Officials across New Jersey struggle with the loss of recycling markets

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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McClatchy files for bankruptcy, likely ending 163 years of family control and setting up more consolidation in local news

 JOSHUA BENTON@jbenton reports for NiemanLab 

It’s been a very public possibility for months, but this morning it became official: McClatchy, America’s second-largest newspaper chain, is filing for bankruptcy. (You can find the legal filings here.)

Here’s The New York Times:

McClatchy, the publisher that operates The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee and other newspapers, filed for bankruptcy protection on Thursday, saying it planned to restructure the debt it has struggled with for years.

In a Chapter 11 filing in New York, the company, which is one of the largest news publishers in the United States, said its 30 newsrooms would continue operating as usual during the case.

The Washington Post:

The Chapter 11 filing will allow the Sacramento-based company to keep its 30 newspapers afloat while it reorganizes more than $700 million in debt, 60 percent of which would be eliminated under the plan. If the court approves, it would also hand control of the 163-year-old family publisher to a hedge fund, Chatham Asset Management, its largest creditor.

The filing foreshadows further cost-cutting and retrenchment for one of the biggest players in local journalism at a time when most American newsrooms already are straining to cover their communities. About 20 percent of all U.S. newspapers have closed since 2004, according to a recent report from PEN America, and the sector has shed 47 percent of its jobs.

And McClatchy’s own Sacramento Bee, the newspaper that started the chain in 1857:

The Chapter 11 filing will allow McClatchy to restructure its debts and, it hopes, shed much of its pension obligations. Under a plan outlined in its filing to a federal bankruptcy court, about 60 percent of its debt would be eliminated as the news organization tries to reposition for a digital future.

The likely new owners, if the court accepts the plan, would be led by hedge fund Chatham Asset Management LLC. They would operate McClatchy as a privately held company. More than 7 million shares of both publicly available and protected family-owned stock would be canceled.

“While this is obviously a sad milestone after 163 years of family control, McClatchy remains a strong operating company and committed to essential local news and information,” said Kevin McClatchy, chairman of the company that has carried his family name since the days of the California Gold Rush. “While we tried hard to avoid this step, there’s no question that the scale of our 75-year-old pension plan — with 10 pensioners for every single active employee — is a reflection of another economic era.”

(It’s oddly comforting that the McClatchy story is by far the best and most detailed of the bunch.)

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Ocasio-Cortez introduces national fracking ban

Ocasio-Cortez introduces national fracking ban
Photo © Greg Nash

JUSTINE COLEMAN reports for The HIll

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), along with Rep. Darren Soto (D-Fla.) officially introduced a national fracking ban in the House.

The bill, announced at the end of last month, serves as a companion bill to the Senate legislation proposed by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), one that Ocasio-Cortez helped draft. Both bills would ban fracking across the nation by 2025. 

The laws would also prohibit fracking within 2,500 feet of homes and schools by February 2021. They also would provide a transition for working families in the fracking industry.

“Fracking is destroying our land and our water,” Ocasio-Cortez posted on Twitter. “It is wreaking havoc on our communities’ health. We must do our job to protect our future from the harms caused by the fracking industry. That is why I am proud to introduce the Fracking Ban Act with @RepDarrenSoto today.”

Soto said in a statement that fracking poses a hazard to “our health, safety and environment.”

“If we want to transition from fossil fuel emissions as we work towards building a 100 percent clean economy, pulling back from fracking is a critical first step,” he said. “Failure to act will only make the crisis at hand even more detrimental for future generations of Americans.” 

Sanders has vowed during his presidential campaign to eliminate fracking in the country if he wins in 2020.

American Petroleum Institute spokeswoman Bethany Aronhalt told The Hill in a statement last month that a ban could produce an increase in household energy costs.

“Banning a safe, successful method of developing energy would erase a generation of American energy progress and in the process destroy millions of U.S. jobs, spike household energy costs and hurt farmers and manufacturers,” she said after the Senate bill was first announced.

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Martha’s Vineyard wind project delayed again

By Colin A. Young State House News Service

BOSTON — The project that has been eyed as the first utility-scale offshore wind development in the country was dealt a blow from the federal government Tuesday and Vineyard Wind no longer expects that its 800-megawatt project, chosen to deliver Massachusetts clean, renewable power, will become operational by 2022.

The Trump administration, which lawmakers and some in the energy world have accused of being prejudiced against wind developments, on Tuesday announced a new — and longer-than-anticipated — timeline for the ongoing federal review of the Vineyard Wind project and the offshore wind sector generally. The new timeline, the developer said, puts another planned milestone out of reach.

“We have received updated information from the Department of Interior that indicates the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the Vineyard Wind I project will be published later than what was previously anticipated,” Vineyard Wind CEO Lars Pedersen said in a statement. “While we need to analyze what a longer permitting timeline will mean for beginning construction, commercial operation in 2022 is no longer expected. We look forward to the clarity that will come with a final EIS so that Vineyard Wind can deliver this project to Massachusetts and kick off the new US offshore energy industry.”

