One of the reasons recycling has fallen well short of targets set years ago in New York is that recyclables don’t weigh what they used to. They are substantially lighter, increasing the challenge of recycling 25% of the city’s waste as measured by tonnage鈥攁 goal set during the Dinkins administration. Case in point: phone books.
They’re virtually irrelevant now, as people habitually search the Internet for phone numbers. Six years ago, Verizon got permission from the state’s Public Service Commission to stop printing residential phone books, and 13,600 tons (27.2 million pounds) of paper vanished from the annual waste stream. Then, last week, the commission ruled that Verizon could stop printing business directories too, meaning recyclers will have about 6 million fewer of those thick books to recycle.
Mixed paper is among the more valuable parts of the recycling stream. But the decline in newspaper circulation has more to do with the reduction in paper recycling than does the disappearance of phone books. Packaging materials have also been made lighter, as have plastic bottles and their caps.
It all adds up at a time when recycling businesses are coping with depressed commodities prices for many recyclables, thanks in large part to the drop in oil prices. That has given a price advantage to the manufacturing of products from virgin materials rather than from recycled content.
Glass, a fairly heavy recyclable, has been largely replaced by plastic in the soda industry, as previously occurred in the dairy industry after mass refrigeration technology arrived at supermarkets. That has also contributed to the lightening of the recyclable waste stream.
But recyclers are not mourning the decline in glass soda bottles: Glass is a difficult material to collect and recycle economically because it is costly to separate the more valuable clear glass from the brown and green variety. Colored glass is generally crushed and disposed of for nothing (if recyclers are lucky) or for a couple of dollars per ton, which is far cheaper than landfilling it.
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