The city of Boston is making an effort to increase its recyclin grates

Tag : Glass Fiber
Massachusettsstate officials aren't satisfied with their recycling totals,either. Though the state recycled about 47 percent of its trash,according to the Department of Environmental Protection, only about10 percent of plastics discarded statewide ended up recycled. Alittle more than half of what was left ended up incinerated atwaste combustion facilities, most of them in-state, says JohnFischer, the branch chief for waste and toxics planning at thestate Department of Environmental Protection. The rest went tolandfills.
Industry insiders see various causes for the resistance torecycling. "It's hard enough to get people to pass a school levyand pay for public schools," says Don Loepp, the managing editor ofPlastics News, another trade publication, "much less get people torecycle their trash." Many communities, especially smaller ones,don't offer curbside recycling, making recycling inconvenient.Other communities collect some but not all plastics, makingrecycling difficult and leaving, say, yogurt cups and cottagecheese tubs to spend eternity in a landfill.
The city of Boston is making an effort to increase its recyclin grates. In May 2007, the city tried a pilot program offering largerwheeled bins and easier "single-stream" recycling to 3,000residents of the city living in Roslindale and Jamaica Plain.Paper, plastics, aluminum, and glass could go mixed into onecontainer - and that container was nearly seven times larger thanthe old recycling bins they replaced.
The idea worked, says Hunt. Recycling in those neighborhoods rose53 percent in three months. Recycled tonnage citywide jumped 14percent between fiscal years 2007 and 2008 as the program expanded,according to city data. Officials believe that trend will continueas single-stream recycling, and those larger containers, reachevery corner of the city in the next 18 months.
BUT THERE MAY BE EVEN MORE HOPE for recycling in the simpleeconomic equation of rising oil prices. The price of "virgin"plastic - plastic being made for its first use - has risendramatically in recent years, driven by many of the same marketforces pushing up gasoline prices. For example, polyethyleneterephthalate, or PET (used for most soda and water bottles),typically sold for less than 60 cents per pound in the 1990s. It isnow selling for nearly $1 a pound. The cost increase makes recycledplastics more desirable to manufacturers, and with the demand forrecycled plastics rising, new markets are emerging. Manufacturersthat once may not have been interested in polypropylene yogurtcontainers - because historically there wasn't enough polypropylenebeing recycled to rely on it for the manufacture of new products -are now buying it back, says Patty Moore of Moore RecyclingAssociates Inc., a national recycling consulting group based inCalifornia. And other previously discarded plastics suddenly havevalue as well. "Kiddie pools, resin chairs, pails and buckets,"Moore says. "There's so much plastic out there right now, andthere's no reason why we shouldn't be capturing it. Because thereare markets for it and there are people who want it."