Maybe you think recycling is a drag – putting bottles and cans in one container, newspapers in another, and putting them out on a different night than your regular trash. Or maybe you feel good about doing that, knowing you are doing your bit to save the planet.

Whichever group you’re in, you might be surprised to know municipal recycling across the country is facing more challenges than ever before, and some cities and towns have stopped doing it.

However, it’s the law in New Jersey so there are no plans to end collections here.

The state Legislature convened a committee this summer to find ways to develop new markets for recycled goods and cut the costs of repurposing discarded plastic, paper, metals and glass.

The first challenge municipalities faced fifty years ago was getting people to think about recycling beverage containers and newspapers, and they were never a hundred percent successful. Programs started slowly but by 2010, 75 percent of cities had recycling programs. And most were profiting at least a little from selling recyclable scrap.

But expectations that there would someday be a huge market for recycled materials were unrealized. Consumers around the world didn’t seem to care whether the products they used were made from recycled materials or not.

It’s expensive to collect, sort, clean, reshape and ship old glass, metal, plastic and paper to companies willing to buy the material in fibers, sheets, and pellets for new uses. Costs kept growing and the market didn’t grow, so now recycling is a money-losing proposition.

Eighteen months ago China, which accepted most US recyclables, decided to stop taking them. Too much was contaminated and unusable. Contamination comes from such everyday things as grease soaked into pizza boxes, food scraps and milk residue in glass and plastic containers, and even diapers mixed in with other plastics. Sometimes dyes or chemicals used to create the original material makes it unsuitable for re-use, and thin plastic bags always jam up sorting machines.

Vietnam, Indonesia and some other countries accept material from the U.S. but they haven’t yet developed a healthy market for end products. Recycled glass and aluminum are still sought-after commodities, but paper and plastic don’t have as many willing buyers.

Clear glass has more value than colored glass, cardboard is easier to repurpose than newspaper, but plastic is the stuff no one seems to want and the stuff most likely to last forever in landfills. That’s why single-use plastics are being banned in so many places.

Most towns have strict rules about what can be collected for recycling, but sometimes people get a little overeager to recycle every scrap containing metal, glass or plastic without realizing the limits. Ruth Abbe, president of Zero Waste USA, has called that “wishcycling.”

“We wish it was recyclable, so we recycle it anyway, even if it’s just going to end up a landfill,” she said.

Memphis International Airport still collects recyclables but now sends every bit of it to a landfill. Deltona, Florida, realized its recycling program was costing too much, so they simply suspended it. Philadelphia studied neighborhoods to see which were the most compliant with the rules, and sends stuff from other areas directly to an incinerator to generate energy for the city.

Since in New Jersey, no municipality can simply stop recycling or make major changes to regulations, you need to keep recycling. Next week, I’ll tell you what happens to your recyclable trash and how you can make it cost less for your town to collect it and send it off to find new uses.

A former assemblywoman from Jersey City, Joan Quigley is the president and CEO of North Hudson Community Action Corp.

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