Commercial recycling lags residential use, market values for recyclables plummet

At the Main Squeeze café and juice bar on Ninth Street, employees collect the food scraps for composting and recycle all of their glass, paper, plastic and aluminum trash.

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By Jordan Milne and David Reed

Twice a day, Main Squeeze employees carry containers filled with recyclables to the city’s big metal recycling bin at the corner of 10th and Elm streets. Owner Leigh Lockhart estimated that the recycling effort cost the business $2,500 in labor last year.

“I actually argued with the city on my trash bill a couple years ago because we have such little trash,” Lockhart said. “Composting takes away 80 percent of our waste, and recycling takes care of the rest to where we’re down to less than a bag of trash per day.”

Main Squeeze is in the minority when it comes to commercial recycling in Columbia.

There are 2,383 licensed businesses in Columbia, not counting home-based businesses. While the range of businesses that recycle is wide -car dealerships, restaurants, factories, pharmacies, and offices-the percentage of use is narrow.

About 140 of them use the city’s recycling collection services, and about 400 businesses in Columbia and outlying areas use the services of Civic Recycling, a private company.

That means about one in five businesses in the city are recycling, compared with one out of every three residents. While all residents have curbside recycling pickup, a program started in 1987, only a third uses the service, according to Layli Terrill, the city’s waste minimization supervisor.

“Most businesses are not recycling because somehow people thought it was, and should be, free,” Terrill said. “I have had several people call me to start up a recycling program, and once they find out it’s not free, they’re no longer interested. We pay for our trash service, so I don’t know how people started thinking recycling was free. There’s still a cost for it, between providing the container, servicing it regularly, and delivering it to be processed.”

By recycling material, less trash ends up in the local landfill and less energy is used in manufacturing. However, in the past few months the market for paper, plastic and aluminum waste has plummeted, and the material is getting stockpiled. As consumers buy fewer manufactured products, the demand for materials is lower, but the swiftness and severity of the decline surprised even longtime veterans in the cyclical recycling industry.

The price offered to the city for newspaper fell from $92 a ton in September to $62.50 in October, $7.50 in November and $2.50 in December.

“Right now we are unable to move any of our paper products,” Terrill said. The selling price doesn’t cover transportation costs, and she said, “our normal buyers won’t pay for it.”

The drop in No. 2 plastic has been less severe-from $45 a ton in October, the yearly high, to $32 in November and $14 in December-and the city sold its recycled plastic this month.

(Glass products are crushed into sand and used for sandbags and other city uses and are mixed with asphalt used to pave the road around the Material Recovery facility beside the landfill in the city’s northwestern corner.)

“The plan for now is to stockpile (paper) until this market improves,” Terrill said. “We’re filling up pretty fast and we’re looking for storage space.”

On the front-end of the market, John Ott, a developer of downtown properties and co-owner of Alley A Realty, said there is an unmet demand for commercial recycling by local businesses.

“A lot of businesses would like to, but, in my opinion, we haven’t really figured out an efficient way,” Ott said. “There’s Civic Recycling, and different centralized places where you can take your recycled materials, and I think that’s a good intermediate way to help people recycle. But I can’t help but think there’s not a better way for the long run.”

The city’s Environment and Energy Commission started to look into ways to promote commercial recycling last summer, but the effort fizzled after the commission member pushing the effort, Square D engineer Ted Dyer, left the group.

“I suspect we are putting a lot of commercial stuff in the landfill that we shouldn’t, but I have no data,” said Dick Parker, a current member of the commission.

Columbia’s bottles and cans used to be recycled at a greater rate before the city’s 5-cent bottle deposit ordinance was repealed in 2002. While 11 states have deposit laws, Columbia at that time had the nation’s only local deposit ordinance.

“Ever since the bottle ordinance was repealed, it seems like even the bar owners don’t recycle,” Lockhart said.

Civic Recycling has been providing commercial recycling collection services for nearly 30 years, and founding owner Brett Allen said volume this decade has been rising about 10 percent a year.

“I started up the business with $1,500 in my pocket when I was 18 years old,”  Allen said. “It was February of 1980, and I had just graduated from high school. My father owned a Miller Brewing distribution in Jefferson City, and started buying back aluminum cans for public relations reasons. I bought a 1957 cattle truck, and State Farm Insurance was our first client. We picked up the materials and kept them in my parents’ garage. The business grew, so we moved out to Cottonwood Memorial Airport, where we got a hanger and a little bailer. As far as recycling in Columbia goes, there was nothing else at the time.”

