Last summer's empty containers for bleach, spring water, dish detergent, antifreeze, baby wipes, cat litter and motor oil have come back to New York streets this fall as traffic barricades. Con Edison has ordered 25,000, all white. The city has bought 3,200 sets of legs made from fabric-softener bottles, all light blue.
The barricades, made by Utility Plastic Recycling in East New York, Brooklyn, use only a small part of the 600 tons of plastic, glass and metal the city recycles every day, but they are a visible sign that the city's recycling program is finding new uses for millions of residential and commercial castaways.
In the Hunts Point section of the Bronx, 15 million clear plastic two-liter soft drink bottles, recycled into plastic lumber, will be used to build a 607-ton fishing pier, complete with gazebos and benches, at Tiffany Street on the East River. The old wooden pier is being demolished. The new one, to be finished by June, will not appeal to the tiny marine organisms that eat their way through wooden pilings.
Beyond creating new ways to use old materials, recycling is also creating jobs. In Manhattan's office paper forest, the World Trade Center this year is yielding 3,000 tons of used paper, the equivalent of 50,000 trees. A crew of 20 workers, many of them homeless or formerly homeless, sorts it into nine different grades before it goes out by the truckload.
"We are mining a resource very few cities have," said Councilman Stanley E. Michels, the Manhattan Democrat who is chairman of the City Council's Committee on Environmental Protection. "We have probably the best garbage in the world -- huge quantities of office paper, for instance -- "and more of it than anyone else."
While the collection of recyclables is the most visible and expensive part of the city's program, city officials say it is the reuse of these items that justifies the effort and may someday underwrite its cost, now $77 million a year to pick up and process newspapers, glass, foil and plastic from homes, schools, hospitals and housing projects.
In fact, New York's growing supplies of materials, combined with strong foreign and domestic markets, have spurred the establishment and expansion of so many private processing plants that the city, which contracts with 14 different companies, has all but abandoned a plan to build five city-owned plants. Now, only one is planned, for Staten Island, and its size has been scaled back drastically.
The question mark for the private sector is how strongly City Hall will back the collection program, and what role the city will play in encouraging new markets by purchasing recycled material.
New York already buys more than $11 million a year in recycled goods, and in January the city will follow Federal guidelines by requiring 20 percent of the content of office paper to have been recycled (not merely unused scraps). Recycled goods are also given a price advantage in competitive bidding, 10 percent for paper goods and 5 percent for other products with a recycled content.
"Whether it's chicken and egg or smoke and mirrors, you have to convince industry that if they make the product, someone will buy it," said Ivan Braun, former director of environmental purchasing for the city's Department of General Services. "On the other hand, you can't buy it unless someone makes it. To convince industry to invest dollars into a new venture, you have to send the message 'We want it.' "
The Giuliani administration does want to develop markets, said Peter J. Powers, the Deputy Mayor for Operations. "The city makes $7.3 billion in purchases. To the extent we can, we are putting our priority on it," he said.
New York state's Office of Recycling Market Development, the first of its kind in the nation, has used $21 million in state financing to attract $253 million in private capital for 21 recycling businesses since 1988. These have created 889 jobs. Utility Plastics was one of these new companies.
William Ferretti, director of that office, is also co-chairman of a national project of the National Recycling Coalition, the Federal Environmental Protection Agency and Clean Washington Center to start trading recyclables at the Chicago Board of Trade by next summer.
"Buyers and sellers will have greater certainty about the availability, quality and true value of those materials," Mr. Ferretti said. "Right now, it's very difficult for sellers like the city, as well as private sellers, to identify the true value of the materials they're making available to sell."
The biggest fear of buyers, he said, "is that they can't get enough supply."
The Supply Building Demand And Confidence
Entrepreneurs who buy, sell, and use recyclables say stable supplies of these materials are essential. But the supplies depend on the willingness of the public to make the effort to separate the foil, the plastic, the glass and the paper that they would otherwise toss in the trash can.
Some in the recycling business suggest that New York has a credibility problem with its program, caused partly by the fact that the Sanitation Department trucks that pick up regular garbage also pick up recyclables.
"People see the compactor truck," said Nancy Wolf, director of special projects for the Environmental Action Coalition. "They think it goes to landfills."
Sooner or later, said Joseph Vecchio, co-owner of Star Recycling and BQE Services in Brooklyn, people end up asking him: Isn't it true that all this stuff just goes to the dump?
"It's real!" Mr. Vecchio shouted over the roar of trucks and machinery. "When I read articles that say recycling is not real, I get enraged. Why would I throw away something I can sell for $50 a ton to $190 a ton?"
At one side of his building under the Kosciusko Bridge in Brooklyn was a mountain of blue recycling bags. On another side were bales of aluminum cans, plastic jugs and bottles, foil, cardboard and office paper. He handles commercial waste and figures that roughly a third of New York's recyclable cans and bottles end up here.
At the moment, a buyer wants old polystyrene, which can be made into videotape cartridges. Another wants clean shrink wrap, which can be reused to make plastic containers. The problem for Mr. Vecchio is how to collect enough, cheaply enough.
Each week he ships out more than 1,500 tons of cardboard. Office paper is running 300 tons a week. Aluminum cans. Steel cans. Aluminum foil. Everything is baled. Everything is sold but the blue plastic recycling bags. They are too dirty, Mr. Vecchio said.
