The business of buying waste is suffering.

Bales of paper protected from the elements by a large blue tarp await a buyer while tons of other material — some recyclable, some not — is received, processed and baled just feet away.

The paper market is down currently and — as with many other U.S. business interests — relations with China play a part in the drought, officials say.

Recycling is a business just as much as the fast food or automobile industries, and there’s significant money to be made. It’s just that the money happens to be made by reselling leftovers from items that have already been produced, bought, used and discarded.

But the business of buying waste is suffering, undercutting the old “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Currently, the market would suggest that one person’s trash is merely another person’s slightly-more-valuable trash.

The life of a soda can or a cardboard box doesn’t necessarily end when tossed to the street in a blue or orange plastic bin.

Alachua County is trying to make sure that life doesn’t end in a landfill.

Luckily for North Central Florida residents, 68% of the waste collected in Alachua is recycled, said Patrick Irby, the acting solid waste and resource recovery director for Alachua County. The Florida Legislature enacted a statewide goal of 75% recycling by 2020, so Alachua is on its way to meeting that goal.

The lion’s share of the county’s recycling operation takes place at the Leveda Brown Environmental Park and Transfer Station.

The 27.5-acre campus on Waldo Road, located a few miles north of the Gainesville Regional Airport, processes roughly 1,400 tons of recyclable material per month, said Charles Hobson, manager at the Materials Recovery Facility, where the recycling happens.

That means the facility sees over 33 million pounds of material come through annually, and recycling, Hobson said, is all about volume.

Asked just how good Alachua County residents are at sorting their recycling, he smiles and answers: “Not as good as we would like.”

Still, just 3% of the material that makes its way to the facility from the residential curbside program is contaminated, Hobson said. That efficiency is in large part due to dual-stream recycling.

“[Going] dual-stream saved our recycling,” Irby said.

The reason Alachua County residents have two separate recycling bins is that different materials are processed separately in the dual-stream process. This makes it easier to separate, and later package and sell, recyclable material.

But the market is suffering due to a surplus. That’s because China, which used to buy large amounts of recycling from U.S.-based plants, is becoming more selective with its waste purchases, Hobson said. The shift in Chinese policy stems from its own environmental issues, causing a pause at the idea of paying to import other countries’ waste.

For years, the lack of strict standards led to China taking in “dirty recycling” that looked clean on the outside of a bale, but once it was torn apart, often revealed waste on the inside. China’s “National Sword” policy enforces strict regulations on the quality of the recyclable material it imports. Standards, Hobson said, that many U.S. plants cannot meet.

As a result, paper is down from $70 per ton eight months ago to $30. Similarly, cardboard has fallen from $120 per ton to $60.

Hobson said in the past he shipped out 12 loads of paper — one load is 40,000 pounds — monthly. In April, just a quarter of that was bought by outside companies, which is why so many paper bales are piling up outside of the facility, awaiting a shift in the recycling economy.

Aluminum is much more profitable than paper products, drawing $1,120 per ton in the open market, while glass actually costs money to recycle.

Hobson said the transfer station pays Strategic Materials in Sarasota $20 per ton to recycle the glass it collects. The alternative is paying $48 per ton to take it to a landfill.

A bright orange Nike shoe box, a Natural Light beer case and even a graduation cap stick out of the organized bales and scattered piles of recycling.

“You get a sense of if we weren’t doing this, how much would go to landfills,” Hobson said, gesturing at a mound of overflow material.

Out of a pile of milk jugs and juice containers, Hobson grabs a Swiss Miss hot cocoa canister and outlines the nightmare that its packaging spells for recycling. He gestures to its metal bottom, cardboard body and plastic lid — dual-stream can’t do much in terms of separating different materials when they make up a single item.

Irby says there’s not much responsibility on the manufacturers’ end in terms of recyclability.

“It’s just ‘what can I do to make my product stand out on the shelf?’” he said. “The end result doesn’t matter to them.”

And at times, the end result doesn’t matter to transient residents — students and University of Florida faculty and staff — who may view the area as a stepping stone, rather than home, Irby said.

“Every day somebody moves here who doesn’t know anything about our program,” he said. “So we have to keep the education ongoing. Sometimes it’s just a convenience factor, of ‘I live in an apartment and the dumpster is right outside my unit and the recycling bin is on the entire opposite side of the complex.”’

At the same time, the city of Gainesville, the largest single city served by the transfer station, has made significant strides in its green initiatives, including lofty renewable energy goals and proposed plastic bag and straw bans.

But these moves only go so far.

“Increased awareness, increased consciousness about environmental issues is always helpful,” Irby said. “In terms of the amount of waste being sent to a landfill or recycled, taking care of plastic straws is not gonna do a lot in terms of your tonnage.

“It will in terms of litter, or impact on streams, when you’re talking about plastic bags or Styrofoam, none of those items weigh a lot, so in the metrics that we report to the state it won’t show up in those, but you’ll see it in the community when you look around. We’re dealing with tons and tons and tons of material, it takes a lot of plastic bags or straws to make a bale.”