In 2003, the city created its own commercial recycling service, for which they provide roll carts or dumpsters based on the volume of recyclable materials of participating businesses. Recyclables are collected and delivered to the City’s Material Recovery Facility for processing.

“I tried to work things out with the city, and even set them up to buy a bailer to do the sorting,” Allen said. “We had agreed that they were taking care of residential, and I was doing commercial, but then Richard Wieman (the city’s solid waste utility manager)  came right to my face and said, ‘We are going to be in direct competition with you.’ Now I’m competing with a private government agency, and I do not think that’s right.”‘

Civic Recyling is now located on Brown Station Road, and down the same road is Mid-Missouri Recycling, which collects computer monitors, televisions, printers and other electronic equipment so that the material doesn’t end up in the city’s landfill.

In recent years, the city has tried to encourage recycling efforts by increasing the number of bins where people can drop off materials that can be recycled. There are now recycling drop-off containers near Gerbes on West Broadway and on Paris Road, Moser’s on Business Loop 70, Patricia’s on Keene Street, the intersection of 10th and Elm Streets, the Rollins Dining Hall on College Avenue, the intersection of Forum Boulevard and Chapel Hill  and State Farm off Providence Road.

Rates and sizes for the city’s commercial recycling program are based on volume and number of pickups. Weekly pick up from a 90-gallon roll cart costs $15 per month, for example.

The city will pay for large volumes of clean, segregated recyclable material from large volume generator businesses that must produce more than a ton a month, which Terrill said almost never occurs.

Terrill said businesses should be able to offset most, if not all, of the costs of regular trash removal when they start using the recycling service. While adding a collection bin for recyclables, they can reduce the number or volume of regular trash pickups.

“When it comes down to it, recycling is more the mind of the corporate infrastructure,” Terrill said. “Then there are other people that just truly want to do the right thing. For it to be successful, it has to start in the hierarchy of the organization. The hard part is training the employees. The higher the turnover rate, the more often the recycling falls through the cracks.”

For business owners on a tight budget, Terrill suggests: “Let an employee off early half an hour once a week to drop off the recycling, and you’ve only had to pay the cost of that employee’s half hour of labor to recycle your materials.”

But the use of the drop offs, and in downtown in particular, presents its own set of problems. Terrill said that although the containers are emptied a couple times a week, they are often overflowing.

Terrill struggles with the recycling situation downtown. Even with several businesses willing to pay for recycling pick up, most don’t have a parking lot or space to keep a large recycling container.

“I don’t have a solution,” she said. “We have to have space for the containers. Even if we did put containers in the alleys, my guys would have to be able to get a truck through there to empty them.”

Terrill cites Kaldi’s coffee house as an example of how a business created its

own solution. After several failed attempts to keep a roll cart near the building, the managers started getting employees to walk to a container that Kaldi’s rents from the city at an offsite location and dump off the recyclables.

“Generally there aren’t a lot of options to recycling materials around here, but some of the downtown businesses are doing interesting things,” said Ott. “Many of the restaurants have grease vats in the alleyways. In some areas a company goes around to these containers with a truck and sucks it out with a hose. The cooking grease that’s recycled from these restaurants is then used in beauty and all sorts of other products.”

Lockhart believes the city needs to get more involved in facilitating recycling downtown: “They’re trying to increase the living spaces downtown, but who wants to look out their door and see a dumpster? Businesses should be required to recycle. We need a city policy and a system. We could even put recyclables out early in the morning and have it picked up before everyone gets out and about.”

The city collected 160 tons of recyclables from the downtown drop-off in 2005 and 189 tons in 2006 and 2007, and that’s about how much is expected to be dumped this year, indicating that the commercial recycling efforts downtown have reached a plateau.

“In the U.S. we have the luxury of space,” Terrill said. “It’s cheaper for our waste management since we have the space for landfills, so we don’t have the incentive to recycle like they do in Europe. In New York and California trash service costs are four to five times higher than in Missouri because they don’t have the space. People don’t mind paying for their trash, but they don’t like paying for their recycling.”