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Mayor Bill Peduto wants to find about $500,000 in the 2020 city budget to purchase 20,000 more recycling bins for Pittsburgh residents.
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Brian O'Neill: Pulling the recycling business out of the dumps

Andrew Stein/Post-Gazette

Brian O'Neill: Pulling the recycling business out of the dumps

Like every other city, Pittsburgh is still working to find cost-effective ways to improve its recycling operation

The day before Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg suggested a “Pittsburgh Summit” where representatives of cities from around the world could assemble to address climate change, Mayor Bill Peduto proposed finding a half million dollars in the city’s 2020 budget to buy about 20,000 more recycling bins for residents.

That’s a good idea. Because up to now, Pittsburgh’s talk has been a lot better than its walk on an issue that has brought Mr. Peduto worldwide recognition.

Fact is other Pennsylvania cities do recycling a lot better than Pittsburgh. Assuming city council approves the mayor’s idea, and the city buys and distributes 20,000 recycling bins, and does the same with another 13,000 bins purchased through expected state grants, what would that mean?

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That would mean up to six times as many residences would be using the 35-gallon containers. It also would leave more than half the city’s residents still using the blue plastic bags that commonly get stuck in the sorting equipment and temporarily shut down the Recycle Source facility in Hazelwood.

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I called Harrisburg’s recycling supervisor, John Rarig, for his take on Pittsburgh’s efforts. Harrisburg invested $1.5 million in recycling bins about five years ago to avoid some of the highest trash disposal fees in the country.

In Pittsburgh, the difference between what it pays to landfill waste (about $26 to $31 a ton) isn’t much more than what it’s now paying to recycle it (nearly $23). But in Harrisburg, it can either recycle at around $35 a ton or dispose of its waste at $195 a ton to the current owners of the local incinerator, Mr. Rarig said. That was the price the city had to pay to unload the incinerator that nearly bankrupted the city.

Mr. Rarig said he can’t see a fast monetary gain for Pittsburgh by investing in recycling bins, but it’s still a good idea. “One of these days we expect the markets will turn around.

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“We’re in this kind of fallow period. There are not a lot of feel-good stories about making money. The market needs to see the stream is there and reliable.”

There is little that’s more volatile than recycling markets. Everyone’s heard by now that China stopped buying America’s so-called recyclables because we were shipping too much garbage the Chinese couldn’t turn into anything else. But it’s not as if that’s the only country in the world that knows how to turn paper into more paper, plastic into more plastic, and so on.

“You have serious glass people in Western Pennsylvania,” Mr. Rarig said. “You’d be able to find homes for it.”

Pennsylvania has three mills that take chewed-up empties and turn them into new glass products. CAP Glass in Mount Pleasant crushes more than 200,000 tons of the stuff each year, shipping it by rail and truck around the country. 

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But that’s another thing wrong with the city’s single-stream system. The glass is inevitably smashed in public works trucks before it even arrives at the recycling center, making the glass both hard to retrieve and contaminating the paper and plastic. In contrast, Harrisburg has 10 drop-off locations within its 12 square miles dedicated to recycling glass alone, and last year it pulled in 199 tons of bottles and jars. 

Glass isn’t hard to recycle — when it’s all glass. On Sunday, Threadbare Cider House and Meadery on the North Side hosted a drop-off event and 2,360 pounds of glass arrived, with the donors — 95 of them — getting a cool glass of cider in return. The Pennsylvania Resources Council and Allegheny Cleanways handled the pickup chores and CAP Glass reaped the bounty.

The city getting thousands of plastic bags out of its pickup system is a start — “zero waste is a journey,” city recycling supervisor Teresa Bradley says — but getting hundreds of tons of broken glass out of the mix should be the next goal. It’s not recyclable if it can’t be sold, and there’s no sense putting the populace through a kumbaya pantomime if there’s no good result. Permanent glass drop-off sites, convenient to everyone, should not be unique to Harrisburg.

Speaking of plastic bags, though, all nine members of Pittsburgh City Council made an ironic move last week: They signed a letter to Gov. Tom Wolf, and to state legislators of Allegheny County, opposing a state budget amendment that would block a proposal to ban Philadelphia stores from using plastic bags.

The Republicans running America’s Largest Full-Time State Legislature don’t much like Philadelphia. I get that. I’m also aware that the biggest fear among some modern conservatives is that they might inadvertently conserve something. Thus risking the entire $34 billion budget deal just to ensure Philadelphians see plastic tumbleweeds on every street corner is no great surprise.

But our city council needs to be careful about banning plastic bags. That’s where most Pittsburghers put their recyclables.

Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or Twitter @brotheroneill

First Published: July 1, 2019, 9:00 a.m.
Updated: July 1, 2019, 9:56 a.m.

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Mayor Bill Peduto wants to find about $500,000 in the 2020 city budget to purchase 20,000 more recycling bins for Pittsburgh residents.  (Andrew Stein/Post-Gazette)
Andrew Stein/Post-Gazette
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