Landfill life and cost are still valid reasons to recycle, but there are other increasingly compelling reasons for recycling. Broken down to its most simple argument, the more things are reused, the fewer new things need to be produced. Producing new glass, plastic, paper and metal products means using more fossil fuels, which means creating more carbon emissions. Reducing our carbon emissions is critical to slowing global warming.
People in The Valley and Vermont are recycling, but not quite at the levels envisioned by Act 78, which called for having 50 percent of waste recycled within 20 years. That has not happened here, nor anywhere in the country, but there are changes coming. In other parts of the country, namely, the West Coast, recycling is beginning to be profitable and that may be what revolutionizes the whole idea of waste management.
According to an article by J. Michael Kennedy, entitled 'Seattle's Recycling Steps Is Being Measured in Scraps,' and published in the <MI>New York Times<D> this week, the western states are recycling 38 percent of waste while the Rocky Mountain region recycles only 14 percent of its trash. Kennedy notes that in the west, freighters traveling to and from Asia are finding great profit in shipping recycled paper -- particularly to China. Waste paper pays about $90 a ton and is making it possible for shippers to make it profitable.
In Seattle, the subject of the article, residents now mix their food scraps in with yard wastes which is turned into compost by one forward-looking entrepreneur. The city of Seattle collects the bins and sells it to the businessman.
Seattle now recycles 44 percent of its trash, up from the national average of 30 percent, and will make food waste recycling mandatory in 2009. While Vermont's rural nature may make state or local collection of compostable material impractical, there may be ways to learn from Seattle's example.
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