive lawmakers and environmentalists have pushed to increase recycling rates with bigger and bigger bins — while demanding almost no sorting by consumers — the recycling stream has become increasingly polluted and less valuable.
“We kind of got everyone thinking that recycling was free,” said Bill Moore, a leading industry consultant on paper recycling who is based in Atlanta. “It’s never really been free, and, in fact, it’s getting more expensive.”
Many of the problems facing the nation’s recycling industry can be traced to the curbside blue bin. Anyone who has ever tossed a soda can into a bin knows what’s supposed to happen: Anything recyclable can go in, and then somehow, magically, it’s all separated and reused.
The idea originated in California in the 1990s. Environmental advocates believed that the only way to increase participation in recycling programs was to make it easier. Sorting took time and was messy. No one liked it.
Companies found that they could recycle almost everything at once. Lightweight newspaper and cardboard were sent tumbling upward, as if in a clothes dryer. Glass, plastic and metal fell into a series of belts and screens. Automation was adopted to sort, bale and send to manufacturers all those tons of paper, bottles and cans.
From the start, it was hard to argue that glass should have been allowed in the curbside mix. It’s the heaviest of recyclables but has always been of marginal value as a commodity.
Today, more than a third of all glass sent to recycling facilities ends up as crushed shards. It is trucked to landfills as daily cover to bury the smell and trap gases. The rest of the glass has almost no value to recyclers and it often costs them to haul away.
The composite of what Americans try to reuse has changed dramatically over the past decade.
Dwindling have been the once-profitable old newspapers, thick plastic bottles and aluminum cans that could be easily reused. There was an even more pronounced drop in newsprint.One bright spot has been an increase in cardboard. Analysts say that with more people buying items through online merchants cardboard can account for up to 15 percent of cities’ recyclable loads — more than double that of a decade ago.
The demand for that paper and cardboard, however, remains at a near-decade low. In China, containerboard, a common packaging product from recycled U.S. paper, is trading at just over $400 a metric ton, down from nearly $1,000 in 2010.
Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a nationwide tally for recycling in 2013 that showed overall recycling had contracted for a second straight year, to 34.3 percent of the waste stream.