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SCHENECTADY
Official says recycling useful, costly
Too much packaging a problem
BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter

   As the 15th anniversary of the state’s recycling law approaches, one local official discussed the reality of recycling in hopes of convincing residents to do more than just toss their bottles in the recycling bin each week.
   Recycling is helpful, but it doesn’t help the environment as much as people think, said Commissioner of General Services Carl Olsen.
   When it comes to cost, it’s actually more expensive to collect the city’s milk bottles, soup cans and old newspapers than it would be to just dump it all in the trash.
   The city could run just one additional garbage truck with a threemember crew to pick up the extra materials, but instead it sends out six separate recycling trucks and employs an extra eight people to do the work. In their daily routes, they burn about 50 gallons more fuel than that one extra garbage truck would use, Olsen said.
   Then those recyclables are loaded onto 18-wheelers, which burn fuel for thousands of miles to get to plants across the country that can reuse old plastic, metal and paper. Very few items stay in the Capital Region.
   Recycling does save precious space in the state’s few remaining landfills, and the materials are put to a new use.
   But because so few materials are recycled, and the environmental cost of the fuel is so high, Olsen said residents need to realize that recycling is not enough.
   In 1992, the state required all municipalities to start recycling programs. That has helped the environment by slightly reducing the amount of material that for decades was dumped in landfills, but the city of Schenectady alone still hauls 120 tons of garbage to the Seneca Meadows landfill every day. That landfill is more than 170 miles away.
   By contrast, the city picks up about 15 tons of recyclables each day.
   Olsen said people could improve that ratio by being more diligent in their recycling, but he thinks the real problem is that there’s still too much trash that must be thrown out.
   “They could do a better service by making choices when they look at packaging,” Olsen said. “When you buy a bigger item that you have to assemble, did you ever notice how much packing is in the box? Even cereal boxes — there’s so much marketing on the outside of the box, the box is a third bigger than the cereal inside.”
   He wants residents to demand less packaging, particularly plastic, as a way of conserving nonrenewable natural resources. Plastic is made from petroleum.
   “Plastic is used a lot more for packaging,” he said. “We use raw materials because they’re cheap. Who are we to do that when we know damn well it will greatly affect our grandchildren’s quality of life? The more we can conserve our natural resources, the more it’s going to last.”
   There are also ways to improve the ratio of recyclables to trash, Schenectady County planner Jeff Edwards said.
   The county is still working on education, he said.
   He gets calls from residents who are convinced that their recyclables get tossed in with the regular garbage, or who think the materials end up not being reused after they’re collected.
   “That’s not true at all. We do recycle it. It does get reused,” he said during a tour of the Kellar Avenue materials processing plant, where most local recyclables are separated and sold to the highest bidder.
   Patagonia uses recycled drinking bottles in the fill for its winter clothing. Milk bottles are sold to companies that make colored bottles, often for laundry detergent. The colored bottles usually go to factories that make plastic lumber, from picnic tables to a child’s outdoor playset.
   The biggest buyer of Schenectady’s recyclables are the Georgia carpet mills, who pick up soda and water bottles to use in their rugs. Cans go to mills in the Midwest.
   The materials that travel the farthest are the paper drink boxes. They are sent overseas to processing plants in the Indonesia area.
   Edwards thinks residents also still need education on what to recycle, even though cities have been collecting materials since Sept. 1, 1992.
   “People don’t know we take the paper cartons, cartons of milk, drink boxes,” he said.
   And even though the rest of the recyclables are trucked across the country — or halfway across the world — it’s still better than never reusing the material at all, Edwards said. “The environmental cost of the transportation is not as much as if you had to go out and cut down trees or mine and extract raw materials,” he said

BRUCE SQUIERS/GAZETTE PHOTOGRAPHER Schenectady County planner Jeff Edwards explains Thursday at the county material recovery facility how recyclables are processed locally then packaged and sent off to larger markets.

I may get beat up for admitting to this one.........but I have never recycled ANYTHING, EVER! If they stopped using all of this plastic crap and other materials for packaging, we wouldn't have to do this stupid recycling.

I've been recycling since it became mandatory and really don't see much advantage to recycling. The products made from recycled plastic costs more than to make it from oil. It costs more to collect the recycled plastic and metal from the consumers than to just collect it in regular garbage. The only advantage seems to be saving space in the landfills. Why doesn't someone find a way to recycle old tires and reuse them so there won't be so many dumped along our roadways. As long as places charge $3 to $5 dollars a tire to dispose of them people are going to dump them along the road. If someone would pick them up for free and give them to a recycling center to be used for fuel or better yet pay the collector a fee per tire to get the tires to be used as fuel to generate power.

The topic of recycling started back in the 60's and 70's when people started to be concerned about the environment. I see it as a way for some of the larger corporations to make some money. Recycling has become a big business in the industry. But I do not see where it has actually helped the environment.

Shadow, I hvae to agree that they're just asking for people to dispose of the tires inappropriately, however, there are things that are made out of recycled tires.  Now, they actually shred up old tires and use them as part of the mixture for the new asphalt when they're putting in new roads.  Sort of a different twist on "when the rubber meets the road," but they are reused.  I don't know that the local places don't just dispose of them, however, they do have this use as a possibility.

Point taken BK, but are tires now cheaper since they are recycled? NO! In fact the process is costly. So it still boils down to big business making big bucks while we are running around like rats in a maze making sure we put all of our recyclables in a nice, neat, politically correct container.

I agree, it is still another step to go through to please "the man."

I have read that tires are shredded and used to fuel power generating plants and also used for a base for our roads but where do you take the tires in this area without paying $3 to $5 per tire to drop them off?

Folks have problems spending 3-5$ a tire for disposal(if this is truly where the $$ goes) yet, we have a lotto/casino/scratchoff addiction????? not to mention all the $1 store crap you can buy.......

Quoted from Shadow

I have read that tires are shredded and used to fuel power generating plants and also used for a base for our roads but where do you take the tires in this area without paying $3 to $5 per tire to drop them off?

I don't really know.  Everywhere charges this "disposal fee."  I'm thinking, instead, it should be changed.  Just like your bottles and cans, change this "disposal fee" to a deposit.  If/when you get new tires, you will be required to pay this.  However, if you go into the shop to get new tires after your first set on a car once this law goes into effect, you would not have this cost, as the deposit that you would have to pay on the new tires would be taken care of by the return of the old tires that are on the car.  This would bring in some money, just not as much as the state is used to right now.  Maybe this would get more people to bring back their tires, though.  I guess with exploded tires, you would have to bring in enough of the tire to show that you tried to take care of it, I don't know, but this is omething that can be started to be thought out by those "higher up."

The last time I bought a set of tires I had to pay a disposal fee to leave my old tires there for them to dispose of. Now when the truck comes to pick up those old tires they charge the company a fee to pick-up those old tires and someone else has to pay a fee when the tires are dropped off at the recycling plant. It just seems to me that we have to pay an awful lot of money to get rid of our tires when there is a way to use them without all the fees on them. BK I like your idea of getting rid of old tires just like we do the bottles.

I just bought a a complete set of tires this week and paid a $10 disposal fee for them. The deposti idea is good, but the return on your deposit would take years to get back since you only buy tires every 40 or 50 thousand miles.