Recycling Revived
By Sam Williams

[Note: This is a pre-edited version of a story which appeared in the Jan. 14 edition of The Gotham Gazette under the headline "Recycling Revived." The final, edited version is available on the Gotham Gazette site.]


New York City recycling is dead. Long live New York City recyling.

On July 16, Mayor Bloomberg officially marked the end of one era in New York City recycling and the beginning of another with a quick stroke of his pen.

In enacting a law negotiated by the city council in last minute budget talks, the mayor retroactively authorized the resumption of plastic recycling, suspended on July 1, 2002, set firm deadlines on the suspension of glass and yard waste recycling (April 1, 2004 and June 1, 2004 respectively) and ordered the resumption of Christmas tree recycling (suspended last fall).

It was, quite simply, a decisive affirmation of recycling's future in a city that had all but given up on the concept less than 18 months before.

"The battle was tough, but we won the war," observed Democratic City Councilmember Michael McMahon, chairman of the council's Sanitation and Solid Waste commitee and a staunch recycling proponent.

Future battles remain, of course. One twist in the current resumption of plastic service is an awkward every-other-week pickup schedule proposed by the Department of Sanitation. According to the recent City Hall agreement, that schedule will remain in effect from the first of August to the first of April, 2004, at which point, normal weekly service is expected to resume. Despite ongoing grumbles over institutional sandbagging, most city recycling advocates and their allies in the recycling industry are willing to look past such temporary obstacles and bask in the newfound resiliency of their movement.

"It's like a relationship," says Maite Quinn, managing director of Manhattan-based Sprint Recycling. "It isn't until you take a step back and really look at what you have, that you can put a value on it."

Putting a value on recyling has never been easy in New York City. Since the passage of Local Law 19, the 1989 ordinance that ordered the Department of Sanitation to set up a city-wide recycling program, recycling advocates and department of sanitation officials have butted heads over how to turn coins and bottles into cash. From the DSNY perspective, recycling has put a consistent drain on both manpower in equipment. From the recycler's perspective, Sanitation's Soviet-like penchant for one-size-fits-all solutions has made it difficult to tailor the city's recycling in a way that would make it more economically productive.

"It almost seems that whenever there was a decision that needed to be made, they made the wrong decision," says Marjorie Clarke, co-chair of the New York City Waste Prevention Coalition. "You begin to wonder: This can't totally be happenstance."

The end result, from the recycling view, has been a decade-long two-steps-forward, three-steps-back process that leaves proponents habitually wary whenever money comes into the conversation. That wariness has translated into strategies designed to stress the environmental benefits of recycling in a city that rarely sees those benefits firsthand.

That unwillingness to tread the bottom line proved a major handicap, however, in the wake of Sept. 11. Faced with a $5 billion budget deficit, Mayor Bloomberg bought into the Department of Sanitation's plan to save the city $56 million a year by ceasing plastic, aluminum and glass recycling.

"We have two recycling programs," said Bloomberg at the time, distinguishing between profitable paper recycling franchise and unprofitable non-paper recycling. "One that works and one that does not."

A June, 2002 budget compromise saved aluminum but consigned plastic and glass to temporary oblivion. Without a favorable bid to undercut Sanitation's chief trash buyer, Houston-based Waste Management Inc., the city's recycling program faced even harsher cuts in the ongoing aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001.

Reforming the Ranks

Talk to most city recycling advocates, and one event from the past year stands out. In November the Citywide Recycling Advisory Board (CRAB) and the Center for Economic and Environmental Partnership (CEEP) joined together to host an industry roundtable at the downtown campus of Pace University.

Essentially a national summit for recyclers, consumers of recyclable commodities and industry lobbyists, the event represented the first major attempt to solicit outside help in driving home the economic sustainability of recycling.

"The city needed more education," says Clarke, a roundtable organizer. "I figured that other cities were doing well. All we needed to do was bring in the information."

Clarke and her fellow organizers had little difficulty getting people to show up. In questioning both the financial and environmental merits of civic recycling, Mayor Bloomberg had essentially fired a shot across the bow of the entire industry. Eager to fire back, attendees came from as far away as San Francisco and Portland.

"New York is a bellwether for other programs across the country," notes roundtable attendee John Burgiel, national director of solid waste mangement for RW Beck. A Florida-base consulting firm, RW Beck has helped cities such as Denver, Cincinatti and Buffalo structure their recycling programs and has a major stake in making sure New York City stays on the green track.

One way to do that, Burgiel and others stress, is to remind city managers of the great big market lying just beyond the five boroughs. Instead of going for the bulk discount, paying waste haulers like WMI and Allied Waste to take both trash and recyclables, attendees proposed pushing the city into the role of auctioneer, selling off its plastic, aluminum and glass franchises to the highest bidder.

To get an idea of how it works, look no further than Visy Paper, a local subsidiary of Australian recycling giant Pratt industries. In 1995, Visy snuck its way into a city recycling contract by forging a deal with the Economic Development Corporation. In exchange for building a 200,000 square foot paper processing facility on Staten Island, Visy won itself a piece of the city paper stream. The facility opened in 1997, a year after Rudy Giuliani announced the impending closure of Fresh Kills. Since then, Visy has ramped up production, recyling 150,000 tons of city paper into recyled corrugated boxes each year and paying $7 a ton for the privilege.

Factor in dumping costs-- $70 a ton according to current city estimates, though many see rates rising as high as $100 a ton as regional landfills continue to put surcharges on New York trash -- and that translates to $11.6 million in annual savings for NYC taxpayers. On June 23, Visy and the mayor's office announced an ambitious 100,000 square foot expansion of the company's Staten Island facility to boost production even further.

