Page 8 RAIN August/September 1981 The Values of Waste by Rex Burkholder Recycling has changed in many ways since the first stirrings of this country's environmental movement. The acts of flattening a tin can or saving a bottle from the garbage heap are no longer the political statements they once were. In some places recycling has become • part of the routine of modern life; putting out the recyclables along with the cat at night. However, despite all the recycling of household wastes currently being done, only a very small part of the total wastes of our society is being diverted from the landfill or incinerator. And our options are quickly narrowing. Into our landfills are going many scarce and rion-renewablematerials such as aluminum, tin and glass along with the chicken bones and plastic wrap. Why, after ten years of 'progressive' legislation and an increasing public concern with matters environmental, have we still barely begun to recycle on a significant scale? Many of the institutional barriers to recycling present in 1970 are slowly b!:'ing removed and the gross amount of selected materials that are being recycled has increased tremendously since then. Nationwide the amount of glass being recycled has risen from barely one percent of production to between three and four perc.ent in ten years. In Oregon the rate of glass recycling is somewhere between 30 and 40 percent, due mainly to the effects of the mandatory beverage container deposit, or Bottle Bill. Indeed, a material which promises a: high monetary return has no lack of eager developers of recycling programs, for that material. Witness the explosive spread of news drop boxes scattered about metropolitan shopping centers and church lots. • Unfortunately, many common materials used in the home which are recyclable are also bulky to handle, expensive to transport, and ·bring low prices when, and if, they can be sold. Iri an all-too-familiar pattern, large corporations are busy getting into the recycling business. Well-known names like Weyerhauser (paper), Kaiser, Reynolds and Alcoa (aluminum) are selling attractive packages which rely on their large capital resources and extended markets to undercut smaller-scale, local-based recyclers. Yet . .. the large corporations refuse to handle anything that doesn't pay to be recycled. the ominous threat of corporate takeover is compounded by the high-grading nature of this urban mining scene. While the traditional, environmentally-oriented recycling effort attempts to recycle as much as can be recycled, the large corporations refuse to handle anything that doesn't pay to be recycled. The economic loser in this basic schism of values is the ethically motivated recycler, since each additional marginal material that is handled increases costs to the point where any possible competition with the large corporations becomes very unlikely. An added problem is the concentration of markets. For each material there usually are only a few large buyers, and often at great
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