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When it comes to recycling, City Commissioner Erik Sten says the easier the better--especially if it's also cheaper for haulers and households. But some recyclers, recycling advocates and industry experts say the new recycling plan that Sten and the city's Bureau of Environmental Services, which he oversees, have come up with may hurt the environment, boost customers' bills and skirt a city policy of paying contractors "living" wages. "It makes me very nervous," says Jeanne Roy, founder of Recycling Advocates, a nonprofit Portland citizen group. The plan the City Council will consider this week calls for Portlanders to stop separating recyclable materials--as we do now--into 13 different categories, ranging from scrap paper to tin cans. Instead, residents will "commingle" recyclables into just two simple categories: containers and paper. City officials say they're trying to make life easier for environmentally conscious residents and the truck drivers who come to the curbs to haul away the containers of our consumer habits. If the drivers no longer have to keep sorted materials separated in their trucks, the theory goes, they can pick up more recyclables in less time. What's driving this urge to merge--in a city where 81 percent of the households already recycle--is a simple mechanical fact. Haulers need new trucks, and new trucks are geared more to commingling than separating. "Approximately 80 percent of the recycling trucks operating in Portland currently need replacement. Most of these trucks were purchased in 1992 at the outset of Portland's expanded recycling program and are fully depreciated," says a city report on the recycling program. That makes 1998 a convenient time to decide how the city will recycle for the next 10 years, says Bryan Engleson, general manager of Eastside Recycling, which serves 53,000 households in Portland. The future looks bright for commingling, Engleson adds, because advances in technology make it easier to sort mixed materials in processing plants. But others warn city officials not to go so fast--if at all--into the brave new world where valuable materials like clear glass sit in the same unseparated, unprotected space with tuna tins, detergent jugs and dark wine bottles. Such commingling dilutes Portland's high recycling standards, critics say. A glass bottle can be recycled infinitely into another glass bottle, as long as it doesn't break and mix with shards of different-colored glass. In commingling, however, glass tends to get shattered and mixed. Then it loses value and is recycled just once into fiberglass or road fill. "It's not what recycling founders envisioned, and not what I expect," says Steve Apotheker, technical editor for Resource Recycling, a Portland-based industry magazine that counts subscribers in 30 foreign countries. "When I put glass out, I expect it will go to bottles. But in commingling, some will go to dumps and roads, which I consider totally unsatisfactory." Rob Guttridge, president of Recycling Advocates, fears that such dissatisfaction will dampen local enthusiasm for recycling, rather than increase it as city officials hope. Professional recyclers like Guttridge also doubt that commingling will save money. "I fail to see how it will reduce the cost," he says, "and it may well increase it." Apotheker agrees, and citizen watchdogs in OSPIRG and the Portland Utilities Review Board have expressed similar concerns. Their problem is this: The city claims that recycling rates (currently $3.23 a month for the average household) can be kept down if sorting isn't done at the curbside, but instead happens later in a processing plant thanks to a combination of modern machinery and old-fashioned low-wage labor. It's not clear, though, that processing costs will stay low as city officials believe. Mary Sue Smith, general manager of E-Z Recycling, says her company lost $200,000 last year on commingled materials. That's because some materials were too contaminated to recycle, and others--such as mixed broken glass--had lower resale value than Smith and her company were banking on when they bought their new sorting equipment. That leaves sorters with no choice but to jack up rates. Some critics also complain that shifting the labor from drivers making $13 an hour to sorters earning a maximum of $7 an hour contradicts a city policy to pay contractors a "living" wage, which is currently defined as $6.98 an hour. Not surprisingly, city officials and haulers dispute the criticism. Bruce Walker, the city's manager of residential recycling, says critics are being too picky in their concerns about glass. At most, Walker says, 30 percent of the glass will get broken and mixed. Even then, he says, it's unfair for activists to insist that a bottle or newspaper have multiple lives. "That's where I part with them," Walker says. "That seems a pretty fine line to be drawing." Engleson says commingling in other states such as Florida has proven economical. He also notes that the labor shift would create entry-level jobs for unskilled workers--many of whom are immigrants. "I still like this idea because it's simple," says Sten. "I'm not convinced yet it has any fatal flaws. It seems to be the small margins that people are arguing about." Yet Sten admits he's willing to listen more closely to the recommendations that critics will make to the council this week. "I may be dead wrong," he says. "We need to explore these downsides, and I've really got to listen as this proposal moves." |
