Sunday Focus: Recycling Down

     The high-tech recycling plant had Montgomery Mayor Todd Strange as the chief cheerleader from the start, but someone in the city should have seen trouble coming.
     The plant's owners failed to file required financial reports after the first quarter of their contract, and that should have raised an alarm in city hall that something was not right.

     Strange pronounced the old orange bag recycling program a failure. 
     He said only a small percentage of the household recyclables that residents were voluntarily putting in orange bags to be collected by city trucks was actually being recycled. The rest was going... to the landfill.

     But now the multi-million dollar plant built by a Florida firm has stopped operations while they seek other investors...or file for bankruptcy. Their operating capital comes from several million in "tipping fees" paid by the city, and from the sale of the recycled materials they somehow extract from the city's residential trash. I think about that every time I pour grease into or put leftovers in my trashcan.
     Strange's goal was to reduce or eliminate trash going to the landfill. But the price being paid for recycled materials has been dropping for years, and the company says it can not make a profit.
     All of this should not have been a surprise to the company. Popular mechanics reported seven years ago that the price for recycled materials was dropping, and the article questioned the need for any recycling programs:

According to one calculation, all the garbage produced in the U.S. for the next 1000 years could fit into a landfill 100 yards deep and 35 miles across on each side--not that big (unless you happen to live in the neighborhood). Or put another way, it would take another 20 years to run through the landfills that the U.S. has already built. So the notion that we're running out of landfill space--the original impetus for the recycling boom--turns out to have been a red herring. Recycling critics also question the wisdom of deploying fleets of large, fuel-hungry trucks that duplicate the routes already driven by garbage trucks to take recyclables to reprocessing facilities that burn energy and emit pollution. And the resources saved aren't always that rare: The virgin material conserved by recycling glass is mainly sand, and we're a long, long way from a "peak sand" crisis.

 [Sunday Focus is a regular feature of www.TimLennox.com]