Maine was supposed to be recycling half of its waste by now. Instead, the statewide recycling rate has stalled around 40 percent. As communities and lawmakers look for ways to boost recycling — essentially, diverting as much waste as possible from the landfill — they must keep in mind that recycling, like so much else, is market-driven.
When lawmakers in 1989 set a 50 percent recycling goal for the state, they also established a waste disposal hierarchy that lays out a number of means — reduction, reuse, recycling, composting and incineration — to keep as much waste as possible out of the state’s landfills.
Certainly, the waste hierarchy is justified by environmental concerns. But there’s also a cost justification: Landfilling is expensive. There’s the cost of processing and hauling as well as the long-term cost of maintaining a landfill and adding new capacity once existing landfills are maxed out.
Fortunately, Mainers produced slightly less waste in 2013 — 2.56 million tons — than they produced the year before, according to the latest Waste Generation and Disposal Capacity Report from the Department of Environmental Protection, and Mainers produce less waste per person than the national average. However, there’s much more waste that can be diverted away from the landfill.
A 2011 report by the University of Maine found that nearly 22 percent of the material in Maine’s solid waste could be recycled; 38 percent could be composted, meaning compost has even more potential to divert waste.
On the recycling front, the economics must be settled in some way, says Joe Fusco, a vice president at Casella Waste Systems. The economics are broken, he says, because they rely on commodities markets to cover the costs of recycling. But the prices for cardboard, metal and glass have been low for several years.
“We kind of got everyone thinking that recycling was free,” Bill Moore, an Atlanta-based industry consultant on paper recycling told The Washington Post, which recently published a lengthy story on the difficult economics of recycling. “It’s never really been free, and in fact, it’s getting more expensive.”
The question, says Casella’s Fusco, is how to price recycling services. Translation: Under the current model, someone will have to pay more to have recyclables picked up and sorted — at least at times when commodity prices are low. That someone will be municipalities, home and business owners, or all of the above.
“The environmental value [of recycling] has proven itself,” Fusco said. “Now, the economic value needs to be proven.”
While The Washington Post article blamed the ease of recycling — especially the advent of single stream, which requires no sorting — for exacerbating the problem, Fusco said that isn’t the case in New England.
“With single stream, contamination is far outweighed by the fact that more people participate and they are recycling more,” he said. “The worst contamination is recyclable materials in the landfill.”
On the composting front, several cities, such as Denver and Seattle, have started curbside compost pickup in recent years, and a few Maine communities are experimenting with ways to divert this waste from the landfill.
In the Portland area, Garbage to Garden has enrolled more than 3,700 households, which pay $14 a month to have their food scraps and other compostables picked up. They can get free compost for their gardens in return. The company has helped communities divert more than 2,000 tons of compostables from the incinerator and landfill since 2013.
In the process, Garbage to Garden estimates it has saved Cumberland, Falmouth, Portland, South Portland, Westbrook and Yarmouth nearly $144,000 in waste disposal costs. However, unlike curbside recycling, those who use the service pay for it (or volunteer for the service in order to defray the cost).
Communities have relied on recycling for years to cut the costs of waste disposal. But with the cost-saving ability of recycling alone in doubt, towns and cities have to broaden their waste reduction strategies — through incentives to reduce waste at the source, occasionally covering the costs of recycling, and encouraging more compost — in order to realize an economic return from the tremendous environmental benefit of wasting less.