Like Visy, Hugo Neu has forged ties with the city government through a side door route. A major steel recycler, the New Jersey-based company offered to recyle the steel from the World Trade Center. It has since taken on a larger steel l recycling contract with the city. Encouraged by the profitability of that enterprise, company execs made a play for New York City aluminum and plastic as well, offering to pay the city $5.10 per ton.

Considering that the closest competitive bid was WMI's offer to charge the city $68 per ton -- $2 below dumping cost -- to take the same material, it was an offer the Department of Sanitation could hardly refuse.

"It's the first time we've really seen daylight for recycling," Doherty told a January City Council meeting.

Since then, Hugo Neu executives have offered to take the whole non-paper package --aluminum, plastic, and glass -- at a cost of $51 per ton. The city has yet to accept the offer, but with out-of-state landfills already imposing a surcharge on New York trash, the bid is growing increasingly attractive.

"This is not just an economic issue," said Hugo Neu general manager Robert Kelman at a May speech to the New York League of Conservation Voters. "This is a moral imperative."

So What's Next?

Hugo Neu's aggressive bidding has revived the image of recycling as a cost-effective enterprise. It has also prodded other local recyclers to vie for similar portions of the city's mammoth recycling stream.

Carmen Cognetta, counsel to City Hall's Committee on Sanitation and Solid Waste, hopes to encourage this trend.

"Recyclers used to be hesitant to deal with the city because they didn't get a good reception," Cognetta says. "I think once people see [the Hugo Neu bid] working, it will encourage more people to bid in the future."

One person eager to line up for city recyclables is Sprint's Quinn. She says the current market value for high quality paper runs well above the $7 per ton Visy currently pays the city for mixed paper and cardboard. If the city could find a way to segregate paper by type, it would boost profits even further.

"[New York] is not working as hard as other cities at getting the markets that do exist," Quinn says says. "We just put in a bid of $33 a ton for Jersey City's paper."

Another outcome of last year's roundtable has been a growing buzz over so-called "pay as you throw" funding models. According to the model, the city charges residents for trash pick up but not for recycling. In San Francisco "pay as you throw" has spurred the expansion of recycling streams into new realms such as organic waste and kitchen compost. The city current recycles half its waste stream, compared with New York City's anemic 20 percent recycling rate in 2000-2001.

"Pay as you throw is a way to provide dedicated funding," says Robert Haley, recycling coordinator at San Francisco's Department of the Environment. "Come bad times or a budget crisis, you don't have to cut back recycling for lack of money."

San Francisco and New York are more than a continent apart when it comes to size, waste-stream burden and local markets for recyclable materials. Still, other examples verify the strength of the model. To get a hint of the future, New York reyclers can look to Canada's largest city, Toronto. Like New York, Toronto experienced the closure of its main landfill in the mid-1990s. Currently, the city exports about a fifth of its solid waste to Michigan. Through a combination of pay-as-you-throw and private contracts, the city is hoping to boost its recycling rate to 60 percent by 2006 and 100 percent by 2010.

"New York has challenges," says Lawson Oates, manager of Toronto's Solid Waste Management Division. "But it also has economies of scale that can be built in. That's an important factor."

Lawson, who also attended last November's roundtable, says he came away with a new respect for New York's waste situation. He recalls waking up at 3 a.m. to the sound of beeping Sanitation trucks and workers clearing the enormous mound of garbage bags piled outside his hotel.

"I suddenly realized that nine floors wasn't as far up as I thought it was," Oates says.

Equally surprising to an outside observer like Oates was the sheer amount of manual labor that went into clearing a single block's worth of trash. Oates says his own department has boosted productivity and reined in labor costs through the use of wheeled bins in high density neighborhoods. To stave off labor trouble, Oates' department has also made sure to include union leaders in each step of the planning.

"With the four day work week, the union was wary but they eventually came on board," Oates says. "As a result, we've achieved economies and introduced some savings into our collection system."

Getting similar concessions out of the Department of Sanitation might be a pipe dream at the moment, but Oates' success has encouraged New York City planners to think creatively. Herein lies the final benefit of the recent waste management crisis: It has punctured the cultural hubris of a city used to viewing the outside world from a distance.

"For whatever reason, we have this mantra: We're New York. We're bigger than anybody. There's no other place we can learn from," grumbles Clarke. "When if you really think about it, half of New York is no different from any other large city. Only in Manhattan do you hit the problems most other cities never face."

Bloomberg: Savior or Shmendrik?

So how much credit should Mayor Bloomberg, the man who, intentionally or unintentionally, forced the city's decades-old recycling program to prove recycling's economic sustainability and deliver the bids to win over City Hall bean-counters?

For Resa Dimino, president of the Grass Roots Recycling Network and co-moderator of last November's rountable, the answer is "not much." Dimino doesn's buy into the growing argument that the mayor's threat to suspend glass, plastic and even aluminum pickup in early 2002 was simply a case of managerial "tough love." Instead, she sees it as a costly example of brinskmanship in a city where residents have yet to experience the routine of a steady recycling program.

"I would argue that it would have been smarter to keep the program in place and go through the same kind of process," she says. "Instead, the city government just chose to ignore things until they reached crisis mode."

Others, such as McMahon, however, are willing to give the mayor the benefit of the doubt.

"I give the mayor credit in that he's the first mayor who admited that recycling is a good idea for the environment and we can make it work financially," McMahon says. "Of course, we had to force feed him that a little bit. But in the final analysis he's doing the right thing by recycling."





Copyright © 2003 Sam Williams.