For people like Mr. Vecchio, one of the biggest challenges in recycling is dealing with plastic. While there are many kinds of plastic, they can contaminate each other if mixed.
Also, many plastics can be recycled only once because manufacturing processes change their structure. Plastic that is recycled to make fibers for clothing or rugs, for example, will deteriorate when used again.
Steel, glass and aluminum, on the other hand, can be recycled again and again. In New York, however, the glass is not recycled into glass because most of it breaks in the sanitation trucks before it can be sorted. Instead, recycling companies grind the mixed glass back into sand or sell it for use in asphalt.
New contracts with the city Department of Transportation require that glass be used in asphalt, and the city is hoping to increase the market for glass from 40,000 tons a year to 75,000 tons a year.
Jobs Recycling Finds Value in Lives, Too
In addition to the money the city receives for the recycled products, several studies have said the program also can help the city create jobs. One study, done last winter by the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College, reported that New York already had about 3,000 establishments in industries related to solid-waste management, reuse and repair, and recycling. Those businesses account for nearly 34,000 jobs and a payroll of over $1 billion.
If the city instituted an intensive recycling system like the one it has been running as an experiment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, the study asserted, enough raw materials could be produced to spur businesses to create 20,392 more jobs.
Another study, conducted last year by Appleseed, an economic development consulting concern, said new recycling businesses could create up to 4,000 jobs, largely in neighborhoods bypassed by the boom of the 1980's: Hunts Point in the Bronx, Red Hook and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, and the northwest shore of Staten Island.
The Grand Central Partnership, a business improvement district, has developed an employment program for the homeless to sort vast quantities of paper, from cardboard to shredded documents, at the World Trade Center. The program is run through a contract with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the building.
The World Trade Center has been recycling for 20 years but stepped up the effort in 1991, placing recycling containers at workstations throughout the building. Charles J. Maikish, director of the World Trade Center, said the building recycles 38 percent of its trash and saves $500,000 a year in trash collection costs.
In addition to the paper, it recycles 1,000 tons of plastic, glass, and metals, and another 600,000 aluminum cans a year. Barbara Iannacone-Ramos, who coordinates the program, said recycling sales now bring in $150,000 a year, and the highest bids for a new contract for 1995 average $800,000 a year.
"We would like to expand this to other buildings," said Thomas Rigney, director of research and development for the Grand Central Partnership. Some workers have gone to better-paying jobs. Others found a place to live.
Blondell Welles said she was homeless when she started work last year, and she now lives in an apartment in the South Bronx. It takes her anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour to sort each giant bin, depending on how many kinds of paper she encounters. "I love it," she said.
"What's happening here," said Mr. Maikish, "is recovering the valuables," and he was talking about more than just the paper.
The Alternative The Great Mound At Fresh Kills?
What isn't recovered, whether it is paper, food scraps, cardboard boxes or discarded appliances, has only one place to go: the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Because New Yorkers do not pay directly for residential garbage pickup and because the city owns what has been seen to be a free landfill, Fresh Kills has grown to 25 times the size of the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt and rivals the Great Wall of China as the largest man-made object in the world.
The garbage arrives by barge, day and night, and when it is dark, the compactors work by floodlight. From 4 P.M. Saturday to midnight Sunday there is a 32-hour pause, but "we never really end," said John J. Doherty, the Sanitation Commissioner, who lived on Staten Island as a child and has watched the landfill expand.
The items that make up this colossus are nothing extraordinary: paper plates, a baby blanket, a pink flowerpot, a white laundry basket, a Roy Rogers french fry carton. Across the expressway is a mall with the usual theaters and shops, selling the very items that end up in the landfill.
Fresh Kills has 90 million tons of air space, Mr. Doherty observed. "We're bringing 13,000 tons a day. It could probably last 22 years at that rate. The question is, will we be able to recycle more? We could last longer."
SORTING IT OUT Do's and Don'ts of Recycling
There are many misconceptions about what can be recycled in New York City, officials say. Here are guidelines from the Sanitation Department for citywide residential recycling.
PAPER: You can recycle newspapers, magazines, catalogues, telephone books and flattened corrugated cardboard boxes. These must be tied with sturdy twine into bundles no more than 18 inches high and placed next to your recycling container.
You can't recycle hardback or paperback books, cereal boxes, shoe boxes, shirt cardboards, gift boxes (or anything else made of smooth gray cardboard), white paper, envelopes or junk mail.
GLASS, METAL, FOIL: You can recycle metal cans (including tuna, soup and pet food cans), glass bottles, glass jars, aluminum foil, pie pans and take-out tins. They should be rinsed clean.
You can't recycle aerosol cans or pump sprays, paint cans or chemical containers, ceramics, light bulbs or mirrors.
PLASTIC: You can recycle containers for plastic detergent, shampoo, soda, juice or milk, and water bottles and jugs. Labels are O.K., but nonplastic parts must be removed.
You can't recycle yogurt cups, the plastic or cardboard lids of take-out tins, anything made of polystyrene (like coffee cups or egg cartons), plastic-coated paper (like milk cartons or candy wrappers), plastic bags (including dry cleaning bags and sandwich wrap), plastic plates, cups or bowls, or appliances like clocks, radios and hair dryers.
