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Recycling: Shades of Green

Posted on: Thursday, 20 April 2006, 21:00 CDT

By Kurt Van der Dussen, Herald-Times, Bloomington, Ind.

Apr. 20--When area state Sen. Vi Simpson was helping give birth to Indiana's solid waste regulations back in the late 1980s, a goal for solid waste disposal was set by the Indiana General Assembly.

By the start of the 21st century, half the solid waste in Indiana would be recycled instead of going to landfills.

So much for that.

It was a happy day at the Monroe County Solid Waste Management District a year ago when its small-scale portion hit that mark. But less than 5 percent of the trash produced by Monroe County residents goes through the district's rural trash transfer and recycling sites or its recycling center at 3400 S. Old Ind. 37.

In 2005, the total estimated solid waste stream for Monroe County was about 166,000 tons. But the district's share of that was only 2,572 tons of trash in its "orange bag" program, plus 3,285 tons of recyclables.

Bloomington's municipal trash doesn't go through that waste stream. Nor does trash from the dozens of small private trash haulers or from the county's trash collection giant and solid waste district operating partner, Hoosier Disposal & Recycling.

Since the solid waste district locked the gate on the county landfill in August 2004 because of environmental and financial problems, Hoosier Disposal has handled 75 percent of all the county's solid waste.

For 2005, Hoosier reports an estimated 165,700 tons of solid waste were produced in Monroe County. That's about a ton for every person, business, industry, school or organization.

Of that, Hoosier disposed of about 123,500 tons, or 74.5 percent. Of the rest, about half is trash that private haulers take out of county and half is sewage sludge generated by City of Bloomington Utilities.

The total of all solid waste recycled by Hoosier for 2005 was just 8,326 tons, or 6.7 percent of its total solid waste stream. In that total is every last recyclable item from the solid waste district, city recycling program or any other recycling source.

That is a far cry from that 50 percent goal of the early 1990s.

So how come only one of every 14.9 tons of solid waste is being recycled instead of the targeted 50 percent?

Simpson herself notes that lawmakers had too simplistic a view of the issue back in the late 1980s.

"It's a lot more complicated than we thought 15 years ago," she said this month. "A lot of the markets are not very stable. -- A lot of it is run by the market."

She recalled the report the Indiana Department of Environmental Management did in 2000, when the 50 percent goal was to be met. "Statewide, very few of the solid waste districts made the 50 percent," she said. "Monroe County was one of the better ones."

Simpson said the trend line is the most important measure for how a county is doing. And by that standard, Monroe's recycling totals have increased by two-thirds -- 67 percent -- in the past decade, from an estimated 4,970 total tons of recycling in 1995 to 8,326 estimated tons in 2005.

As it is, Simpson said, there was no penalty for not making the 50 percent figure because it was just a goal. And she said she suspects that after that 2000 state report was filed away, a lot of counties and solid waste districts "have slipped and gone backwards."

In Monroe, the recycling buck ultimately stops not with the solid waste district but with Hoosier Disposal's county manager, Scott Bradshaw.

He's responsible for the handling and marketing end of the 1 1/2-year-old pact with the solid waste district under which they split any profits from recycled items the district collects. But he also oversees the materials brought in by city trucks and has to decide what gets recycled from trash that private haulers bring in.

Bradshaw says economics drive that decision.

Only cardboard, paper, aluminum and steel cans and scrap metal make Hoosier or the district any profit. Glass and plastic are recycled only because the pittance Hoosier and the district can get for them per ton makes it cheaper to haul them in for recycling than to haul them 60 miles to the company's Sycamore Ridge landfill for space-consuming burial.

The solid waste district must pay Hoosier to take its plastics and glass. It does so for two reasons: It's the right thing to do for the environment, and it costs a little less than landfilling those items.

Meanwhile, Bradshaw said, there's no way Hoosier is going to add to its costs to sort plastics and glass out of the bagfuls and truckloads of general trash it handles from city trash trucks, rural trash transfer sites or private haulers.

But he said public attitudes and government policies also drive recycling.

He said Bloomington and Monroe County residents have a greater commitment to recycling than do other southwestern Indiana cities such as Washington and Vincennes. But even here, there still are thousands of city and county residents who won't bother to do even the most basic sorting out of recyclables before they bag their trash.

"We just need more people doing it," said Melissa Kriegerfox, director of recycling and reuse for the county solid waste district. "And businesses. We need more, more, more. The question is how to do that."

That's where government policy enters the picture.

Bradshaw noted both the East and West coasts are far more stringent in requiring recycling. In New York, he said, people can be fined for not separating recyclables from their trash.

Beyond that, places such as Seattle and Portland have large-scale composting of organic trash to greatly reduce landfilling. Indeed, a small group of Indiana University students working with the local Center for Sustainable Living is developing proposals for doing that in Bloomington and the county.

Officials from town and city councils and county commissioners to state legislators, and indeed Congress, have the power to make sustainable policies a priority.

"It all comes down to how tough they want to be and how serious they want to get about recycling," Bradshaw said.

Find marketable products

But there's another way, Bradshaw said: Create more markets for recyclables and products made from them.

He says requiring U.S. industries to use recyclables in manufacturing would be one way to create a market for now-unprofitable items for recycling and make them more economically viable.

But he also said the recycling industry needs to come up with more products the public wants to buy.

For example, he said, he saw a home-improvement show on TV about a kid-proof, ultra-durable and good-looking floor covering made of a mix of pulverized recycled glass and epoxy. If that product took off, there would be a higher demand and hence a higher market price for recycling glass.

Or take the small business in far-southeast Indiana that recycles plastic pop bottles and spins them into soft, warm vests, sweatshirts, hats and gloves.

"What if Wal-Mart came in and said 'I'll take a million of those'?" Bradshaw asked.

Only about 7 percent of Monroe County's solid waste is being recycled.

The "big dog" for recycling is neither the county's solid waste district nor the Bloomington Sanitation Department. It's Hoosier Disposal & Recycling, which processes three-quarters of the county's total annual solid waste stream.

Hoosier's manager argues the keys to increasing recycling are more political will and action and more popular products made from recyclables that would make glass and plastic recycling financially viable.

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Copyright (c) 2006, Herald-Times, Bloomington, Ind.

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Source: Herald-Times

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