City Saves Money By Trashing The Recycling Program

Ocean City, Maryland turns into a bustling beach community four months out of the year, and the influx of tourists brings a heavy increase in trash.

After 23 years of recycling, Ocean City has decided to scrap the program, saving one million dollars every year as a result. CBS shows us why this city decided to trash their recycling program, and why others may soon follow.

WATCH city trashes recycling program:

Do you think Ocean City was right to trash its recycling program?

Comments

[Dogs And Cats]

12:16 AM on 06/10/2010

Cities that don't have recycling should be levied a tax to help pay for environmental cleanup. Perhaps some of it could go to the BP spill since plastics, nearly all of which are recycled in some cities, comes from petroleum.

[djgonebad]

01:39 AM on 06/04/2010

Having moved out of Detroit, where there isn't a recycling program, and to Dearborn- I must say my family is happy that the city (Dearborn) is expanding their program, by giving the citizens bigger trash and recycling containers.

HAPPY, HAPPY TIME!!!

[Reginald Whibbey]

12:20 AM on 06/04/2010

if the recycle program is not profitable then scrap the management not the program. In america there are 1.05 tons of waste per person per year, that is enough for profit.If recycling is a drain then it is letting you know that stupid people are running it, get the stupid people out. Don't go backwards. but then again politicians are not very smart.

[Cdangers]

11:51 PM on 06/03/2010

Americans are so funny.

[Bellla]

07:55 PM on 06/03/2010

This is ridiculous. I run my towns recycling center and when the town had budget trouble and cut the recycling budget I turned my recycling center into a self sustaining department, by seeking out the best deals for scrap metal resale and making a profit on materials that used to be given away. Any recycling center should be self sufficient and not be a drain on it's municipality. I'd bet a change of management style would make a world of difference. Recycling has to turn a profit or it will always be the first thing to get chopped.

[iisguy]

05:27 PM on 06/03/2010

Pay it backward

[LibDrummer]

04:33 PM on 06/03/2010

Recycling from companies is usually just a front anyway. It takes 4 qts of oil to make a printer toner cartridge. Remanufactured cartridges often outperform the oem and cost almost half as much. Companies that refuse to even try them include:

Coke

Home Depot

Wachovia

Ban of America

Those 4 alone could save millions of dollars but do not bother because it is just not important to them.

[Blago 2012]

01:41 AM on 06/04/2010

Where did you find this information on those companies you cite? I work for Coca Cola so maybe you know something I dont

[Benover de Viros]

05:26 PM on 06/06/2010

Answer the question then. Does Coke use remanufactured cartridges or not?

[edejan]

02:32 PM on 06/03/2010

LastAngryWoman, I too thought we were on the road to recycling nirvana after the envrionmental awarenss movement started by Rachel Carsons' book, "Silent Spring." Unfortunately, our country/world is not run by people who read that book or who have any concern whatsoever about anything but keeping the money machine going. My last gasping efforts to do something positive on a personal level was to move to a small town, buy a house with a large yard and do my own composting and grow my own organic vegetables. I feel much happier now that many of my brain synapses have been damaged by old age and disease, and suggest to anyone of the older age to do what you can on a personal basis since the world is going to hell anyway. (What good would REAL recycling do anyway in view of the Gulf Oil "Spill" or oil volcano, as I like to think of it.) Now with the space program scrapped, we can't even hope to escapse to another earthlike planet when we've totally trashed ours.

[Kristen1975]

11:55 AM on 06/03/2010

Waste energy plant is recycling, right? I think they need to watch WALL-E.

[willowsbasket]

11:02 AM on 06/03/2010

Yes. They are right to trash the recycling program.

Why have 2 sets of trucks banging their way through residential neighborhoods? Twice the amount of equipment to maintain, twice the number of employees to pay. Then the stuff is trucked miles and miles to a recycling center to be sorted, then trucked miles and miles again to points of re-use. Makes no sense at all.

What does make sense is to reduce consumption in the first place!

[paulschechter]

12:10 PM on 06/03/2010

You stated that makes no sense to recycle because you would need twice the amount of equipment, twice the trucked miles, etc. You are forgetting about the embodied energy needed to make products from virgin materials. How many miles do you think are required to harvest trees in Canada, create paper, and ship it to Florida? Why not just recycle paper that's already in Florida? How much energy is required to ship oil from the Middle East in order to make plastic in America? What about the energy required to mine Bauxite (the principal ore used to make aluminium) and ship it from Australia to the US (the US currently imports 100% of it's bauxite from other countries--primarily Australia)? Did you know that extracting aluminium from Bauxite is extremely energy intensive and production from recycled materials only requires 5% of the energy as production from the ore? Bauxite is also usually strip mined, which is incredibly environmentally damaging.

