Leah Mishkin reports for NJ Nightly News
The borough of Chatham, with a population of just under 9,000, is struggling with a problem that’s become common across the country: how to get rid of recyclables.
In a matter of years, towns have gone from getting paid for the bottles, cans, newsprint and other recyclables left at the curb by their residents — about $10 a ton — to paying $70 a ton or more to have it taken away.
“It is definitely a shock to the system,” said Jocelyn Mathiasen, the council president in the Morris County community. “We ended up having to raise the prices that we charge for garbage collection.”
“Over the past 10 years New Jersey has really hit a recycling crisis,” said Randall Solomon, executive director of Sustainable Jersey. “I’d say we as a state and as a country — even the world — are at a critical juncture.”
A decade ago, most towns required residents to separate their recyclables into multiple bins. But in an effort to boost recycling participation, many municipalities switched to a single-stream system, where everything is commingled in one bin, to be sorted later at recycling facilities.
But experts say residents have become more lax about what they put in the recycling bin, and the wet paper, greasy pizza boxes, dirty jars and other contaminants that get mixed in can turn a batch of recyclable materials into worthless garbage.
In hindsight, it’s turned out to be a significant problem, says Gary Sondermeyer, vice president of operations for Bayshore Recycling, one of the largest recycling companies operating in the Northeast, selling clean, sorted material for use in new products.
“It’s really the floor of the New York Stock Exchange,” Sondermeyer said. “Recycling is, in fact, a commodities exchange.”
Recycling companies have relied on international markets like China, which once took in nearly half the world’s recyclable waste but eventually balked at the flood of contaminated material.
“China finally took a position ‘enough is enough of that,’ and then other countries have followed suit,” Sondermeyer said. “So, in a nutshell, there’s been a collapse of international markets and we’re all competing to use the domestic markets that exist.”
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