The Recycling Bottleneck Everybody's doing it. But where do all those cans and bottles go from here?

By BRUCE VAN VOORST WASHINGTON

IT'S A SELF-CONGRATULATORY RITUAL, repeated every day, every week, all over America. Separate the clear glass bottles from the green and amber ones. Place the newsprint in one basket, mixed white paper in another, the reams of used computer paper in a third. Haul the whole lot out to the curb. There. You've just done your bit for humanity: you've recycled. It's Miller time.

Not so fast.

To be sure, recycling is in vogue. Citizen participation is at an all-time high; curbside collection programs have exploded from 600 in 1989 to 4,000 today. But the dirty secret, and it's not a little one, is that major quantities of the material being collected never actually get recycled. More than 10,000 tons of old newspapers have piled up in waterfront warehouses in New Jersey, and a congressional committee has heard testimony that the nationwide figure tops 100 million tons. At the Pentagon, employees looking out over the parking lot can watch paper they've carefully segregated in the office being tossed into a single Dumpster, destined for an incinerator. The used-glass market has been so soft that Waste Management of Seattle, Inc. is stuck with a mini-mountain of 6,000 tons of bottles from neighborhood collections. In the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, haulers have run out of storage space and are incinerating some recyclable goods. "It's like having your suitcase all packed with no place to go," laments Amy Perry, solid-waste program director for the nonprofit Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group.

The problem is that the economics of recycling are out of whack. Enthusiasm for collecting recyclables has raced ahead of the capacity in many areas to process and market them. Right now, says Victor Bell, a veteran Rhode Island recycling expert, "the market can't keep up with the recycling binge." In recent years many states and municipalities have passed laws mandating the collection of newspapers, plastics, glass and paper. But arranging for processing -- and finding a profit in it -- has proved tricky. As trucks loaded with recyclable materials arrive at processors, backlogs develop. Worse, the glut has depressed already soft prices for used paper and plastics.

"Long term, our members recognize that if you're not in recycling, you'll be out of business in 10 years," says Allen Blakey, public relations director for the National Solid Wastes Management Association, the nation's trash collectors. Yet government-mandated recycling laws, by requiring haulers in some instances to pick up unmarketable items, are actually forcing some into bankruptcy. The danger in this short-term failure of recyclonomics, warns William Rathje, author of the recently published book Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage, "is that, in the interim, recycling enthusiasts will become disillusioned at reports of difficulties."

If there's money in trash, entrepreneurs will find it. And in many instances they have. Processors are turning a profit by recycling high-value steel and aluminum cans and, in general, paper cartons and cardboard. A Shearson Lehman analysis concludes that recycling is now attracting "the attention of the solid waste industry investor." In two areas in particular, innovative ideas are cropping up:

NEWSPRINT

Paper, especially newspaper, is the biggest component of landfills -- about 40%. Despite being the most widely recycled material, newsprint is not at all easy to process or market. "Often we can't give the stuff away," says James Harvey, owner of E.L. Harvey & Sons, Inc., a Westboro, Massachusetts, hauler. Facilities to remove ink from newsprint -- a necessary step before it can be pulped to make new paper -- are enormously expensive. To justify the investment, recyclers need the sort of arrangement just announced between the city of Houston and Champion Recycling Corp. In return for building an $85 million de-inking plant, Champion Recycling, a subsidiary of Champion International Corp., a leading paper manufacturer, was assured of getting the city's entire collection of old newspapers and magazines. "Our customers not only want to buy recycled materials; they are insisting on it," says Champion International president Andrew Sigler. "This is a market-driven operation that's great for Houston and gives us the assured supply we need for economic efficiency."

PLASTICS

Though plastics constitute 8.3% of all municipal solid wastes and are proliferating faster than any other material, less than 2% of waste plastic gets recycled. Largely this is because it is cumbersome and expensive to separate the seven basic types and relatively cheap simply to manufacture virgin plastics. Wellman Inc., of Shrewsbury, New Jersey, has emerged as a leader in recycling so-called PET bottles, the most common clear plastic containers for liquid, turning discarded ones into furniture textiles, tennis * balls, electrical equipment and yarn for polyester carpet. The Coca-Cola Co. services major markets nationwide with two-liter bottles made of 25% recycled PET plastic.

"It will always cost you money to get rid of garbage," asserts Marcia Bystryn, a recycling official in New York City. The trick is to encourage behavior that minimizes the costs, allocates them as equitably as possible and creates productive economic activity wherever possible. In large measure, the present disequilibrium in recycling is the result of policies that work at cross-purposes with those goals and with one another. Environmentalists argue -- correctly -- that recycled materials suffer in the marketplace against virgin materials because of government subsidies. Newsprint producers, for instance, are indirectly subsidized through public-area logging and logging access roads. The depletion allowance for petroleum subsidizes producers of oil-based plastics. "If these costs are taken into consideration," contends Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, "recycling looks economically a lot more competitive."

