Recycling got it's modern start in the late 1960s and early 1970s both as a common sense New Economy idea -- mining urban ore -- and also as a practical solution to the lunacy of the "Throw Away Society." The pioneers of the early recycling movement often don't get enough credit in the annals of environmentalism. While saving spotted owls and whales has been the rage since 1970, recycling has been a center piece of the early urban environmental equation going back to the early parts of the 20th century. Unlike wildlife conservation and wilderness protection, recycling addresses the environmental impact of each and every person in a given city or town -- at home, at work and at play.
It might come as a surprise, then, that the National Recycling Coalition (NRC) -- the premiere group that spearheaded major partnerships and initiatives back in the 1980s and early 1990s including The Buy Recycled Business Coalition; The Electronics Recycling Initiative; RecycleMania; the Chicago
Board of Trade Recycling Exchange; The Climate Change Initiative; and America Recycles Day -- is about to go belly up in either Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The NRC, host of the greatest recyclers' party of the year -- the annual National Recycling Congress; voice to thousands of waste reduction professionals; and long the center of national recycling policy (for better or worse), pretty much got mismanaged and mistreated into the ground by a combination of incompetence, sloth, and foolishness. Some of this may have been the result of a hands off board of directors. Some may have been an executive director with a personal agenda. And some may just be the result of too many masters with too little money.
How is it possible to run a recycling organization dedicated to reducing waste and resource efficiency with money from the trash industry, soft drink companies, and other corporate interests whose very profits depend on excess consumption and disposable products?
The story of the NRC's demise is long and rather sordid. I won't go into it here. You can get a good dose of that here and here. What is important to know is that the slack is in part being picked up by the GrassRoots Recycling Network (GRRN). Formed some 15 years ago as a direct result of the NRC's growing ineffectiveness, GRRN is focused on the concept of Zero Waste and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR).
The struggles for the NRC, and recycling in general, might seem surprising given the nation's newfound affection for anything green and sustainable. But in a very real sense, a number of us have been warning about the demise of recycling as part of the environmental toolkit for years. As a public works principle, recycling seems to work at least on the residential level. 30% or so of this country's household garbage is either recycled or composted every year. This has been the case for well over a decade.
But recycling as a field has never adequately addressed specific structural issues that continue to make waste diversion a difficult row to how in the public policy sphere as it relates to trash economics. Most specifically, recycling calls forth the need to measure and manage waste and recovered material using high-tech scales that allow haulers to charge a certain rate per pound for trash and another charge for recycling services. Presumably, measurement along these lines would allow for truer market comparisons between disposal and recovery.
Similarly, in the mid-1990s the US EPA came out with two seminal publications that should have revolutionized recycling in America. The first was called "Full-Cost Accounting for Municipal Solid Waste Management: A Handbook." The second was a set of case studies and prescriptive rules for re-writing the rules of institutional waste management systems, moving trash companies from the job of filling landfills and feeding incinerators to making profits from total resource management systems, optimizing waste reduction and recycling, and minimizing waste. This book, called "Resource Management: Strategic Partnerships for Resource Efficiency," seems never to have been read by anyone on the commercial side of the trash equation.
Numerous other issues have not been adequately addressed over the years. Recycling markets are the key to the economic viability of materials recovery. Over the past two decades the North American recycled product industries have taken a back seat to China and other Asian nations. US bottling, plastic packaging, paper packaging and scrap steel commerce has taken a dramatic nose dive, while China's recycled products infrastructure has exploded. With relatively modest competition from domestic North American companies, China has been able to call the shots on pricing, material quality and environmental impacts.
All of which is to say, that the NRC did not do the job it needed to in order for recycling to remain the primary urban environmental initiative on every business, institution, and household's agenda. These days folks want roof gardens, solar electricity, biofuel vehicles and permeable driveways. It is a shame. State of the art recycling , composting and waste reduction systems should mean a 90% or greater level of waste diversion. Instead we get watching the demise of the National Recycling Coalition as a diversion.
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