Yet another sad and unexpected effect of the current economic conditions: recyclables losing their value. Cardboard, plastic, newspaper and metals are piling up across the country as recycling contractors fail to find buyers who will purchase the materials at a fair price. This slump in the scrap market means that many of those recyclables will end up in the landfill instead of getting new life as car parts, book covers and boxes.
From The New York Times:
“It’s awful,” said Briana Sternberg, education and outreach coordinator for Sedona Recycles, a nonprofit group in Arizona that recently stopped taking certain types of cardboard, like old cereal, rice and pasta boxes. There is no market for these, and the organization’s quarter-acre yard is already packed fence to fence.
“Either it goes to landfill or it begins to cost us money,” Ms. Sternberg said.
In West Virginia, an official of Kanawha County, which includes Charleston, the state capital, has called on residents to stockpile their own plastic and metals, which the county mostly stopped taking on Friday. In eastern Pennsylvania, the small town of Frackville recently suspended its recycling program when it became cheaper to dump than to recycle. In Montana, a recycler near Yellowstone National Park no longer takes anything but cardboard.
There are no signs yet of a nationwide abandonment of recycling programs. But industry executives say that after years of growth, the whole system is facing an abrupt slowdown.
Many recyclers are hoping the market will rebound in the next six months to a year, so they’re still stockpiling tons of material. In the meantime, they’re hurting. Prices have bottomed out – on the West Coast, for example, paper materials that sold for $105 a ton is down to $20 to $25.
This news is disappointing, to say the least. We can’t afford to lose public support for recycling. The good news is, most cities have no plans to cease recycling operations, but some are already limiting the types of materials they’ll take. If only more manufacturers would commit to using recycled materials for everything they possible could, we could keep the stream of recyclables moving until the economy rebounds.
Link [The New York Times]
Photo credit: Jody Hilton for The New York Times
