As Costs Skyrocket, More U.S. Cities Stop Recycling

New York Times ^ | March 16, 2019 | Michael Corkery

[reaganaut1]

Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country.

Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. And last month, officials in the central Florida city of Deltona faced the reality that, despite their best efforts to recycle, their curbside program was not working and suspended it.

Those are just three of the hundreds of towns and cities across the country that have canceled recycling programs, limited the types of material they accepted or agreed to huge price increases.

“We are in a crisis moment in the recycling movement right now,” said Fiona Ma, the treasurer of California, where recycling costs have increased in some cities.

Prompting this nationwide reckoning is China, which until January 2018 had been a big buyer of recyclable material collected in the United States. That stopped when Chinese officials determined that too much trash was mixed in with recyclable materials like cardboard and certain plastics. After that, Thailand and India started to accept more imported scrap, but even they are imposing new restrictions.

The turmoil in the global scrap markets began affecting American communities last year, and the problems have only deepened.

With fewer buyers, recycling companies are recouping their lost profits by charging cities more, in some cases four times what they charged last year.

Amid the soaring costs, cities and towns are making hard choices about whether to raise taxes, cut other municipal services or abandon an effort that took hold during the environmental movement of the 1970s.

[j. earl carter]

Just recycle metals. The rest is carbon. Putting it in a dump is good for the environment.

Oddly, the recycling dumpsters where I live don't allow metals (other than aluminum cans). It is truly absurd.

[Cecily]

Reduce and reuse is correct. My office still buys styrofoam coffee cups, and people at work use them all the time even though we have many, many clean coffee mugs and glasses for water and cold drinks, and the dishwasher cleans everything at the end of every day. Why buy styrofoam cups, and why do people use them?

[Vlad The Inhaler]

To paraphrase Eric Hoffer:

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

Recycling completed the transition and became a racket some time ago.

[hinckley buzzard]

Recycling makes sense in an economy of scarce commodities. It was widespread during WW II, with scrap paper drives, metals, even lard being collected and used in the war effort.

In a post-scarcity economy it makes no economic sense.

[JoeFromSidney]

Yes, I recall gathering rubber, steel, and other materials that could be r-used for the war effort. I wonder, though, how much of what I rounded up and turned in actually got recycled, and how much went into the landfill because t wasn't economical to reprocess it.