In just three years, the recycling world has changed. Originally it told tens of thousands of recyclers that they could almost indiscriminately toss plastic, paper, cans and bottles in their Hawaiian blue collection bins. Now, the city pushes a message that they need to be more choosy.
After years of tallying recycling success by tonnage, the whole recycling industry is pushing a new message that a leaner, cleaner stream is better and that, in effect, less is more. “It’s very hard to operate at a profit,” said RDS President Joe Benedetto. “What I’m telling you is, we are not profitable. We understand there’s a cyclical nature to commodities. So we hope to see the pricing come up to where we are profitable.”
Changes in the market and RDS’s current difficulties have raised the specter of whether the city’s popular single-stream recycling program, which began three years ago this month, is sustainable for the long term. “We’re challenged right now,” Roanoke Sustainability Coordinator Nell Boyle acknowledged. “The contamination’s become a real issue.”
Anne Sampson’s kitchen recycling bin reveals her mania. Amid beer bottles, newspapers, cardboard packaging, are sticky notes. She can’t bear to consign even those tiniest bits of paper to the landfill. The Roanoke photographer, 59, grew up when public service announcements shaming “litterbugs” were nearly ubiquitous. That early influence, she said, shaped her fixation on anything that promotes respect for the natural world. Today, that urge it manifests itself by what she puts in that recycling bin in her apartment at the base of Mill Mountain. “There are so many assaults on our environment,” Sampson said. “It feels like, at least you can do this.” She’s been conditioned to an approach to recycling summarized as, “How much of this can I keep out of the landfill?”
A few miles away, in the Edgehill neighborhood, Emily Jarrett, has the same recycling mania. She and her family moved here from Tupelo, Mississippi, in July. Raised by hippie parents, she has not one, but two, city recycling bins. And, especially as her family continues to unpack from an interstate move, some weeks even those aren’t enough. Her bin shows the same symptoms as Sampson’s: Even wadded store receipts land in it. “If it’s so easy, why not?” she asked of recycling. “It’s teaching my children that even small things make a difference.” Sampson and Jarrett are prime examples of people recycling the way advocates taught them to — eagerly rescuing every scrap they can from a landfill that can be saved and reused.