NEW YORK, NY July 08, 2003 — Plastic recycling is back, and glass recycling will resume in nine months. City councilmembers, who had been pushing Mayor Michael Bloomberg to bring back the full recycling program, were pleased with the deal, which was worked out in the recent budget agreement. But the push to bring back plastic - and, especially, glass - has caught residents and even the city's recycling contractor off guard. WNYC's Amy Eddings reports.

Ask New Yorkers if they know what the recycling rules are, and you'll find that many of them haven't a clue.

Man: They're supposed to bring back recycling, is what I hear? But I'm not sure if that applies to cans or glass or plastic or what not.

Woman #2: I believe that they used to process the plastics and the cardboards together. But now everything has a separate place.

Man #2: Recycling rules? Yeah, paper only. That's what I believe.

Man #3: Supposed to recycle the glass now? Is that it?

Woman #3: No, I have no idea, but whatever they are, I'm sure they're very stupid and unecological.

Man #4: Oh, no, I'm not interested in recycling. With everything going on in the world and this is all you got to say about is recycling?

Here's the deal: paper gets recycled. Metal cans get recycled, in a separate bin. And, as of last week, plastic bottles and jugs get recycled, in the same bin as the metal.

But who can blame New Yorkers for being confused? In the last year, the rules on plastic have flip-flopped, from Yes, recycle it, to No, throw it away, back to Yes, yes, recycle it. And in the coming nine months, recycling pick-ups will change from once a week, to every other week, back to once a week again.

Recycling advocates like Mark Izeman, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, agree that these frequent changes aren't a good way to instill recycling habits.

Izeman: Well, cutting back to every other week, recycling for a temporary period of time, will cause some confusion among New Yorkers. But viewing this in the big picture, we're bringing back plastic and glass, after spending a year in which those materials were suspended. And we've now realized more clearly that recycling is the best way to go if the city wants to save money.

During last year's budget negotiations, Mayor Michael Bloomberg had argued that recycling was ineffective, and costly. Plastic recycling was suspended for a year - it was resumed last week. And glass, the most difficult material to recycle, was suspended until July of 2004. During the most recent budget negotiations, the administration committed itself to bringing glass back by April, three months earlier than originally planned. Michael McMahon is a councilmember from Staten Island and he chairs the council's sanitation committee.

McMahon: What we've done now is guaranteed that glass will be back, and it will be back April first, sooner than even the current law mandates. So that's what's really the great success and the great victory for proponents of recycling.

McMahon says pushing the starting date from July to April was important, because he thinks it will prevent glass recycling from becoming a pawn in future budget negotiations, which usually heat up in June.

But the April 1st start-up for glass has surprised an important player in the city's recycling drama. That player is the New Jersey scrap metal company, Hugo Neu Schnitzer East, which is taking the city's metal and plastic. Hugo Neu also has the lowest bid on the table to take glass. At $51 a ton, it would finally make the cost of processing the city's recycling less expensive than processing its trash. Robert Kelman is the company's general manager.

Kelman: Our bid was to begin for July 1st, 2004. We lowered our bid in the spring in anticipation of glass at least being discussed to be brought back by law for next year. But we did it also because we needed the lead time to permit, design and build the proper facility that we are planning on putting in to our Bronx location. By stepping up the date to April 1st, it just makes it that much more difficult to get it done.

Kelman wants to invest between twelve and fifteen million dollars in high-tech machines that will sort the city's broken glass by color. Doing that will make the city's mixed, crushed glass more marketable. But the city hasn't sealed the deal with Kelman. It also hasn't put out a request for proposals for glass recycling that would allow companies to come up with arrangements that are more creative than the city's standard contract. Those contracts last for five years and allows the city to back out with only ten days' notice and they're a big risk for Hugo Neu, or any company that wants the city's recycling business.

Kelman: The longer-term view is the best view. And that planning and investment for the next 10 to 20 years, that incorporates a very strong, robust and well-invested recycling program, is in everyone's best interests, it is in the economic best interests of this city and all its residents.

When asked if the city will be ready by April to bring back glass, Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty would only say, that's what the budget agreement calls for. And he says Hugo Neu is free to back out if the new start date ends up being unrealistic.

Doherty: They could say we don't want it. But we aren't going to rush out and enter into a contract that quickly. We have to look at it a bit more and be sure that that's the way we want to go, and see what happens.

But the time to get an effective glass recycling program up and running has been reduced by three months. Recycling advocates believe it can be achieved by next April. But they say the city must act quickly, if it wants to bring back a full-scale recycling program next year that will be substantially less expensive than throwing glass, plastic and metal in the trash. For WNYC, I'm Amy Eddings.

This story was reported with assistance from Kathleen Horan.