Getting hard to recycle paper these days 📄 ♻

There was a time when paper recycling was ubiqous in offices and even in the home. Every desk had a paper recycling bin, at home you had easy recycling for your junk mail, office paper and cardboard usually in one mixed bin, seperate from the cans and the bottles.

Then for a short time it got even easier – many residences and businesses got single stream recycling bins. Any business that had a recycling dumpster for cardboard could suddenly recycle cans and bottles and office paper for the first time – they didn’t have to arrange a special service that only the most green minded businesses had. It was great, at least on paper.

I had a friend really plugged into the recycling business ten years ago that was warning how truly bad single stream recycling was – how poorly cleaned yogurt containers (trash after all) was getting all over the used office containers, and glass recyclables was being compacted in garbage trucks with the cardboard. When curbside recycling was new, they had to use specialized trucks but a big part of the appeal of single stream was the use of regular garbage trucks for hauling well smashed and compacted recyclables. But once you smash an egg its hard to un-smash it at the materials recovery facility.

When I went to college, I was surprised how minimal recycling programs were in rural areas. While they collected newspaper and office paper for recycling, it wasn’t the kind of recycling that one traditionally thought of, selling the scrap paper back to a mill to use in making new paper. Instead it was ground up and used as bedding in maternity and calf pens at some of the large dairies of the Champlain Valley. Saves on growing hay and straw for bedding – and helps tie down the nitrogen, reducing smell of the solid bedback when it’s spread on the fields by locking the nitrogen to the carbon. It’s actually not a bad thing.

Apparently paper bedding that’s been the bedrock of many rural paper recycling for a long time – keeps it out of the landfills, and reduces trucking costs and emissions. At the same time though it was a symptom of how paper recycling was failing – absorbing cow shit and getting the nitrogen and nutrients where they need to be to grow corn silage rather than pollute the air and water is great but it’s not closed loop nor does it save trees.

The greater Albany area had and still has some paper mills which use scrap paper for recycling. At one point, they were processing so much scrap paper locally that paper mills were a minor but notable source of PCB contamination of the Hudson River. Until the 1990s, fax paper and carbon paper was coated with PCB based ink that when pulped often would float through the waste water works. Fortunately, they replaced PCBs with other less toxic chemicals, although some are or resemble PFOAs which are another toxic stew.

State offices for many years at least put a good face on recycling, although there was a brief scandal in the mid-2000s about how the DEC offices had recycling bins at every desk but the cleaning crews just emptied them into the garbage destine for the Rapp Road landfill as the state didn’t bother to set up a recycling contract or the necessary dumpsters for the new, privately owned lease to own state building.

The Town of Bethlehem had large mixed-paper recycling dumpsters for recycling until last September. I often used them to get rid of all the junk mail and cardboard I had. I figured recycling was better for the environment, and truth be told, paper doesn’t burn that well with the rest of the burnables, especially if it gets wet from leaky bottles in the trash. Plus when you burn paper you have the problem with fire brands floating off the fire, and a lot of paper doesn’t burn well. Cardstock and glossy magazines are particularly hard to burn, due to the high percentage of the paper that is made up of clay — and sometimes stinky from the ink. You can still take paper to the recycling center, but now it has to be sorted by type — cardboard and paperboard separate from junk mail. I do that still in the winter months.

But even at work, recycling has gotten more difficult. They no longer pick up recycling bins in the office, if you want to recycle, you have to bring your own paper to a central recycling trash can on each floor. I guess there is a lot less paper trash, now that everything went electronic with COVID and remote work. But there is still is paper, and it takes a lot more work to recycle it, if so inclined. You can say it’s the Labor shortege but they are still emptying the garbage cans twice a week. It’s like nobody cares about recycling anymore, climate change with glitzy electronic devices, electric cars, solar panels and windmills are sexy today. Climate change is big, recycling is an after thought.

Ultimately its good that paper is finally going the way of the paperless office. They’ve talked about getting rid of paper for three decades but it’s obnoxious to see recycling going away, especially when the Albany Landfill is closing in the next year or so and all trash not currently hauled out of town to Seneca Meadows or Finch Pruyn dump in Saratoga will be making the long trip up the Adirondack Northway then Military Turnpike to an expanded dumping grounds 15 miles north of Malone. All hauled by big diesel rigs, that bletch out toxins while hauling the restaurant slop mixed with broken television sets, telephone cords and discarded office memos north.

Probably when it comes down to it, using waste paper for farm animal bedding isn’t a half bad idea. Printer inks do contain certain metals, petroleum compounds and plastics most are pretty minute and the soy based inks common these days aren’t that harmful. Tying down nitrogen, turning more piss and poop from livestock into fertilizer while keeping livestock dry and healthy is a good thing on a farm or homestead.

While distant dumping grounds may be the solution for urban waste, and burn barrels for wastes on remote homesteads, dumping and burning isn’t the ideal solution. If you can manage the waste on your own land without releasing more carbon or air pollution into the atmosphere – all the better. Without a question when I own my own land, some paper trash will get burned but the more I can turn into fertility the better. A less stinky, smokey homestead is a better option.

I wish I had solutions to all the urban problems but I’m not a politician or activists and I’ll leave it up to the cities to figure out how to address their issues, noting their poor performance on waste management and recycling portends a lot to what my expectations on what climate change harm reduction policies will look like to the government. They’ll build a bunch of solar farms for show, make a big stink about climate change for a few years before getting bored and moving on, all while we suffer the increased impacts of the destruction of the climate we all know.