The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) sent shockwaves through the industry in August with its plan to hold off on developing the final environmental impact statement for Vineyard Wind — the Massachusetts-contracted project that has been in line to be the first major offshore wind farm in the country — while it studies the wider impacts of a sector that is hoping to ramp up in Northeast and mid-Atlantic waters also used by the fishing sector.

On Tuesday, BOEM published a new “one federal decision permitting timeline,” which envisions the issuance of a decision for permit approval by Dec. 18, 2020. Before the feds launched the broad review of wind projects, a decision on permit approval had been expected by Aug. 16, 2019.

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Vineyard Wind had originally planned to financially close on its project and begin on-shore construction work in 2019, put the first turbine into the seabed in 2021 and have the 84-turbine wind farm generating electricity in 2022.

Officials from Vineyard Wind, a joint venture of Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and Avangrid Renewables seeking to build an 84-turbine wind farm 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, had said in July that the entire project would be at risk if the federal government did not issue the project’s final environmental impact statement by the end of August. Since then, the company affirmed its commitment to the project “albeit with a delayed project schedule.”

Vineyard Wind officials said Tuesday the company remains committed to being the first large-scale offshore wind project in the country and is in close contact with the utility companies it is under contract with about any impacts the federal review could have on the project.

The company has also been communicating with the U.S. Department of the Treasury to discuss the possibility of preserving eligibility for a key tax credit for Vineyard Wind and any other project that is similarly held up due to unforeseen regulatory actions.

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How’s this for a spring volunteer job–Counting eels plucked from the Hudson?

Our reaction: Ewwww! But maybe you’ll like it

One little eel, two little eels…

From the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation

Are you looking for an outdoor volunteer opportunity? The Hudson River Eel Project is seeking community members to help study eels in streams of the Hudson River estuary. The American eel (Anguilla rostrata), a migratory fish, is hatched in the Atlantic Ocean and enters North American estuaries, including the Hudson River, as tiny, see-through “glass eels” each spring.

As a volunteer, you will work in a team with scientists to collect these eels from specialized nets, count the fish one-by-one, weigh them in groups, and release them to habitat upstream. You will also help collect and record water temperature and water-quality data. 

Eels are counted in 15 streams from Staten Island to Troy. The fieldwork takes place from March through May, and schedules are flexible. Training and all gear are provided. 

For more information, visit DEC’s website or e-mail: eelproject@dec.ny.gov.

We’re always looking for stories that might interest our readers. If you come across something so interesting that it cries out to be shared, please send it to editor@enviropolitics.com  If we agree, you’ll see it here soon.   

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EPA proposes yet another cut to waste minimization and recycling budget

The Trump administration’s proposed budget would add new grant programs, but significantly shrink sustainable materials management funding.

Cole Rosengren reports for WasteDive

The U.S. EPA’s recently proposed FY21 budget calls for a nearly 53% reduction in funding dedicated to the agency’s waste minimization and recycling work, despite ongoing public promises to help address national recycling challenges.

As outlined, the annual budget for this area under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) would decline by nearly $9 million and be offset by $4.25 million in new initiatives. Staffing levels would shrink from 43.4 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff to 5 FTE. The EPA says its proposal “refocuses the Program from efforts in Sustainable Materials Management to the priority areas of recycling and food waste and loss.” 

The Trump administration has sought to drastically reduce the EPA’s budget before, but is annually rebuffed by Congress. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi already indicated the administration’s new broader budget proposal will face a similar reaction this year.

The FY21 proposal also includes a large reduction to related RCRA waste management work, but the requested recycling cuts are in some ways more notable when it comes to agency messaging. For the past three budget years (FY18, FY19 and FY20), the EPA has proposed a complete elimination of the RCRA waste minimization and recycling program.

Traditionally, EPA has justified the cuts by arguing state and local governments could continue similar work, even though many other environmental agencies face their own funding constraints. This year the agency altered that approach, indicating EPA wants to more generally shift resources away from sustainable materials management (SMM) projects.

SMM, a lifecycle thinking concept elevated within the EPA’s Office of Land and Emergency Management (OLEM) during the Obama administration, is often raised by both appointees and career staff as a foundational element of their work. SMM was most recently cited as a priority to Waste Dive last fall by EPA officials and mentioned by OLEM Assistant Administrator Peter Wright in a House subcommittee hearing just last week. 

Asked to explain this implied policy shift, an EPA spokesperson told Waste Dive the agency’s position has not changed. They pointed to upcoming events around SMM and ongoing planning for 2020 America Recycles Week activities. “The Administration’s 2021 budget request marks a significant commitment to this priority area by requesting more funding than last year’s request,” the spokesperson said via email.

While the agency’s $4.25 million request for new initiatives is notable – especially when compared to last year’s request for fully eliminating the program with no offset funding – it is still a significant reduction when balanced out by the nearly $9 million in proposed cuts.

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