Waste paper represents the most significant proportion of the solid waste pile. Various studies have established that it represents 40 to 50% of all municipal waste. At the present time, we are recycling approximately 12 million tons of paper stock annually, and in the process we save the equivalent of 200,000,000 trees which would have had to be cut down if we were using only virgin pulp. But our present utilization represents only 20% of the total raw material needs at a time when there are over 35,000,000 more tons of paper recoverable from solid waste. If we were to raise the recycling rate to 50%, for example, we could conserve 500,000,000 trees-a forest equal to an area represented by New England, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland. This is not only a dramatic statistic; is a very real consideration. The U.S. Forest Service states that in spite of improved tree harvesting techniques, the spiralling paper demands of Americans will be outpacing virgin material availability. And by 1985 even a 35% recycling rate for waste paper will still leave us with the same solid waste burdens we have today!

Recycling can help stretch out the nation's resources through the increased and effective utilization of solid wastes.

3. Saving Energy: The use of primary materials consumes more energy per ton of production than recycled materials, according to a report by the National Commission on Materials Policy. The Commission has pointed out that studies of copper, aluminum, steel, and paper production demonstrate that recycling effectively saves energy. It notes that about 2% of the total U.S. energy demand could be saved by the recycling of available steel, aluminum, and paper.

Recycled materials have a built-in saving of energy. The energy needed to extract primary materials and then to manufacture them has already gone into a recyclable product. The recycling process therefore actually saves significant kilowatt hours per ton which might have been needed in the use of comparable primary materials.

Recycling conserves energy resources and in the mounting national concern over the energy crisis, the focus will be on the recycling industry as a vital source of energy saving.

4. Environmental Values: It is obvious that if a substantial proportion of solid wastes can be recycled, it represents a dramatic counterforce to air and water pollution. By recover

ing the values in these waste materials and putting them back into the resource cycle, we turn an environmental liability into a national asset. We reduce land and water pollution. Unlike the non-productive conditions inherent in air and water pollution control, solid waste management via recycling is economically productive and also combats land pollution.

The ecological rationale in recycling has been widely recognized by environmental groups, scientists, educators, industry and Government leaders-all of whom have added their support for recycling as a powerful and positive environmental force. It is sometimes assumed that the effect of recycling is simply to eliminate litter through the collection of waste paper or cans or bottles. While this does have a desirable effect in helping to keep our cities and countryside cleaner, is only a marginal factor. The basic factor ecologically is that recycling, through the reutilization of solid waste materials, stops them from going through the disposal cycle which is inherent in the dangers of pollution. Recycling is use and reuse, not use and discard.

5. Economic Asset. The recycling of substantial portions of solid wastes can save millions of dollars in disposal costs and earn additional millions of dollars in income from the economic value of the recycled material.

The United States recycling industries' annual sales volume is estimated at more than $8 billion. Of this total, metals and minerals amount to some $6 billion and paper, textiles, glass, rubber, plastics, etc., to about $2 billion.

By adding millions of tons of reclaimed materials into the resource pool, the recycling industries significantly assist the U.S. balance of payments factor by easing the amount of raw materials that have to be imported. Recycling produces materials made by American labor, and it is also capable of producing surplus raw materials for export-another valuable asset in terms of present U.S. trade deficits.

The economic value which results from secondary materials can be vastly expanded in this decade, as more recoverable solid wastes become available for recycling and as markets for secondary products are expanded. The basic importance of markets in the economics of recycling is discussed in another section, but it must be emphasized that NARI's recycling principle: "Markets first collections second" is at the heart of the entire recycling concept.

More than 3,000,000 tons of nonferrous scrap metals are recovered annually by processors and consumed by secondary smelters, refiners, ingot manufacturers, fabricators, foundries, and other industrial plants. The major nonferrous metals recycled are copper, aluminum, lead, and stainless steel scrap-but there is also a substantial recycling of zinc, nickel, precious metals and exotic metals.

Approximately 12,000,000 tons of paper is recycled annually, and nearly 1,500,000 tons of textiles move through the recycling process.

The industry that recycles these commodities has been on the job for more than 100 years in the United States. Today it is a highly sophisticated, technology-conscious, and multifaceted industry with large plants and yards distributed geographically across the entire country. Historically a family-oriented business, in the past few decades it has become more corporate structured. Many secondary material companies today are publicly-owned and have their stocks traded on the various exchanges.

NARI's comprehensive study for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "A Study to Identify Opportunities for Increased Solid Waste Utilization," prepared by the Battelle Memorial Institute, has developed a profile of the "average" recycling industry company.

This "average" company has annual sales of over $7.5 million; employs 71 people in its plant and office; has a value of plant and equipment of $1.4 million; and engages in annual sales per employee of $106,000.

Obviously, this "average" company hardly fits the old pattern of the public's concept of a scrap company. But then the recycling industry, on a closer look, is an industry that defies preconception. Any $8 billion dollar industry must be reckoned with as one of the nation's major economic assets. The growth potential of the recycling industry is substantial and has been commented on by financial experts in leading business magazines.

Recycled materials move in international business. The flow of scrap metals, paper stock, and textiles plays a vital role in the economic growth and stability of underdeveloped countries. Without these raw materials, many of the underdeveloped countries, lacking primary materials, would suffer serious industrial handicaps. The larger countries of Europe and the

Far East also are buyers of U.S.-generated and processed recycled materials, scrap which is surplus to our domestic needs or is better suited to industrial use overseas.

Perhaps no one has defined the recycling industry as aptly as the late President John F. Kennedy, who, in a message to NARI on its 50th anniversary, stated: "If any word describes your industry, it is 'resourcefulness'."

THE RECYCLING PROCESS

What is recycling? In a nutshell it may be defined as the process of converting the discarded, used, surplus, by-products, and other elements of solid waste into valuable new raw material.

A stack of newspapers-an appliance that has outlived its usefulness-a junked automobile-an accumulation of beverage cans-a structure that is dismantled-a railroad car that is scrapped-old clothing-a pile of used tiresall these are forms of "old" or "obsolete" (postconsumer) scrap which can be reclaimed and processed into new raw material for use in a wide range of industrial and consumer products.

But this is only one side of the recycling coin. Recycling also encompasses the processing of industrial scrap-material which results from the various manufacturing operations in industrial plants and which moves through the scrap cycle.

It is this industrial scrap, sold by thousands of American manufacturing plants, that forms the economic heart of the recycling industry's operations. This scrap is carefully processed, for it too can easily become contaminated and its recyclability lowered. It must be marketed in competition with, and on the same qualitative basis as, virgin materials.

The scrap processors who handle these vast accumulations of recycled materials are the hub of the resource recovery cycle. Scrap dealers collect, test and identify, sort and segregate, often changing the shape of the recycled material in order to properly bale or otherwise pack it for shipment to a variety of industrial

consumers.

Recovered waste material thus moves through normal recycling channels when it moves to a scrap processor's yard or plant. Here is a true recycling center, for these are