Recycling is stalling, and the big blue bin is one reason why

“If people feel that recycling is important — and I think they do, increasingly —‚ then we are talking about a nationwide crisis,” said David Steiner, chief executive of Waste Management, the nation’s largest recycler that owns the Elkridge plant and 50 others.

The Houston-based company’s recycling division posted a loss of nearly $16 million in the first quarter of the year. In recent months, it has shut nearly one in 10 of its biggest recycling facilities. An even larger percentage of its plants may go dark in the next 12 months, Steiner said.

The problems of recycling in America are both global and local. A storm of falling oil prices, a strong dollar and a weakened economy in China have sent prices for American recyclables plummeting worldwide.

Environmentalists and other die-hard conservation advocates question if the industry is overstating a cyclical slump.

“If you look at the long-term trends, there is no doubt that the markets for most recyclables have matured and that the economics of recycling, although it varies, has generally been moving in the right direction,” said Eric Goldstein, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council who tracks solid waste and recycling in New York.

“And that’s without factoring in the external impact of landfilling or anything else,” Goldstein added. “There aren’t a lot of people saying, ‘Send more material to landfills.’ “

Still, the numbers speak for themselves: a three-year trend of shrinking profits and rising costs for U.S. municipalities — and little evidence that they are a blip.

Trying to encourage conservation, progressive lawmakers and environmentalists have made matters worse. By pushing to increase recycling rates with bigger and bigger bins — while demanding almost no sorting by consumers — the recycling stream has become increasingly polluted and less valuable, imperiling the economics of the whole system.

“We kind of got everyone thinking that recycling was free,” said Bill Moore, a leading industry consultant on paper recycling who is based in Atlanta. “It’s never really been free, and in fact, it’s getting more expensive.”

It starts with the bin

Many of the problems facing the nation’s recycling industry can be traced to the curbside blue bin — and the old saying that if it sounds too good to be true, it just might be. Anyone who has ever tossed a soda can into a bin knows what’s supposed to happen: Anything recyclable can go in, and then somehow, magically, it’s all separated and reused.

The idea originated in California in the 1990s. Environmental advocates believed that the only way to increase participation in recycling programs was to make it easier. Sorting took time and was messy. No one liked it. So-called Material Recovery Facilities, or MRFs, were created to do what consumers wouldn’t.

With conveyers, spinning flywheels, magnets and contraptions that look like giant Erector Sets, companies found that they could recycle almost everything at once. Lightweight newspaper and cardboard were sent tumbling upward, as if in a clothes dryer. Glass, plastic and metal fell into a series of belts and screens. Automation was adopted to sort, bale and send to manufacturers all those tons of paper, bottles and cans.

From the start, it was hard to argue that glass should have been allowed in the curbside mix. It’s the heaviest of recyclables but has always been of marginal value as a commodity. In the rough-and-tumble sorting facilities, a large share of it breaks and contaminates valuable bales of paper, plastic and other materials.

Today, more than a third of all glass sent to recycling facilities ends up as crushed shards. It is trucked to landfills as daily cover to bury the smell and trap gases. The rest of the glass has almost no value to recyclers and can often cost them to haul away.

In recent years, the problem of contamination has spread beyond glass. The problem was exacerbated when municipalities began increasing the size of bins, believing that bigger was better to keep more material from landfills.

Consumers have indeed been filling the bigger bins, but often with as much garbage as recyclable material.

With the extra room, residents stopped breaking down cardboard boxes. Because a full shipping box sometimes fits inside, even with foam and plastic wrap attached, all of it more frequently shows up at sorting facilities.

Residents have also begun experimenting, perhaps with good intentions, tossing into recycling bins almost anything rubber, metal or plastic: garden hoses, clothes hangers, shopping bags, shoes, Christmas lights. That was exactly the case last year, when the District of Columbia replaced residents’ 32-gallon bins with ones that are 50 percent larger.

“Residue jumped a ton,” said Hallie Clemm, deputy administrator for the city’s solid waste management division. In fact, so much nonrecyclable material was being stuffed into the bins that after an audit by Waste Management last fall, the share of the city’s profit for selling recyclables plummeted by more than 50 percent.

That has driven up the city’s processing price for recyclables to almost $63 a ton — 24 percent higher than if it trucked all of its recycling material, along with its trash, to a Virginia incinerator.

The D.C. Council recently approved a payment of $1.2 million to Waste Management for the contract year that ended in May. In 2011,the city made a profit of $389,000.

Changing times

A large part of the problem for recyclers is falling global commodity prices — a phenomenon largely out of recyclers’ hands. But the negative impact of that trend is amplified by the contents of most recycling bins, because the composite of what Americans try to reuse has changed dramatically over the past decade.

Dwindling have been the once-profitable old newspapers, thick plastic bottles and aluminum cans that could be easily baled and reused.

With oil prices driving up transportation costs, manufacturers have engaged in a race to make packaging more lightweight. Coffee cans disappeared in favor of vacuum-packed aluminum bags; some tuna cans went the same way. Tin cans and plastic water bottles became thinner, too: The amount of plastic that once came from 22 bottles now requires 36.

There was an even more pronounced drop in newsprint. Long a lucrative recycling commodity, it’s not a key commodity market. In its place is something known as mixed residential paper: the junk mail, flattened cereal boxes and other paper items that these days can outweigh newspaper in a one-ton bale.

One bright spot has been an increase in cardboard. Analysts say that with more people buying items through online merchants, including Amazon.com and eBay, cardboard can account for up to 15 percent of cities’ recyclable loads — more than double that of a decade ago.

The demand for that paper and cardboard, however, remains at a near-decade low.