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?