he world's biggest blender towers two stories high. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, a steamy gray slurry churns in its maw. Beneath the mammoth Cuisinart is a 2,000-ton mountain made of all things paper -- computer printouts, file folders, glossy magazines, telephone books, paperbacks, wrapping paper, pizza boxes, school notebooks, and fruit cartons. Every so often, a huge metal claw grabs a 7-ton handful and releases it into the blender's milkshake mix, which sends off a swirl of flying confetti as the paper hits the blades. On down the line, with the help of some hot water, a little cornstarch, and a lot of squeezing, drying, and pressing, rolls of smooth, clean paper will spool out at the other end of the Visy paper mill.
Visy is located on New York's Staten Island. Its slogan is "Harvesting the urban forest," and it delivers on the promise. The plant recycles nearly 1,200 tons of paper waste daily, producing the equivalent of about 650,000 new cardboard boxes. Visy claims it saves about 11,700 trees a day and uses, in the process, only about 10 percent of the electricity a virgin-wood pulping facility would use. On top of all that, New York City is actually saving money by selling its residents' scrap paper to Visy. The whole thing is as feel-good as recycling is supposed to be -- down to the big family portrait of the Pratt clan, which owns Visy, hanging in the main conference room. But before you start to feel all warm and fuzzy, consider: Companies like the Visy paper mill are rare. And recycling is in trouble.
hree decades ago, Americans threw themselves into the recycling revolution like couch potatoes becoming fitness fanatics. Today, we've hit a plateau. "I hate to use the term, but recycling is clearly not as sexy as it was," says Steve Kullen of America Recycles Day, a public-education nonprofit.
In recent years, the proportion of trash that Americans recycle has barely grown -- crawling from 26 percent in 1995 to 30 percent in 2000. In 2001, the recycling rate of aluminum beverage cans dropped below 50 percent for the first time in fifteen years. A record nineteen states dropped glass from one or more of their curbside programs last year.
Nonetheless, the public's desire to recycle remains strong; after all, more people in this country recycle than vote. But maybe good intentions aren't good enough. Maybe money is what makes the world go round. That was certainly the message New York City sent on July 1, when it suspended recycling of plastic for one year and glass for two. "Not cost-effective," said Mayor Bloomberg. The city calculates that recycling metal, glass, and plastic costs about $100 more per ton than sending it to out-of-state landfills, and that consigning glass and plastic to the dump will save more than $40 million a year.
Take a stroll today through New York City, the biggest garbage producer in the country, and you'll notice overflowing trash cans at the curb. Next to them are recycling bins that used to be full of glass and plastic as well as metal, but now hold only a few cat-food tins. Lots of garbage trucks, too -- making additional trips to pick up the additional trash. True, a $5 billion budget deficit does force one to set priorities. "I never got the impression from anyone I spoke with that there was antipathy to recycling," says Laura Haight of the nonprofit New York Public Interest Research Group. "It was more along the lines of, 'Is it going to be infant mortality programs, or is it going to be recycling?'"
