<B>Haulers Settle In Recycling Inquiry</B>

Four private waste haulers accused of throwing away curbside recyclables have reached a settlement with the state attorney general's office, which had been investigating the companies after customers complained that they weren't recycling.

Clifton Park-based County Waste & Recycling Inc. and Casella Waste Systems, Rutland, Vt., agreed to refund $100,000 to residential customers and municipalities allegedly deceived by the firms.

The companies also agreed to distribute recycling guidelines to customers and to train employees on recycling.

And they vowed to recycle.

None of the four firms -- which pick up garbage in eight counties, including Albany, Schenectady, Rensselaer and Saratoga -- admitted any wrongdoing. But the attorney general's office says that wasn't the point.

"The key thing here was to make sure that these materials get recycled," said Judith Enck, a policy adviser in Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's Environmental Protection Bureau. "We were looking for companies to comply with recycling laws."

The agreements were the result of a 16-month investigation that began in the summer of 1999, when a (Albany) Times Union article reported that some local waste haulers were tossing bottles, cans and paper from recycling bins into the back of a garbage truck en route to the dump.

Since then, there has been increasing evidence that recycling in New York -- mandated in 1988 -- has faltered because of fickle markets for recycled materials and little enforcement. State recycling law only requires recyclables to be separated when markets exist for their resale.

"This settlement is the first sign of enforcement that we have seen that looks as if it will really work," said Sharon Fisher, a board member for the New York State Association for Reduction, Reuse and Recycling Inc. and the recycling coordinator for the town of Bethlehem.

Others referred to the agreements as "gentlemen's warnings," meaning that although they did not carry substantial financial penalties, the act itself could send a message throughout the industry that someone is keeping tabs on recycling.

"Just the fact that Big Brother is watching should keep everybody honest," said Joe Miranda, recycling coordinator for Saratoga County, where County Waste & Recycling is one of the largest private haulers.

But the settlements are only the latest in a string of actions to come out of the attorney general's office on behalf of recycling. In May, a survey by Spitzer's office found that two-thirds of municipalities received complaints about waste haulers breaking recycling laws, but only one-fifth were doing anything about it. A month later, Spitzer sued the city of Amsterdam for abandoning recycling altogether because of the cost. Along with the settlements, the office lifted the court action against the city which reinstated recycling in November.

"The nature of our enforcement not only reaches private companies, but government entities. We will continue to investigate and monitor recycling," Spitzer said in a telephone interview Friday.

The state's most recent solid waste numbers -- which have not been officially released -- show that recycling is achieving what it was meant to do when it became law in the late 1980s: diverting waste from landfills. In 1999, municipalities in New York handled 5.9 percent more trash than a year previous, but the amount going to landfills declined slightly -- by 3 percent.

Recycling itself also is gaining. Miranda said he has seen a 7 percent increase in recyclables in Saratoga County, the first increase in five years. And statewide, recycling jumped 12.7 percent from 1998 to 1999, but most of that increase came from tons of unidentified materials being recycled in New York City, according to Richard Morse, director of the state Assembly's Legislative Commission on Solid Waste.

But while the recent statistics are encouraging, in some places there are signs that the recycling system is breaking down. "In the middle of that growing number, there are places like Amsterdam who can't find markets, and trucks mixing recyclables with trash," said Morse.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation and lawmakers are reconsidering the 1988 law that requires municipalities to enforce recycling in an era where the practice has increasingly been taken over by private companies. As part of that effort, in July Gov. George Pataki signed into law a bill that could provide as much as $5 million to local governments to strengthen their recycling programs.

"We have had a real change in the landscape since the solid waste management act was passed," said Carl Johnson, a deputy Environmental Conservation Commissioner. "We are looking at it to figure out how to operate in a market environment."

As part of the state's investigation, five investigators armed with cameras were deployed to homes that had called in a legitimate complaint. In many cases, investigators witnessed haulers mixing source-separated recyclables with garbage in violation of state recycling law.

But this practice -- known as commingling -- is not clearly illegal in the reading of some local statutes, according to Robert Rosenthal, an assistant state attorney general. A bill drafted by the attorney general's office was introduced into the Assembly in March, clearly making commingling and the dumping of plastic, glass and paper illegal.

"There definitely seems to be a hole in state law on this issue, whether state law prohibits commingling," Rosenthal said. "Ultimately, what we had to look at was whether these companies were misrepresenting recycling."

County Waste & Recycling, one of the largest haulers locally, will pay $2,500 to the towns of Malta and Stillwater and $5,000 to Clifton Park to fund hazardous waste collection programs as part of its agreement.

The company claimed that if state investigators saw recyclables going into the truck, it was because customers had sorted the material improperly.

"Much of recycling is dependent on homeowners recycling. Maybe recyclables were picked up on a limited number of occasions because they were not properly source-separated," said Dean Sommer, the lawyer representing the trash hauler in the settlement.

Last year, Darcy Baumbach was one of many to e-mail the Times Union about her experience. She wrote about her trash hauler at the time, County Waste & Recycling: "I watched every Friday while the hauler first dumped my recyclables and then my trash into the same truck. I watched the truck then do the same thing to all the other houses I could see."

A year later, after switching to another company, she has hired County Waste again and has seen an improvement. "They are picking up the recyclables," she said Friday. Source: Times Union Albany, NY