By Noel Grove

Cause and effect

Nearly 65 percent of our aluminum cans are reincamated along with a
quarter of our paper and Steel cans and 20 percent of our glass. The
renewed interest is spurred be arange of concems: loss of landfill space,
contamination of ground wáter be landfills, dwindling natural resources
and, perhaps agrowing comprehension of our unmatched squandering.
We burn 16 percent now and could burn more; But that raises concems
about air polution from heavy metails such as lead, cadmium,
copper,and mercury, which vaporize in intense heat.
Our recyclables are picked up for nothing, explained Sally Kentch, who was
setting out her papers, cans, and glass and plastic bottles one morning as I rode
the rounds with a recycling truck in a north Seattle neighborhood. "But we $15
a month to the city 30-gallon, can for garbage that can't be recycled. If we
don't recycle well,we may need two garbage cans, which cost twice as much

With the fees charged for the garbage cans, Seattle covers its weekly
garbage pickup and pays two companies to pick up the recyclables. The
companies sort the materials and sell them at a profit. Pay-as-you-throw can
be hard to swallow when trash collection has been a service paid for invisibly
out of property taxes
problem - solution
Six years ago Florida decided it had no choice. Groundwater in the
fourth most populated state sometimes sits only three feet below the
surface, easily affected by pollution from landfills. So the Solid
Waste Management Act of 1988 ordered counties to be recycling 30
percent of their waste by the close of 1994.
 Programs that look promising on paper sometimes flounder in practice. In Germany, for
example, law makers were praised in 1991 for requiring manufacturers to recycle their
packaging -not literally to take it back, but to pay a second party to recycle the volume of
packaging they were producing. programs that look promising on paper sometimes founder in
practice. Many businesses signaled their compliance by marking products with a green dot.
But without any system of enforcement, some dots appeared that were not backed by
recycling contracts. And the packaging pilled up beyond the recyclers ‘ability to process it.
Green dots began showing up in landfills.
problem - cause
"We underestimated people's response to recycling", said David Dougherty,
director of the Clean Washington Center, a state agency in Seattle that
develops markets for recyclables. "They did it so well an oversupply
resulted. But seeing those materials go ging has made people realize the
need to create markets for them.