Recycling does make sense from an energy and resource prospective. Here is an informative website: http://www.ecocycle.org/tidbits/ and some of the salient points are below:
- Recycling glass instead of making it from silica sand reduces mining waste by 70%, water use by 50%, and air pollution by 20%.
- Recycling 1 ton of paper saves 17 trees, 2 barrels of oil (enough to run the average car for 1,260 miles), 4,100 kilowatts of energy, 3.2 cubic yards of landfill space, and 60 pounds of air pollution.

[Benover de Viros]

05:27 PM on 06/06/2010

Ding-Ding

[LastAngryWoman]

09:40 AM on 06/03/2010

Sorry to carry on so...but it really bugs me.

I thought, as a child in the late sixties and a teen in the seventies...that by 2010, brilliant minds would have some sort of system in place where we all chip in to deal with our personal responsibility with our own waste and a shared responsibility with our communities and neighbours.

Thirty, forty years later, and not much. It's as though we all had a brain freeze after the gas lines ended in the seventies and we collectively decided the problem was over and now we can just go back to business as usual.

Which is to say; Consume, Baby, Consume! and Dump, Baby, Dump!

[LastAngryWoman]

09:36 AM on 06/03/2010

continued ...

I found out that our 'wet' waste did not have and does not have a location to be dumped.

But they nevertheless require us to fill our plastic see-through (so they can monitor what's in it) green bags with 'wet' waste, ie compost waste, in the same manner as usual.

The the compost or 'wet' waste bags are dumped in....are you ready?

They are dumped in the regular old dump with the 'icky' waste. Same exact place.

For five years, I have been loading compost into little plastic bags and dumping them in the same blo.ody dump as the rest. But now there are millions of pretty different coloured plastic bags decorating the dump site.

I called them. "They're working on it. Please continue sorting."

[LastAngryWoman]

09:31 AM on 06/03/2010

I live in a Milo Minderbinder city. (see Catch 22)

We have a recycling 'program' here.

When we moved here five years ago, we were told we must separate all our waste into three categories: Dry, Wet, and Waste.

Each type needs to go in a different coloured plastic bag (oil anyone?) and put out for collection. Each bag must be labelled and correctly sorted or it will NOT be picked up. If you can't get rid of something...you must take it to the recycle/dump, where they charge 2 bucks per bag to dump.

Sound good? I thought so. Maybe. I was a bit concerned about all these plastic bags, though.

Fast forward five years to the present.

Guess what I found out?

to be continued...

[sandzw007]

07:54 AM on 06/03/2010

How about keeping the recycling and use the products from recycling to create income. You can make and capture methane, recycle and sell plastic, scrap metal, glass and paper, create jobs. Time to make glass containers again (with recycled glass). Be an innovator and help create and sustain this newer type of industry. How about making your own bio diesel and use hybrid cars to save money.....and on and on. When will we see some true American innovation and creativity? The time is now to change not to give up and continue the bad habits that get us into trouble.

[tjohnson]

12:01 AM on 06/03/2010

I think all cities sould trash their recycling programs.
Although, trash is a problem, I’m not as concerned about it. It's not as big of a problem as energy waist and gluttonous product consumption.
Believe it or not - the way we recycle is actually a problem. It uses a HUGE amount of energy - and most recycling isn’t profitable (Only aluminum is profitable - Most of it is subsidized...by the taxpayer). Instead of re-cycling, we should be re-using.
Re-using vs. Re-cycling: Re-cycling involves turning something used into a new product, Re-using is using the same product until it can no longer be used.
It is expensive and hugely energy intensive to re-cycle glass and plastic....in turn it is a huge waist of fuel and bad for the environment.
Energy is the big problem - not trash. But the two are related - if we "made" less trash - we would use less energy - and vice versa. The problem is consumption in the first place.
A good program may be the city to charge residents for their trash, by the pound, regardless if the trash is recyclable or not. If it is profitable to recycle it, somebody will get in the busness to pay you for it.
What happened to returnable beer and soda bottles and milk bottles?