Last week's posting about the reappointment of the Streets Commissioner led to a lot of questions about recycling in Philly. I'm an absolute waste geek, and thought I'd share some info with all of you. I'd also be open to using this thread as a Q&A on recycling issues in general since there's so much to cover, I know I won't get to it all. I'll start off with some of the most frequently asked questions I get:

Where does my recycling go?
Recycling collected in Philly goes to Blue Mountain Recycling,which is located on Grays Ferry in South Philly. Blue Mountain is a state-of-the-art facility and is able to sort single stream recycling- meaning that recyclables can be put out in one bin and separated at the facility.

How well does Philly do in recycling?

Update- Be sure to check out Penn Future's Christine Knapp's feedback in the comments. Maybe the green advocacy community is just gearing up, rather than sitting back...

Bruce Schimmel's CityPaper column this week talks about the green movement of the City, and the kick in the ass the community received when Mike Nutter re-appointed noted recycling anti-advocate, Clarena Tolson:

With Tolson's reappointment as commissioner of Streets, they felt kicked to the curb.

"This is the very antithesis of a new day and a new way," said one advocate. "Tolson stymied every effort to create a viable recycling program," another added. Stunned, and I think humiliated at having been blindsided, no one would speak on the record. Saying instead they needed to speak with "one voice," they found no voice at all.

...

In addition to demanding a "national search" for the "most qualified" candidates in their five-point agenda, the Alliance also had mayoral hopefuls promise "total transparency," by promoting cooperation between the new Streets commissioner and the very groups whom Tolson had shut out.

Basically, the entire environmental/green advocacy community put into their plans during campagin season that this woman needed to be replaced. Nutter endorsed those plans. But, now, for a reason no one can really pinpoint, Tolson has been reappointed. Pretty strange.

I know that in many ways, Tolson will do better work with a little fire under her ass. But, um, so what? Why, when qualified people are being replaced in City Government, because Nutter wants his own team, would a person like this stay?

But, much more important is the question for advocates: Schimmel takes a look at the City's green movement, and basically sees a group that has neutered itself, and has quietly not complained when they obviously just got a stick in their eye.

There is a more charitable description of it all- that they are giving Nutter time to work, etc. That is fine and good, but that certainly isn't how I would do it. It just is not in my nature to let someone give me a kick while I smile and take it. This isn't the green movement asking for a 50 million dollar new program; this is simply asking that someone who was long seen as an adversary of a clean, green city, no longer be holding the keys to the kingdom.

That said, I sort of admire the behavior of the greens here. Just like I admire the good government types who didn't mind when Nutter wholly endorsed Bob Brady as party chair while vaguely talking about reform. Just like I admire the historic preservationists who didn't seem to complain that Nutter, the new Mayor and ex-chair of the Convention Center, was nowhere to be found when historic buildings were being illegally destroyed for Convention Center expansion.

OK, some of the above is sarcasm, but as someone who is way too impatient about everything, I admit there is a virtue
somewhere in there.

At heart, I really do think Mike Nutter can be a great Mayor. But, that won't be if he serves as a dictator- it will be if advocates demand a seat at the table and act as watchdogs. Nutter is not a superhero, and if we want the City to be all that it can be, I don't think it does us any good to simply sit down, keep quiet and hope for the best.

The New York Times has a great story today about how Seattle has turned around its recycling rate from the "cardboard ceiling" it hit in the 1980s, to a national leader.

Seattle now recycles 44 percent of its trash, compared with the national average of around 30 percent, which makes it a major player in big-city waste recovery. Its goal, city waste management officials said, is to reach 60 percent by 2012 and 72 percent by 2025.

Philadelphia's recycling rate is 5%.

Seattle makes it illegal, with consequences, to throwout cardboard and paper in their nonrecycable bins. Now they're expanding that even further. While the environmentally friendly city has always taken yard scraps in a third bin, they now allow food scraps into that mix; soon they'll mandate it.

In today's world of global warming, every day we waste in reducing our carbon footprint is a day we will pay for in the future. (It takes significantly less energy to make things from recycled products than from raw materials.)

Recycling is not something our national or state government handles, the responsibility falls directly to our City Council. It is their inaction that continues to keep us in the dark ages of civic living.

As of Oct. 10, 2007 Philadelphia still lacks real, city-wide recycling.

Earlier this week, while flying back to Philly from Ecuador, I happened upon an article in Newsweek that made me want to force the plane turn the plane around and land in another city. The article, which would probably seem innocuous to most, was in an international copy of Newsweek, and it took a look at the huge export market of recyclables and other junk to China:

Scrap materials are the alpha and the omega of the industrial process. Consumers create scrap when they use goods; factories consume it to create new goods. As China has industrialized, its demand for such materials has soared. According to Stan Lancey, chief economist at the American Forest & Paper Association, U.S. exports of recovered paper to China—where paper was invented around 100 B.C.— soared from 348,000 metric tons in 1994 to nearly 9.1 million metric tons in 2006, worth $1.07 billion. This year, China has bought 58 percent of U.S. scrap-paper exports. Meanwhile, exports of ferrous scrap (it sounds like a Scottish breakfast but means waste iron and steel) rose from 166,000 metric tons in 1998 to 2 million metric tons last year. Junk dealers reaped $1.5 billion selling scrap copper to China in 2006. All told, China's ravenous factories hoovered up 42 percent of U.S. scrap exports in 2006.

So why does this piss me off so much? How about the fact that Philadelphia basically doesn't recycle at all. Not only is Philadelphia not cashing in on this global trend, we are all paying to pollute when people would pay us to conserve.

The market has gotten so hot for junk, that this week, New York City Council passed a bill that severely fines people who "steal" recyclable materials that people and businesses put on the curb. (Apparently though these "thieves" wouldn't touch discarded Mets memorabilia- even the Chinese are smart enough not to buy that crap)

The City Council unanimously passed a bill yesterday that would sharply increase fines for people who steal recyclable material from curbsides — to $2,000 from $100 for a first offense, and $5,000 for each subsequent offense within a year.

Officials say the bill is aimed at organized enterprises that use vehicles, which would be impounded under the new law, adding that the $100 fine had not been large enough to prevent these thefts. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is expected to sign the bill, according to an administration spokesman.

Sanitation officials estimated the city might be losing as much as 15,000 tons of paper a year from Manhattan alone. Based on the city’s current recycling contract, which pays $10 to $30 a ton, that means an annual loss of $150,000 to $300,000.
...

“Our recyclable waste that used to be thought of as worthless is getting so valuable that people now see an economic advantage to stealing it,” said Eric A. Goldstein, a senior lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that helped prepare the city’s original recycling law in 1989. “What this sensible legislation does is create a mechanism that would get at the problem of rustlers of recyclables.”

I'm sure that this is just one example of how the city squanders its many resources, but it's a particularly annoying one. The next time you want to know where we could get money for a robust violence reduction program, for more affordable housing, for better schools, etc. look no further than your filled-with-valuable-recyclables garbage can. I cannot think of a single, solitary, sane answer to the question of why we are paying to throw away stuff that other people would pay us for, other than maybe the crooked-nosed "trash lobby" is exerting some sort of pressure on Council and the Mayor not to act, or these folks are dumber than we all suspected. Can anyone give me one reason, it doesn't even have to be a good one, why the city isn't selling it's trash to the highest bidder?