Every day it seems that something new is taken the way of the dinosaurs due to the global recession — Corporate jets, The Rainbow Room, Polaroids, Arena Football, Circuit City, Linens n’ Things, Sharper Image, Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, the U.S. branch of DHL, even the Broadway musicals RENT and Hairspray. The story is disastrous as every new chapter unfolds, with few exempt from the carnage.
Many in the peanut gallery are saying that all of those corporations got what they had coming. Years of overspending and mismanagement came back to righteously haunt them.
The question is…how will we feel when the same global recession causes the end of recycling programs?
As far as I know, my local recycling center was not involved in financial derivatives or predatory loans. But in this increasingly interconnected world, all businesses share the burden of economic stagnation.
For years, private contractors bought up recyclable glass, plastic and paper. Not for the good of humanity, but because millions of dollars could be made by “going green.”
In an article published December 8th in the New York Times, Matt Richtel and Kate Galbraith said that, “recycling programs have been driven as much by raw economics as by activism.”
Richtel and Galbraith point out that over the last three months the price of recycled products has experienced a catastrophic drop. On the West Coast in October of last year, mixed paper — one of the principle recycled products — sold for $105 a ton. Now, the same paper sells for $20 a ton. Recycled tin, which once sold for $327 a ton, is now worth $5 a ton.
Recyclables processors who used to pay for recyclable goods are now, in many cases, charging the cities who deposit those same goods. For instance, the city of Boston used to receive $50 a ton for recyclables, now they receive $5 a ton and may soon have to start paying to unload those recyclables.
In large cities, like New York and Boston, receiving anything for recyclables is still better than paying as much as $80 a ton to put them in a landfill. Many smaller cities are not as fortunate, their recycling programs are in jeopardy of significant cutbacks. In many cases cardboard will be the only collected recyclable material.
The problem lies in the fact that the world’s primary user of recycled goods is China, a country that for years took as much recycled material as we would send them. Now they only require a trickle of what they once needed as more and more Chinese businesses close their doors.
The result is a massive stockpiling of recycled goods all across the country. Recyclables processors have no recourse but to charge more for what they take as their storage becomes packed with items of little to no value.
Thankfully in the local area, the recycling programs for N.C. State and Wake County as a whole are operating normally.
According to Lindsay Batchelor, program manager of Waste Reduction and Recycling, the University’s program is doing well. But as we exit the “Year of Energy” and as the global recession worsens, who knows what the future has in store?
Perhaps a few “Years of Waste” are on the horizon?
Send Russell your thoughts on recycling in the recession to [email protected].
