Is the recycling industry in crisis?

DeAnne Toto

The mainstream press recently has turned its attention to the recycling industry. Articles on the topic have appeared in publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and Mother Jones.

Author of Junkyard Planet, Adam Minter, a frequent speaker at conferences hosted by the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc. (ISRI), also weighed in on the topic in an essay for Bloomberg.

The Washington Post article quotes David Steiner, CEO of Houston-based Waste Management, as saying, “If people feel that recycling is important—and I think they do, increasingly—then we are talking about a nationwide crisis.”

WM’s recycling division saw a loss of nearly $16 million in the first quarter of 2015 and has shut nearly one in 10 of its biggest material recovery facilities (MRFs), the Washington Post reports, adding that Steiner said more of the company’s plants may be closed in the next 12 months.

Among the issues the Washington Post article cites as plaguing the recycling industry are falling commodity prices, contamination and the changing nature of the recycling stream.

The Mother Jones article and Minter’s essay challenge some of these assertions, however.

In his essay, Minter says the “national crisis” that Waste Management’s David Steiner says the U.S. recycling industry is experiencing is not the fault of America’s declining interest in recycling but of the industry’s failure to plan for the changing waste and recycling stream.

Minter points to the decline in newspaper generation as an example, writing, “Unfortunately, the industry failed to change its infrastructure in response to America’s changing reading habits.

While Waste Management’s recycling division may be losing money, not all recycling companies have suffered the same fate, as the article in Mother Jones points out, offering St. Paul, Minnesota, as an example. The city contracts with Eureka Recycling, a nonprofit based in Minneapolis, for its recycling services. Eureka has generated $3.5 million in revenue and 100 new jobs since 2001 and has achieved a 50 percent recycling rate, “an accomplishment it has achieved largely through a program that gives consumers clear instructions about what they can recycle,” Mother Jones reports.

San Francisco’s Recology also gets a nod in the article, which states that while the company isn’t “seeing Wall-Street-level profits, it isn’t experiencing a crisis either.”

While the industry does need to address some underlying issues, a number of recyclers continue to find success, knowing that the fluctuations in commodity pricing are germane to doing business and that quality is rewarded financially.