NEW YORK, NY November 26, 2003 — Stability is not a word anyone would use to describe the city's current recycling program, battered by cuts and pickup changes in the last year and a half. But behind the scenes, the city's been seeking proposals that are expected to radically improve the recycling of metal, plastic and glass. Today's the deadline for those proposals, and they come at a time when even seasoned recyclers have been feeling confused and defeated. WNYC's Amy Eddings reports.

Last August, while New Yorkers were trying to figure out which plastic jug or bottle got added to the recycling bin, the Sanitation Department dramatically changed its approach to the recycling of plastic, metal and glass. Many environmental advocates said that, for once, it was a change for the better. With little fanfare, the Sanitation Department issued a request for proposals to develop a long-term, cost-effective strategy.

Lange: To describe the RFP, best described as one of the most significant or most positive changes to recycling in probably the last decade.

Bob Lange is the director of the city's recycling program. He believes the biggest asset is the proposed contract's length. Unlike typical recycling contracts, which are good for five years, this one's for twenty years.

Lange: That provides you with the kind of stability that's both useful for the city, in terms of its expenses, and for the business community for receiving and providing those services.

But that's not the only possible benefit. The city is looking for companies that will reduce truck traffic and use unloading facilities so that lines of sanitation trucks are kept to a minimum. It will give extra weight to proposals that encourage new markets for recycled materials .perhaps spawning local companies that, say, make lumber out of plastic. Jim Tripp is with the group Environmental Defense.

Tripp: If we're really lucky, some processing type of firm will come in with a bid, and a consortium of end users that would be willing to invest in New York City and make products here the way the Visy Paper plant is making them.

Visy built a multi-million dollar paper mill on Staten Island that employees 150 people, based on the twenty-year contract it has to process a big chunk of the city's recycled paper. This deal makes money for the city. That's why Mayor Michael Bloomberg spared paper when he proposed recycling cuts. But plastic and glass WERE suspended . only to have critics like City Comptroller William Thompson argue that it was more expensive to send the material to landfills. Mark Izeman, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, believes the RFP is proof the city has realized this.

Izeman: We didn't save the forty million dollars that the administration had projected; the new figures show that recycling can save New York City money. And indeed, the turnaround in the recycling program over the last year is due in large part to greater recognizition by city officials of the cost effectiveness of recycling.

Recycling director Bob Lange argues that the idea for a long-term metal, plastic and glass contract had been around for at least six years but he concedes that the fiscal crisis, and the attention being paid to recycling, put the idea into action.

And action will be needed to get recycling back on track. Even the city's most dedicated recyclers are stymied by the recent changes, especially the alternate week pickups. Nancy Aleksei lives in Maspeth, Queens .one of the city's top recycling neighborhoods.

Aleksei: Like, with some of the paper things, we're just throwing them in the garbage. Because we have so much piled up, that we have no place left to put it.

Others residents, such as Mary Ellen O'Keefe and Pat Cosgrove, say they're still recycling as carefully as they used to.

O'Keefe: Oh I still do it. I still do it.

Pat Cosgrove: You have to, I mean, that's what we have to do. Otherwise, we'll get a ticket if we don't do it.

Amy: I'm just wondering if there's a tendency, when you run out of space to just throw it away.

O'Keefe: There is. You'd be lying if you said there wasn't!

Cosgrove: There is. (Laughing) We don't do it!

WNYC found that in the city's top fifteen recycling districts, in neighborhoods like Maspeth, the Upper West Side, Woodlawn, and Bay Ridge, people are less successful in recycling the city's targeted materials than they were a year and a half ago, when the city first made cuts to recycling. This success is expressed in the capture rate. This is the percentage of the total targeted recyclables in the waste stream that are properly ending up in recycling bins.

The average capture rate has dropped by fifteen percent in the city's top districts.

The city's recycling director says it's hard to really know what is causing the decline, because the baseline data used to calculate the capture rate are fourteen years old. But Kendall Christiansen, co-chair of the Citywide Recycling Advisory Board, sees it differently.

Christiansen: Well, it says to me that it's pretty confusing out there. I know that because every day, neighbors, strangers, people on the subway, ask me what to recycle and when.

Christiansen says the city is going to have to work extra hard to re-instill good recycling habits in its citizens next spring. That's when glass recycling is expected to return, and it's also when the city will announce the winning proposal for the twenty year contract. Until then, remember, the city recycles only paper, metal, and plastic bottles and jugs. For WNYC, I'm Amy Eddings.