A brave new world for recycling
Recycling is serious now. I read it in Newsweek, so it must be true I used to say recycling will become serious when there’s a real market for that stuff. It’s too expensive to ship it from where it is to where anybody can use it, and only enthusiasts will do all that separating on a regular basis. Well, recycling is serious now. .
Junk is a $65 billion industry that employs 50,000 people in this country, the magazine says. We send $6.7 billion of it – car bodies, discarded metals, and all kinds of paper, plastics and other stuff – to China. That’s more than anything else China buys from us except aerospace products. They use our junk to manufacture the junk they sell back to us. “It tamps down our trade deficit, creates American jobs, and might save the planet,” Newsweek says.
From 1994 to now, China’s imports of American recycled paper goods jumped form 348,000 metric tons a year to 9.1 billion. Waste iron and steel jumped from 166,000 metric tons in 1998 to 2 million metric tons last year, $1.5 billion in recycled copper alone. China buys 58 percent of U.S. scrap paper and 42 percent of our scrap metal, Newsweek says, that would otherwise go to landfills and incinerators.
Business is booming. It’s an expanding seller’s market, enough to convince big scrap companies to invest in new technology to separate mishmashes of junk, and reduce the amount of separating we have to do for them before they collect it.
I first heard the word “recycling” around 1970 from idealistic kids in tie-died clothing who were a little younger and a lot more idealistic than I was. But in the ‘50s, our grade school still had “paper drives,” a vestige of World War II. We’d nag our parents to save their newspapers and drive them to the schoolyard once a month, because the classroom with the largest pile was the winner. Each month we got a report of how much money we made at our last paper drive.
From our classroom windows, we’d see a truck drive the papers away. Years later, I learned we got them back, in the form of future newspapers. Forty percent of the newspaper I worked for in the ‘80s and ‘90s was printed on recycled paper. In a downsizing business, with the cost of paper rising, recycling meant jobs in the newsroom, where I worked, and service to our readers. Our industry had been recycling more and longer than any other at the time.
But aside from that elegant microeconomic model, where the trucks that left the plant with new product came back with yesterday’s unsold product, recycling for me was still a feel-good project for organic granola eaters, a press release from municipalities about how much taxpayers could save IF they cooperated and separated their garbage, and surly workers at transfer stations who threatened to fine me if I threw a green glass bottle in with the clear glass bottles.
Will a big condo development like mine ever start selling dumpsters of discarded paper and metal instead of paying someone to collect it? How about big office buildings? I could see it if there were just two or three dumpsters, not a proliferation, collected by one or two companies with good separating technology. I’m glad recycling companies are making big money, but I don’t want to do their work for them for free. Metal, plastic and glass, and organic waste is about my limit. And no fines.
