Recycling: Stalled At Curbside

By Bruce van Voorst/Washington

From the reaction in the environmental community last week, one would have thought Bill Clinton was about to outlaw offshore oil drilling. In fact, all he wants to change is the way the government buys its stationery, all $20 billion of it. The President plans this week to order federal agencies to purchase only paper with at least 20% of the content made from recycled trash by 1994. He wants the recycled content to be 30% by 1998. Allen Hershkowitz, recycling chief of the Natural Resources Defense Council, hails the move as "the most important decision in recycling history."

Why? First, because the White House wants to set the standard -- a definition of "made from recycled paper" -- that environmentally friendly businesses as well as state and local governments can follow. More important, that action, and similar decisions across the country, should stimulate the market for recycled paper.

Not a moment too soon. In spite of highly visible and rapidly spreading collection programs, and the surprising willingness of Americans to sort their trash, the national recycling effort is deeply troubled. With comprehensive recycling programs in 40 states, and the number of communities offering such programs jumping from 50 to over 4,000 in the past three years, cities and municipalities now collect far more of some items than the recycling industry can handle -- materials such as high-grade white paper, computer paper, green glass and plastics. That means that the bottles, milk jugs and catalogs that are diligently separated into appropriate bins and carefully taken to the curbside often end up all jumbled together in the same landfill.

The problem is simple economics: too much supply (used material) and not enough demand (for recycled products). When that happens, prices drop. And have they! The average value of a ton of household waste fell from $100 in 1988 to $44 in 1992. Glass bottles rise in shiny mounds in Seattle; plastic containers fill warehouses in Johnsonville, South Carolina.

There are some solutions to the household waste, but not recycling ones. Space for cheap landfills, once thought virtually exhausted, turns out to be still widely available. Seattle, for example, has landfill for 100 years, even without recycling. Modern incinerators, though hardly without their critics, offer a tidier alternative for waste disposal. The 1980s saw a binge in new incinerator construction, and cities across the country, from Long Beach, California, to Fairfax, Virginia, now burn some of their trash, turning a portion of it into energy in the process.

But Americans don't want to send their garbage into the earth or into the air. They want to recycle. Hundreds of well-intentioned companies have sprung up in response to this enthusiasm, but few have prospered. Jason Stanton, president of Envirothene in Chino, California, the largest plastics processor in the West, says that after three years of operations, the firm has just begun turning a meager profit. "Demand's just not there," says Stanton. United Resource Recovery of Canton, Ohio, went belly-up this month because it could not find a profitable market for its products. And in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Poly-ana Plastic Products is limping along trying to market the pellets made from recycled bottles. The company has lost money for 56 straight months, according to president Marty Forman. "It's impossible to compete with virgin plastics at current prices," sighs Forman.

Even successful companies have had trouble making money from recycling. WMX Technologies, Inc., the nation's largest collector of curbside recyclables, has invested millions of dollars in the process over the past five years, only to see profits just beginning to trickle in. The company is sometimes stuck with mountains of material that it cannot profitably unload. "Until we recycle as a system, we won't ever optimize the process," says Jane Witheridge, WMX Technologies' vice president of recycling. "How and what we collect determines how it's sorted and then how it can be recycled. Each step is part of a whole."

Some materials are far more easy to recycle than others, and aluminum and steel lead the list. About 57 billion aluminum cans -- close to 70% of all those produced -- were recycled last year, along with 40% of steel beverage containers. Metal products are unique in that the recycled materials are usually cheaper than the original versions. According to Jerry Thompson, vice president for containers at the American Steel Recycling Institute, "Because of the huge cost of mining and transporting and processing ores, it's cheaper for our industry to collect, process and remelt used cans." Both are heavy, compact and durable substances and can be collected and reprocessed much more efficiently than other recyclables.

