NEW YORK, NY June 05, 2002 — The Bloomberg Administration and the City Council are expected to miss today's deadline for a budget agreement. One of the sticking points in the negotiations has been the fate of the city's glass, metal and plastic recycling program. Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to suspend it for 18 months, saying it is ineffective and costly. Meanwhile, the mayor has had high praise for the paper recycling program, which makes money for the city through a contract with Visy Paper, a paper recycling mill. Bloomberg spoke enthusiastically about the company in his budget address.

Bloomberg: You should go over, if you're ever interested, to Staten Island, the Visy Paper company, and see how paper actually -- they dump it at one end and out comes paper at the other end. It's fascinating. (Laughter.) It really is, I mean, how can they do this? That's a program -- but, but that's a program to help the world that is working.

WNYC's Amy Eddings took the Mayor up on his suggestion to visit the plant, and to find out if similar strategies could be used for the city's metal, glass and plastic.

The mayor was right. At Visy Paper, near the Fresh Kills landfill, paper is literally dumped out of garbage trucks at one end of the long, two-story building, and recycled paper spools out into giant, brown rolls at the other. I'm at the start of the line, where, this year, 150-thousand tons of the city's paper will arrive by barge or truck. Visy's general manager, Daryl Whitehead, says the Australian-based, private company invested $200 million dollars in this mill so it could take all kinds of paper, from cardboard to office stationary.

Whitehead: The other six contractors that take the waste paper from the city, they've gotta process the waste. They have to take it somewhere, put it on a conveyor, sort the cardboard out from the plastic, the newsprint to the white waste. Whereas here -- off the street, into a DOS truck, onto our platform,dump it on the floor, push it in.

Everything goes into Visy's pulper, including the car parts, old toys and plastic bags that often end up in the city's paper collection. The pulper is a big vat that acts like a giant mixer, using water to break down paper fibers into a slurry that looks like three-day-old oatmeal.

Whitehead: And we dump it into a tank like you see here. And then we take it from this stream and we go forward. We take out the smaller particles, the glass, we take out the sand, the styrene. And all the other contaminents before it goes onto the tape machine and is turned into a recycled paper product again.

Heat draws the water out of the cleaned-up pulp, and big rollers press it into long sheets of heavy, brown paper. Huge rolls of the paper are placed on 18-wheelers and sent to other companies that will use the paper to make corrugated boxes that carry everything from pizzas to bathroom tile. This is the second recycled paper mill Visy operates in the United States. The other is near Atlanta, Georgia. Whitehead says Visy saw a business opportunity in the "urban forest " created by eight million New Yorkers.

Whitehead: We've calculated, with research we've done in Australia, every person produces a ton of waste per year. Of which, conservatively, 30 to 40 percent of that is paper products. Eight million people times that calculation and you've got a few million tons of paper.

In the early 90s, Visy approached then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the city's Economic Development Corporation. The EDC helped Visy get tax-exempt loans, and find a site near water, power, and neighbors who accepted them. The sanitation department committed to delivering a guaranteed tonnage to the mill over the course of twenty years. And Visy agreed to pay at least ten dollars a ton for the paper, regardless of the market price. Eric Deutsch used to be at the EDC, and had worked on the Visy project.

Deutsch: Up until the time the Visy deal was done, my understanding is that the city was in short-term deals, basically paying processors a tip fee -- $20, $30 a ton -- to take the paper away. Based on the fact that there was no paper being manufactured in the city, all of that was for export. And so the market was really based on what was happening in the global paper markets.

With the Visy deal, the city insulates itself from the global market's fluctuations. In the past five years, Visy has paid the city eleven-point-four million dollars for its waste paper. Visy's a private company, so Daryl Whitehead could not divulge the company's profits, but consider this: what goes in one end of Visy's mill as old paper, purchased for ten bucks a ton from the city, comes out as recycled paper Visy sells for about $350 dollars a ton. Not bad. And Whitehead says Visy is currently negotiating with the city to collect more paper.

City officials and recycling advocates agree: Visy Paper is an example of an innovative deal that leveraged the city's waste paper stream for economic and environmental benefits. But paper is only one part of the city's recycling program. Sanitation workers also collect metal, glass and plastic.


All of the metal and some of the plastic is sent outside New York to be processed into a useable form. Almost ALL of the glass actually ends up in landfills -- as a cover material, which is recycling, of a sort, in its lowest form. Recycling advocates want to know why big processors like Visy aren't being brought here to invigorate the market for these materials, and save this part of the recycling program. The difficulties, observers say, begin at the curb. Take glass, for instance. Although it has more value to processors if containers are kept whole, and sorted by color, the city mixes them together, and crushes them. At a recent city council committee hearing, Sanitation Deputy Commissioner Stephen Lawitz explained why the department decided to pick up glass in this manner.

Lawitz: There's a trade-off between the costs of collection and the costs of processing. The trade-off to collecting it in a way that separates the glass and keeps the containers intact, as high as our collection costs are now for metal, glass and plastic -- and they're nearly twice as high as regular garbage collection -- they would multiply many more times if the trucks and the crews had to take the time at each stop to separate the glass and keep it separate throughout the route.

Notice there's no mention of getting New Yorkers to sort their glass, plastic and metal. Sanitation officials have often maintained that, despite a recycling program that's been around for more than ten years, the general lack of apartment space, the high number of foreign-language speakers, and the anonymity of city living has made compliance difficult. For the department, the thought of requiring more sorting, and more rules, seems pie-in-the-sky.

These arguments annoy Marjorie Clark, with the Citywide Recycling Advisory Board.

Clark: We shouldn't really have to be having this conversation. If the sanitation department's recycling market development arm had continued to work throughout the 90's, we'd have solved the problem. Now, we're basically playing catch up.

So if the city cannot -- or will not -- sort its metal, glass and plastic at the curb, making it more attractive to buyers, what about bringing in companies like Visy who can more efficiently and profitably do something with the stuff, as it is? The technology to sort plastic resins and mixed, crushed glass exists. Ira Rubenstein (STEEN), with the Environmental Business Association of New York State, says the city could bring these companies to New York -- if it really wanted to.

Rubenstein: You know, that is one thing that the city has to its advantage. It has a very accomplished bureaucracy. It knows how to deal with complex projects -- it takes a while, often times longer than anyone would like, but it is very competent to do those things when it sets itself in that direction.

But Bob Balder, with the Economic Development Corporation -- a man many recycling advocates credit with almost single-handedly making the Visy Paper deal happen -- says metal, glass and plastic processing is technologically more difficult than paper, and more expensive. Balder says that, even though the sanitation department has huge quanitites of cheap, raw material, bringing an aluminum smelter or plastic resin separator to New York -- with its high labor and real estate costs -- is a tough sell.

Balder: It's almost like going back to the 70s, when we kept going, we have all this free energy from the sun, why can't we get it into my wall socket? You know, again, it's the economics of what it take to get to that end point that become the challenging thing. There's no clear solution that works the way paper did. So there's no magic bullet that looks like Visy that is going to come in and solve that problem.

Visy's Daryl Whitehead is willing to try.

Whitehead: Our company in Australia, we've gone into recycling plastic and recycling glass. If they want, we can either bring a bunch of our people out, and say, this is what we have done, or we'll take some of the city officials and say, hey, come to Australia, see what we've done, see what we can bring back to the States.

In the meantime, the city council and Mayor Bloomberg's aides are negotiating the budget, and what to do with the metal, glass and plastic program. Council officials are hoping the city's own laws, mandating recycling, will stop the mayor from suspending the program while sanitation officials look for a solution. For WNYC, I'm Amy Eddings Visit Visy Paper on the web