This Recycling Resources symbol is a registered mark of the Copyright 1973 Note: Statistical charts and material contained in this publication are based on the NARI study for EPA, as well as other NARI studies. RECYCLING: Guide to Effective Solid Waste Utilization The 1970's may go down in history as the years of raw material shortages, Recycling represents a constructive program for America's future. This Guideline WHY RECYCLING? Each year more than 200 million tons of solid wastes are collected in the United States at a cost of more than $6 billion. Recycling can substantially reduce this vast accumulation of solid wastes and cut the taxpayer's cost. Each year brings us nearer to depletion of our raw material resources in this country and greater dependence on imports from other nations. Recycling conserves our natural resources and adds to the vital raw material supplies needed by American industry. Each year the magnitude of our energy crisis grows. Recycling saves energy and makes possible greater utilization of materials at a lower energy rate. 1. Solid Waste Utilization: The staggering accumulation of waste materials results from an affluent society which discards, after short-term use, much of its products-millions of cans, appliances, autos, household goods. These consumer items, plus the waste generated by industry and government, comprise vast tonnages of metals of all types: paper, textiles, plastics and glass. Some of it is recycled, but most of it is carted off to the dump, or incinerated, or disposed of in rivers and streams. There is an environmental awareness on every level today which recognizes that the disposal practices of the past are ecologically unsound. The burning of solid wastes invariably leads to air pollution problems, and it has been banned or limited in city after city. Strict laws have been drawn against the discharging of wastes into the nation's waters. The dumping of solid wastes is constantly being challenged as detrimental to environmental management. Landfills are becoming increasingly limited outlets for solid waste disposal. Little by little we are running out of space and time and money to deal with solid wastes. Municipalities have been carting their wastes over longer and longer distances in a frantic effort to find available land for their disposal. Costs for collection and disposal of solid wastes-ranging from $20 to over $30 a ton in urban areas are expected to rise steeply in the next decade. Many cities, already hard-pressed financially, simply are being bankrupted by the mounting costs of solid waste disposal. It is significant that the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965 became the Resource Recovery Act of 1970. The Federal Government had thus recognized the direction it must take. Recycling represents the most affirmative environmental response and the most constructive economic answer to the critical challenge of solid waste. 2. Conservation Urgency. The United States is beginning to run out of valuable natural resources. In some areas-metals, for examplethe United States has long been a "have not" nation, finding it necessary to import much of its required ores, concentrates and primary metals. But even in those resources which formerly were abundant, time is taking its toll. The Director of the Bureau of Mines has predicted that by the turn of the century, U.S. demand for primary metals will have quadrupled and that we will need imports at seven times the present rate to satisfy our requirements. One of the positive ways in which we can help conserve our natural resources is to recycle and recover the resources in our solid wastes. WHAT LEADING AUTHORITIES SAY ABOUT THE VALUE AND IMPORTANCE OF RECYCLING "We consider that resource recovery deserves to rank among the highest national priorities. We urge the Congress and the Executive Branch to establish recycling as an explicit national goal To create markets for recovered materials by recycling technology, by Federal procurement policies, and by equitable tax and transportation rate treatment for virgin and secondary materials." -NATIONAL COMMISSION ON MATERIALS POLICY "MATERIAL NEEDS AND THE ENVIRONMENT TODAY AND TOMORROW" "The level of recycling depends almost entirely on economics. Recycling takes place to the extent that it is the most efficient use of resources. In the absence of artificial economic subsidies for 'natural' or 'virgin' materials more secondary or recycled materials would be used. The economics of recycling are also influenced by apparently inequitable freight rates both ocean and rail which makes the transportation of secondary materials relatively more costly than the movement of virgin resources." -REPORT TO CONGRESS ON RESOURCE RECOVERY BY THE U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY "If the Federal Government is to commit itself to fostering maximum resource recovery, recycling, and reuse, it should change its present tax and purchasing policies to further that goal. Such a commitment should have a three-fold purpose: to provide economic incentives to private industry; to stop practices which needlessly intensify our solid waste problems; and to conserve natural resources. To these ends the Committee recommends consideration of a number of Federal tax incentives and disincentives and governmental procurement policies." -LAURENCE ROCKEFELLER, CHAIRMAN CITIZEN'S ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY "Conservation and reclamation of scrap are of the utmost importance in order to provide necessary raw materials for the manufacture of essential military and civilian items. Secondary raw materials recovered from scrap provide a vast reservoir of hard-to-obtain materials." -DEFENSE SCRAP YARD HANDBOOK DEFENSE SUPPLY ACENCY "We now have the technology to recycle much of the material that is treated as waste and thereby to return it to useful purposes. However, market and other incentives in recent years have tended to work against recycling. As a result, we reuse less and less as population, per capita consumption, and changes in production processes add increasingly more and more to the amount of material which must be disposed." -PRESIDENT'S COUNCIL ON THE ENVIRONMENT REPORT TO CONGRESS (1971) "There is an urgent necessity for Federal action to correct freight rate discrimination against solid waste and recycled materials ... Congress should enact legislation to reduce freight and shipping rates for solid waste materials to resource recovery facilities and to secondary material users... Resource recovery will neither impact nor improve local solid waste management until it becomes profitable economically. The overriding consideration is for Federal action on policies and prac tices which discourage or impede the handling of solid waste or the processing, marketing, and reuse of recycled materials." -NATIONAL LEAGUE OF CITIES AND UNITED CONFERENCE OF MAYORS "CITIES AND THE NATION'S DISPOSAL CRISIS" "Recycling offers the potential for an environmentally and economically superior alternative to many current disposal practices." -RUSSELL E. TRAIN, CHAIRMAN COUNCIL ON ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY "The waste piles resulting from mineral processing and mined-over lands must be reclaimed nities to improve the environment and at the same time produce economically useful materials 'urban ore" ... there are major opportu Urban waste is in fact -FIRST ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF INTERIOR "It appears that post-consumer waste recycling could result in industrial energy savings as large or larger than that directly obtainable from the utilization of solid waste as fuel.” -ARSEN J. DARNEY, JR., DEPUTY ASSISTANT ADMINISTRATOR, EPA "The Task Force concluded that energy and secondary resource recovery should be encouraged by state governments and local governments should be encouraged to give secondary industries equitable consideration in respect to other forms of industries... States should encourage local governments to remove restrictive zoning practices that preclude the development of needed recovery facilities... These practices reduce the ability of secondary material industries to profitably operate. Expansion of such industries will be necessary if urban solid waste problems are to be reduced." -THE COUNCIL OF STATE GOVERNMENTS TASK FORCE REPORT "THE STATE'S ROLE IN SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT" 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; it 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, it 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. |