Progress has been made in newsprint as well: 43% of all newspapers published in 1992 were recycled. Yet MacMillan Bloedel, a Canadian company that is planning to build the largest newsprint-recycling facility in the world in West Sacramento, California, has put its two-year, $1.5 billion project on hold until overall prices for newsprint return to profitable levels.

Used glass presents a particularly sharp challenge to the recycling industry. Because clear glass and colored glass don't mix, reprocessing often results in a hue that is gray or worse. That's why trash collectors ask homeowners to separate the clear bottles from the amber and green ones. Of course, that doesn't always happen, and bottles tend to break, making the resulting bits of mixed glass virtually unrecyclable. The Glass Packaging Institute in Washington claims that 33% of glass bottles are recycled, though not all into new bottles. Many companies, for example, use the combined colored and clear shards to produce an aggregate for street paving called glasphalt. And the Anchor Glass Container Corp. of Tampa, Florida, uses a new process that coats clear glass with a colored plastic to be used instead of colored bottles. When the coated glass gets recycled, the acrylic color is easily burned off.

Of all the junk that constitutes America's household wastes, plastics are the most recycling resistant. The material comes in so many varieties, produced from such different polymers, that just separating it in the recycling process is cumbersome and expensive. Add in the cost of reprocessing, and the price of recycled plastic goes even higher. For example, virgin plastic is 10% cheaper than recycled resins. Says Lance King, community-outreach director for the Californians Against Waste Foundation in Sacramento: "Plastics may be 40% of the volume in some communities and a third of the cost in a curbside program, but they don't begin to pay for themselves." North American Recycling Systems of Fort Edward, New York, has simply stopped its plastics operations. Tom Tomaszek, former president of the company, lamented, "The market simply isn't yet there." Nobody, he continued, "will buy the stuff at reasonable prices." As a result, tons and tons of reprocessed plastics lie unsold in the New York region alone. Little wonder only 2.2% of all the plastics produced end up being recycled.

One plus for plastics is an advanced chemical-and-heat recycling process that literally returns them to their original material -- high-quality oil. Unlike other recycling procedures, which merely grind up and melt the plastic, the process developed at Conrad Industries Inc., near Seattle, accepts unsorted plastics and breaks the polymers into their constituent molecules. The result is identical to virgin oil, the building block from which new plastics are made. Customers such as Lyondell Petrochemical Co. of Houston will reprocess Conrad's product, and Conrad, a profitable private company founded in 1955, will soon increase its recycling capacity from the current 300 lbs. of plastic an hour to more than 2,000 lbs.

Enthusiasm for recycling has also produced some innovative technological breakthroughs. Patagonia Inc., a Ventura, California, manufacturer of designer sportswear, is marketing sweaters spun from green plastic soda bottles. Home builders are using a recycled paper, wood and plastic wallboard made by Gridcore Systems International that is tougher and more durable than wood or drywall. Pallets made of recycled plastic by Custom-Pac Extrusion, Inc., of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, are outlasting their wooden counterparts 10 times over. "These are exceptional breakthroughs," says Will Ferretti, director of the New York State Office of Recycling Market Development. "There's a lot more to come."

Another company on the technological leading edge is BFI of Houston, which uses sophisticated automation in its plants to sort and process paper, glass, plastics and metals. Its technology works so well that it has increased its "recycleries" from two to 93 in the past three years, and its recycling business is growing at 35% a year.

One sure way to boost demand for whatever is coming: better symbols on products showing their recycled content. The National Recycling Coalition, based in Washington, has persuaded 25 large industrial companies, including Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, AT&T, McDonald's and Johnson & Johnson, to back a "Buy Recycled" movement. The Environmental Protection Agency is about to launch a "Buy Wa$te Wi$e" campaign, urging consumers and manufacturers to favor recycled goods. "The public must get away from the idea that merely putting items in containers at the curb is recycling," says David Dougherty, director of the Clean Washington Center in Seattle. "It's not recycled until it's used again." That's precisely what President Clinton says the government can force the market to do.

With reporting by Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles