It takes yesterday's trash and makes it into tomorrow's products. You could say the recycling industry is both noble... and lately, struggling. "If you want to look at recycling over the last two months, the news is really glum," said Susan Hubbard, the CEO of Eureka! Recycling, a non-profit organization that recycles trash in St. Paul. Hubbard says over the last nine years, Eureka's remained profitable until this fall. "Maybe we're getting three quarters of what we were getting for a bale of cardboard maybe a couple months ago. Dramatically, huge," Hubbard said. Indeed, the prices -- like so many in today's economy -- are startling. From January to November of this year, the price of cardboard has gone down from 110 dollars a ton to 45 dollars a ton. Newspapers have gone from 110 dollars to 70 dollars. Aluminum has gone from 80 cents a pound to 58 cents a pound. And plastic has gone from 20 cents a pound to just seven cents. Perhaps most dramatic: junk cars that could once get 500 bucks now are only worth 50 dollars. It's a drop in revenue for organizations, like Eureka, that amounts to deep cuts. "It really impacts, it obviously impacts the bottom line. Everybody's tightening up. We're tightening up," Hubbard said. But this is not just about the bottom line. Experts say the drop of profitability in recycling could also hurt our environment. "It also saves biodiversity because we're not cutting down ancient forests in order to produce paper. And it uses far less water, fewer chemicals less energy," said Eric Goldstein with the National Resources Defense Council. The recycling industry will continue to wait out this low period in the economy, hoping for some improvement. In the meantime, Eureka has already cut some administrators' pay. Hubbard expects the industry will absolutely rebound. She says it remains, by far, the most cost-efficient means of dealing with trash. Burning trash costs a lot more, she said.
(Copyright 2008 by KARE. All Rights Reserved.)