Even with such disadvantages, there are profitable recycling operations. Three years ago, J.J. Hoyt, recycling manager at the U.S. Naval Base in Norfolk, Virginia, took over a solid-waste disposal program that had been costing taxpayers $1 million a year. A shrewd businessman, Hoyt was sensitive to hauling managers' needs and negotiated lucrative deals. Now, says one Navy officer, "not a tin can or newspaper falls to the ground on base." This year Hoyt's program is earning close to $800,000. "The key is knowing the market," he says.

New York City's experience is decidedly more mixed. Its primary landfill, Fresh Kills on Staten Island, already covering 2,200 acres and rising to a height of 155 ft., is rapidly filling up. And the city, which recycles only about 6% of its waste, must turn increasingly to recycling or incineration. A program launched in 1989 to recycle 25% of the city's daily output of 26,000 tons of solid waste has fallen short. Only 29 of the city's 59 community board districts participate in the program. Although Mayor David Dinkins hopes to expand this to 39 by the end of the year, officials admit that recycling faces heavy slogging. "Recycling began with a real naive sort of optimism," says Bystryn. "I think it is important to come back somewhere near to reality." The Dinkins administration succeeded against intense environmentalist opposition in enacting a waste-disposal plan that includes construction of an incinerator in Brooklyn.

Critics of recycling in the U.S. claim that it weakens the economy, but Germany, one of the world's strongest economies, is showing that isn't necessarily so. Since last December, manufacturers and retail stores in Germany have been required to take back such transport packing materials as cardboard boxes and Styrofoam. This spring the requirement was extended to "secondary packaging" such as cardboard boxes for toothpaste or deodorants. By next year, consumers will be able to return sales packaging -- from yogurt cups to meat wrappers -- to the point of purchase for disposal. In mid-1995 German manufacturers will be responsible for collecting 80% of their packaging waste. Augmenting the government's program is the Duales System Deutschland, a private-industry-initiative recycling program that has already distributed collection bins to more than half of Germany's 80 million people and expects to reach virtually 100% before the end of the year.

Japan's recycling rate is almost double that of the U.S. -- 40% of municipal solid waste, vs. 17%. But the Japanese program shares some of the problems familiar to American recyclers. Milk cartons, one of the favorite recycling items, are piling up high in warehouses. Like America, says Hiroshi Takatsuki, a professor at Kyoto University, "Japan emphasized collection before coming up with an appropriate infrastructure for reuse."

Americans dispose of far and away more waste than anybody else on the planet. The EPA estimates the annual cost of this disposal at more than $30 billion, a figure rising 17% a year and predicted to reach $75 billion by the end of the century. On the other hand, despite the dire predictions of some environmentalists, disposal is less of a problem than in many other countries. There are still plenty of landfills available, and they will continue to play an important role. So will new incinerators, despite their many environmental shortcomings. For America to catch up in recycling, experts call for action in four areas:

ECONOMICS

Recycled materials deserve at least the same tax and subsidy treatment that is provided for virgin materials -- especially paper and plastics. Potential investors in recycling equipment and research should be encouraged with tax incentives.

PACKAGING

About 39% of the paper and paperboard going into landfills and incinerators comes from packaging. The German example shows how that number can be dramatically reduced. Lever Bros., for instance, manufactures a superconcentrated powder laundry detergent in small boxes, saving the equivalent of 13 million plastic bottles a year. L & F Products sells its Lysol brand and other liquid cleaners in Smart Packs that take up 65% less landfill space than the jet-spray containers they are designed to refill. Imperial Chemical Industries of London has developed a plastic, soon to be distributed in the U.S., that biodegrades with or without exposure to air and sunlight.

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT

Recycling is a new frontier for technical innovation. New processes, for instance, are needed to remove contaminants. Sorted solid wastes often include contaminants that gum up recycling systems, such as clear plastic tape on envelopes or sticky yellow Post-its on office paper. A single ceramic cap from a bottle of the Dutch-brewed Grolsch beer can contaminate an entire batch of green glass. "We haven't begun to tap the potential for technical innovation in recycling," says Lloyd Leonard, legislative director for the League of Women Voters.

LEGISLATION

The New Jersey mandatory recycling law -- achieving 34% recycling, or double the national average -- demonstrates the virtues of a legal prescript. Minimum-content laws such as those in Oregon and California, mandating the use of recycled materials in new products, have proved effective. So have "pay by bag laws" that increase the price tag for garbage removal according to volume. Last fall the White House issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to give preference to recycled materials when purchasing products. But that's just a start. "Unless the government mandates more use of recycled material in products," warns Dan Weiss of the Sierra Club, "recycling will be discredited."

For all its promises, recycling remains only part of the world's waste- disposal solution. Despite the enormous energy and enthusiasm with which Americans and others collect recyclable products, the real breakthrough can come only when similar effort is expended on reducing waste in the first place and in enticing more markets to absorb recycled materials.

With reporting by Rhea Schoenthal/Bonn and Jane Van Tassel/New York