It’s a money-saving move for the company, which processes commercial waste, construction debris, and household waste collected from a variety of different streams, including its own carting company, Maggio’s, other private carting companies that service the East End, and waste collected at Southampton and East Hampton town transfer stations from residents who choose to haul their own trash.

What they are picking through is mainly commercial waste, but several of the carting companies that pick up trash from homeowners on the East End take it to Paumanok. Most of those haulers do not offer separate recycling collection. Instead, they tell customers to put recyclables in the same trash container they roll out to the curb once a week. They say, or imply, that the recyclable materials will be picked out later and recycled.

That’s technically true. But the vast majority of that material is never recovered. It ends up in a landfill.

It is a cold, hard fact. There are several reasons, and the blame does not belong to any one company or entity, or official or government body.

Understanding why much of the material we consider recyclable does not, in fact, get recycled requires a deeper look at the recycling and waste management industries, both at the local level and internationally. Meanwhile, recent changes to the world recycling markets have created what industry insiders call a “paradigm shift” when it comes to recycling as we know it—and it’s not a shift in favor of more recycling.

Haul It Away

For up to 12 hours a day, 363 days a year—the exceptions being Christmas and New Year’s Day—large dump trucks bearing the names of many of the local private carting companies pull in and out of the facility on Old Dock Road in Yaphank, a stone’s throw from several other waste transfer stations. The pungent smell of solid waste is powerful enough to seep through car windows on the drive down Horseblock Road to the facility.

Flatbed trucks pull in and out all day long, coming in empty, leaving with the giant black cubes of garbage. They may have originally come to deliver some kind of material to Long Island, a region that consumes far more than it produces, and are looking to make money on a back-haul to wherever they came from.

Recyclables that have high value, and are easy to extract from the waste stream, are pulled out. Smaller, less valuable items don’t make it—in fact, they aren’t even targeted.

There are no landfills on Long Island anymore, so the trucks take the garbage to landfills out of state.

What happens at Paumanok happens at many other facilities in Suffolk County, with predictable results. Recyclables that have high value, and are easy to extract from the waste stream, are pulled out. Smaller, less valuable items don’t make it—in fact, they aren’t even targeted.

Corrugated cardboard, as in the voluminous numbers of Amazon boxes? Highly valued, often snagged and recycled. Construction debris? It has enough value to justify pulling it out of the commercial waste flow.

But plastic water bottles? Empty vegetable cans? Glass? Almost never.

Cardboard collected for recycling.

Take Your Pick

East Hampton and Southampton Towns are unique when it comes to waste disposal and recycling, because, unlike many other townships, they do not offer municipal curbside pickup.

Residents in those towns have, essentially, two choices: haul refuse to one of the town transfer stations, or hire a private carting company to pick up their garbage on a weekly basis at the curb. Which option they choose has a great impact on the efficacy of their recycling efforts.

In Southampton Town, residents must dispose of their household waste using the town’s “green bags,” which are sold at various locations throughout the town--large bags cost $3.10 each; recyclables can be tossed into separate large containers at the town transfer station, free of charge. Residents who produce less trash by diligently separating recyclables—and by composting, and generally reducing their waste production—will save money by buying fewer green bags.

Roughly 15 percent of Southampton Town residents are self-haulers.

In East Hampton Town, recyclables are disposed of in the same way, but instead of purchasing green bags, residents pay a flat fee per year, $115, for a sticker for their car (cheaper for additional vehicles, or for senior citizens), or $20 per trip, which allows them to dump an unlimited volume of trash and recyclables.

But self-haulers are the exception. Southampton Town’s director of municipal public works, Christine Fetten, estimates that only 15 percent of Southampton Town residents take their refuse to the transfer stations—the rest of the town residents hire a private carting company to take away their trash and recyclables.

East Hampton Town officials said it was difficult to estimate what percentage of its population self-hauls and what percentage uses a private company for curbside pick-up. The town, with a population of 22,000, orders 18,000 stickers each year, but some people purchase two, one for each car.

There is one common thread with all the private carting companies, however: They all assure would-be customers that their recyclables will be recycled, even if they are thrown away in the same container as regular household trash and picked up in the same truck.

There are numerous private carting companies that serve the East End, but the main players are Montauk-based Mickey’s Carting, which primarily serves East Hampton Town; S&P Carting, based in Water Mill; Winters Brothers/East End Sanitation, with its local operations in Quogue; Sunrise Sanitation of Westhampton Beach; and Go-Green Sanitation and Emil Norsic and Sons, both of Southampton.

As a group, they vary in terms of services they offer when it comes to recycling, how they process recyclable materials, and where they send them. S&P and Winters Brothers, for example, do offer separate curbside recycling pick-up, unlike the other companies, although not all of their customers take advantage of that service.

And while many of those companies send their waste to Paumanok, not all of them do. Winters Brothers operates its own trash sorting facilities, while GoGreen uses Peconic Recycling and Transfer Corporation, located in Cutchogue, which is a newer facility that has more updated machinery to help extract more recyclables from the waste stream.

There is one common thread with all the private carting companies, however: They all assure would-be customers that their recyclables will be recycled, even if they are thrown away in the same container as regular household trash and picked up in the same truck.

If this sounds too good to be true, it often is.

No Markets, No Recycling

A first key to understanding why this happens lies in the fact that recyclable materials are commodities, and, like any other commodities, the price for them can vary wildly. It’s not always a matter of whether or not facilities like Paumanok and PRTC have the ability to pull recyclables from the waste stream—rather, it’s a question of whether it’s worth their while, from a business standpoint, to do so.

The price that recycled plastic will fetch on the open market, for example, depends on the price of oil, because crude oil is used to manufacture plastic. When oil prices are low, it is cheaper to produce virgin plastic than it is to make new material from recycled plastic—and thus the price for recycled plastic bottoms out.

There also is great variation in the types of plastic used in everyday products: some have high value (clear or white plastic milk jugs and detergent jugs, for instance) while some have little or no value (thin-film plastic or plastic water bottles).