Recycling

Beginning in the mid-1960s and growing alongside the environmental movement, recycling became an important aspect of municipal waste management and symbolic of personal actions to help clean up the environment. In earlier times various kinds of recycling took place; they consisted in diverting products from the waste stream before discard. Boy and Girl Scout troops collected old newspapers to raise funds—as those old enough may still remember. Beer, sodas, and milk moved in returnable glass bottles; and because most of these containers finally broke in centralized facilities like bottling plants, the residues were also collected and sold to glass companies. During World War II the government solicited metals and the public set these aside to help the war effort. Finally, automobiles that had reached their final hour were recycled, as they still are, in scrap yards—by far the most massive consumer products, alongside appliances, thus disposed.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word "environment" was first used in its current sense in 1956. It did not become a household word until the 1960s. Long before that time, however, recycling was a major industrial activity carried out for economic reasons but under different names: in metals it was the scrap trade, in paper the waste paper trade in two branches—newsprint gathered by volunteers and cardboard gathered from offices and warehouses; there was also a trade in broken glass ("cullet"), in rags, and in waste oil. Farmers collected restaurant wastes to feed to pigs and recycled the fertilizer value of farm animal wastes as manure. And farm and garden wastes have always been composted. None of these activities has changed and, in fact, are the recipients of wastes today extracted from the municipal waste stream. Certain forms of recycling, however, are relatively new. They include reprocessing of auto tires into rubber, synthetic fuels, or paving materials; the recovery of lead from batteries; plastics recycling; and relatively experimental methods of converting organic wastes to fuel ("bio diesel"). Then, as still today, manufacturing wastes were either immediately recycled if suitable or used for fuel to power production activities—common in wood and fiber-using operations.

MUNICIPAL SOLID WASTE RECYCLING

The movement toward municipal solid waste (MSW) recycling was probably sparked by the introduction of steel cans to package soft drinks and beer in 1953. These containers made a contrast with the returnable bottle, at that time still the dominant mode of beverage packaging; cans did not bear a deposit and were soon littering roads. Keep America Beautiful, a business-sponsored organization, began operation in 1953 as well and attempted to persuade the public not to litter. KAB's most memorable ad image was the Indian chief with the tear in his eye—sad over the despoliation of the countryside. The public noticed that packaging was proliferating and turning into a form of marketing—and solid waste tonnage was growing more rapidly than population. The "throw-away" society was born. In 1965, the first federal law on solid waste, the Solid Waste Disposal Act, passed Congress coinciding with the introduction of aluminum beverage containers that year: you could crush them in one hand! Amended versions of the act gave recycling more and more prominence until the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 made recycling of MSW a national policy. But RCRA had no mandatory provisions. With the exception of mandatory deposit bills at the state level and local laws mandating separate collection of recyclables from waste, recycling at the national level continues still as an injunction rather than as a regulatory program.

Economics

MSW recycling has always required subsidy because scrap prices do not cover the expensive separation of commingled wastes by hand or machine. At the same time, disposal of wastes, whether by the relatively expensive method of incineration or the lower-cost use of burial in landfills, is less expensive than waste separation with a portion recycled and a larger portion disposed of—even when scrap revenues were factored in. For these reasons MSW recycling has been essentially funded by the public sector and by the population's contribution of labor in separating wastes.

Even when collection, separation, and concentration costs for material components are subsidized, economic conditions cause demand for waste-derived commodities to cycle up and down. This has led to programs to increase the "recycled content" of goods produced. Companies advertise high recycled content as a way of inducing environmentally aware consumers to select their products. Where technically feasible, and the waste markets sold for a lower price than "virgin" raw materials, producers also realized a cost benefit.

Quantitative Trends

Based on data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), MSW generation was 236.2 million tons in 2003, of which 176.4 million tons (75 percent) was in the form of potentially recoverable materials. Of this subtotal 31.4 percent was recovered for recycling in 2003, most of it in the form of paper (72 percent). The bulk of recovered paper was in the form of old newspapers from households and corrugated cardboard from businesses. About 48 percent of all paper and board, 36 percent of metals, and 19 percent of glass is recovered; the lowest recovery rate is associated with plastics (5 percent), the highest with nonferrous metals, primarily lead batteries (67 percent). The low rate of plastics recovery is explained both by the many types of plastics on the market, the difficulties in sorting them, and the fact that some cannot be remelted.

Of the 60 million tons of organic and miscellaneous wastes not included in figures above, cities recovered about 17 million tons in 2003, 28.2 percent, the great bulk of it in the form of composted yard trimmings. For context, it is worth noting that MSW represents a mere 3 percent of total waste generation in the United States, which, based on EPA's estimates, stood at around 7.84 billion tons. The overwhelming mass of this waste, however, is the form of mine tailings. Industrial waste generation in the major categories like metals, paper, plastics, and glass is very low because production wastes are immediately recycled.

Recycling rates appear to have increased since the beginning of the recycling movement, but reliable numbers are not available. The reason for this is that waste generation by type of content is not routinely determined; in some surveys (such as the one cited above) commercial wastes are included, in some they are left out. Very substantial paperboard recoveries have always been associated with commercial sources—long before recycling took hold; and in the olden days much newsprint was diverted from MSW when demand for waste paper was high. One source, cited by EPA, Biocycle Magazine, showed recycling increasing from 19 percent in 1992 to 33 percent in 2000, with increases in every year in between. Such data, however, are not based on scientific or census-like measurements and, while no doubt capturing a trend, are more impressionistic.

Energy Recovery

Conversion of MSW to energy, referred to as waste-to-energy, was proposed and demonstrated early in the history of waste recycling—on the model of industrial practice. Waste-to-energy conversion is tracked by the Energy Information Administration. Data provided by EIA indicate steady if somewhat cyclical growth in energy production from solid waste. Generation, expressed in equivalents of British thermal units (BTUs) was 0.354 quadrillion Btu in 1989 and had reached 0.571 quadrillion Btu by 2003. In 2003, the breakdowns of the total were 1) combustion with heat or electric power recovery at 51 percent, 2) capture of methane gases from landfills, 26 percent, and 3) heat recovery from agricultural byproducts, sludges, tires, and other biomass components of waste, 24 percent. In 2003, waste-to-energy represented 9.4 percent of all renewable energy consumption—more than 3 times the amount provided by solar and wind energy combined.

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