A few years back, I lifted the lid on a Paper Retriever bin in a church parking lot on the North Side and discovered someone had tossed a gutted deer carcass in with the old newspapers and junk mail.
I threw my papers atop what was left of Bambi’s mom, then called the number on the side of the dumpster. I left a message suggesting someone attend to the mess before the newspapers were red all over.
Such always have been the travails of the recycling business. Justin Stockdale, western regional director of the Pennsylvania Resources Council, says when he was working in Santa Fe, N.M., circa 2003, he found a cow carcass in a “cardboard only” container.
Those may be the extremes, but China finally got so fed up with the tainted recyclables that American and other exporters shipped it that it imposed an impossible standard a year ago: It would accept only those loads of waste metal, plastic or paper that were 99.5 percent pure.
Ivory Snow couldn’t meet that. The move shocked a worldwide, multi-billion market that already had more than its share of problems. Recyclers are still finding markets for scrap paper and such, but they’re not nearly as aggressive in the pursuit. The fact that a lot of people are reading this on phones, tablets and laptops has impacted the paper industry, too.
Whether it be tulips, condos, Bitcoin or scrap, nothing is immune from a market collapse.
When Abitibi, the Canadian forestry/paper giant, arrived in metro Pittsburgh with Paper Retriever bins in the summer of 2005, it spread its bins across five counties and had 850 working by 2007. Churches and schools embraced the program to reap payments by the ton. Those bins long since have been acquired by Royal Oak Recycling in Michigan, but there aren’t half as many bins around because payments to the nonprofits ceased.
Some churches, such as Most Holy Name in Troy Hill, still have a couple of Paper Retriever bins because “taking care of the environment is part of Catholic social teaching,’’ Rebecca Hurst, parish business manager, said. But other churches that took in more than 20 tons of paper each in 2017, St. Aloysius in Reserve and St. Thomas More in Bethel Park, no longer have the bins. Truck noise, cleanup and lost parking spaces are harder to justify when there’s no money in hosting bins.
I called Royal Oak’s local office to find out where its bins are now, and Dustin Johns, appointed plant manager three months ago, readily agreed to an interview. I drove Monday to Neville Island and squeezed the company car among 18-wheelers, then entered a warehouse piled high with the paper that’s hauled in from a tri-state area stretching from Kittanning to Lisbon, Ohio.
Mr. Johns went to his computer for a quick count of the bins on the plant’s routes and came up with 350. A small fleet of trucks brings back tens of tons of paper and cardboard from businesses’ scrap each day. These all-paper hauls are worth more than mixed recyclables because their end result can be more valuable. The purer the form the more likely it will have new life as print-worthy paper; tainted stuff is lucky to come back as a cardboard toilet-paper tube.
The city of Pittsburgh has become something of an outlier, sticking with single-stream recycling — plastic, metal, paper and glass set at the curb in one bin or bag — even as 20 South Hills communities and Shaler began this year telling residents to throw their glass in the trash. Pittsburgh’s single-stream method was pioneered by Mayor Sophie Masloff in 1990 and hailed (by me, among others) for the convenience that brought widespread participation.
But that convenience has run roughshod over the quality of the end product. The glass inevitably gets smashed into what amounts to a million needles hiding in the paper-plastic stack. “Glass maybe never should have been put in,’’ Mr. Stockdale said. “I suspect it’s ending in a landfill.’’
The city says no, but it must pay Recycle Source in Hazelwood $17.50 a ton to recycle the glass, so it’s asking residents outside the city not to take their glass to the city’s drop-off sites.
The trend is not the city’s friend. Back in 2008, Mayor Luke Ravenstahl decided to stop asking residents to keep paper separate from other recyclables and the city reported receiving $46.46 a ton for the whole schmear. Now it reports getting $5 to $40 a ton for different grades of sorted paper and $210 a ton for your standard bimetal food cans. It offered no stats on plastic or aluminum, but Shawn Wigle, the city’s recycling overseer, said “at the end of the day it’s still cheaper to recycle than landfill the material.” The average landfill cost to the city is $28 average a ton.
Tim McNulty, spokesman for Mayor Bill Peduto, said the city is exploring other options but has a contract with Recycle Source through June 2020. Prices on the various recyclables change monthly, but the city isn’t willing to “simply tell our residents to landfill the [glass] when it is 100 percent recyclable,’’ Mr. McNulty said.
I’ve already shoved too many mixed recyclables in this column for it to be worth much, so let’s end with some good news. Mr. Johns reported that a DVD player once tumbled out of a Royal Oak bin, and it worked. And toward the end of last summer, a truck was unloading when a family of raccoons tumbled out, the mother having given birth in the cozy nest of paper.
The mother ran off but workers put the newborn babies in a box and put that under a spare trailer. The mother returned and two of the babies survived.
Maybe single-stream recycling will prosper, too, but don’t bet your used DVD player on that.
Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or Twitter @brotheroneill
First Published: January 17, 2019, 10:00 a.m.
