It’s trash day. Take a look around your neighborhood and compare the size of the garbage cans to the recycling bins. How big are those garbage cans? How many of them do you and your neighbors have? How big are the recycling bins?

It’s likely the trash can is probably at least five or six times larger then your recycling bin – assuming that your recycling bin is totally full and your trash can is not. The differential is probably even greater in many cases, such after a spring cleaning or a party where you’ve generated a lot of trash.

Recycling sounds great. We like to pad ourselves on the back for those couple of No 1 and No 2 plastic bottles and a few tin cans we put out separate from the recycling bin. We are doing a good thing, we tell ourselves, keeping the trash out of the landfill. Not only that but we are giving the politicians something to brag about. Play with those numbers a little bit and our recycling efforts look like we are doing a lot to keep trash out of the landfill and into new products that we can buy once again at the store.

The good people of Albany recycle 38% of their residential trash, according to figures from the city of Albany. This is all because of your hard work, washing out those tins cans, and putting them out in the pretty blue bins. That’s the trash you and I generate, and not the trash those big evil corporations, clearly not acting on our behalf. We must be doing good our elected officials like to tell us.

In providing this excellent statistic they also were kind enough to provide a table of what makes up the trash that we are doing such a good job at recycling.

(Source: City of Albany 2006 Recycling Numbers, From a FOIL Request By the Save the Pine Bush)

Albany’s residents worked so hard and recycled 20,011 tons of solid waste last year. The remaining 31,567 tons of Albany’s residential waste was landfilled. That’s a 38.8% recycling rate. Doesn’t that just make you proud. Not only was all that pretty paper, glass, metal, and plastic was kept out of the landfill, but so where those tires and that drier you left on the street corner, along with those branches, leaves, and household hazardous wastes.

Let’s now come back to reality for the city. On trash day, most people put out to trash bins – one small one for recycling paper, along with one for recycling certain glass, metal, and plastic products. The other big one is for trash. There is not a bin for dumping your old washing machine in, one for hazardous wastes, one for the old tires on your car, and certainly not one for contaminated soil.

If you subtract out things from the recycling rate that clearly are not being recycled in the conventional way – household hazardous waste, tires, and dirt, your recycling rate drops down to 23%. Household hazardous waste is sold to a contractor which may recover some chemicals, neutralize others, and send some of them to a landfill or incinerator for disposal. Not exactly recycling. Tires are sent to LaFarge to be burned as energy, not exactly recycling either. Contaminated soils, the largest “recycled” material are used as landfill daily cover – not exactly recycling in the conventional sense.

Indeed, those materials could have been dumped directly on the landfill and not been used beneficially in a secondary life. But that is far from the notion of conventional recycling as it is posed to the public as a whole. We are told recycling is done with the blue bin, not something that happens behind the scenes at a massive waste processing facility. No residents throw asphalt, concrete, or dirt spoils in a special trash can for recycling except for the city. Yet, the law considers it residential waste, and it’s beneficial use, so it’s considered recycling.

The city recycled 266 tones of white goods last year, such as refrigerators, stoves, and washing machines. That’s a residential waste according to the city’s official numbers. The city sold those appliances to Hudson Scrap Metals at the port. Those appliances were crushed and shipped by barge on down to a massive scrap yard where they were shredded. About 2/3 of those shreds were melted down into a low quality alloy in a massive electric arc furnace, about a 1/3 was shipped off as shredder residue to andfill in Georgia or another massive dump in a southern state. At end of the day about 177 tons became metal used as low grade steel, while 89 tons supposedly recycled where actually landfilled in an out of state landfill.

Yard waste is another massive category of waste the city has to dispose of throughout the year. Trees in the city fall down, leaves are piled up and need disposal, and grass clippings are left for collection. The city hauls them off to a composting center north of the city, located upon an old city landfill. They grind up the woody brush and turn this into mulch. They compost leaves and grass, after mixing it with a non-residential nitrogen rich waste to turn it into compost. These are two separate inputs and end products, despite often being hauled in the same trucks to the compost facility.

Yet is this trash and recycling in the conventional sense? Leaf litter doesn’t go in that pretty blue bin. It’s a totally separate type of waste that theoretically could be landfilled, but as a practical matter again is not part of the waste stream we consider to be garbage. It still is a big portion of what the city considers to be recycled every year, even if we don’t necessarily think of it as a recycling operation. A lot of the leaf waste does not come from residents per say, but is generated by normal city activities such as park maintenance and urban forestry. The law still considers it to be a residential waste even though it’s generated largely by government.

If you take out all “recycled materials” from consideration besides paper and the GMP categories, and compare it the solid waste generated, you find the true city-wide recycling rate is more like 12.5%. That assumes that all of diverted waste is totally diverted from the landfill – which is unlikely. Probably between the city’s own MRF and Sierra Fiber’s processing as broker about 20% of the designated recyclables get discarded in our landfill. When the final processor recycles the material another 30% is likely disposed of elsewhere as contaminated material without any use.

In addition, the definition of residential waste can be obscure and excludes many sources of waste created in residential life. Construction debris, a major component of solid waste and the Rapp Road landfill is not considered under the definition of residential solid waste. That can include everything from building materials to many appliances people have discarded. Cars that every 5-10 years we discard, are not counted as residential waste when they are crushed and sent to be shredded and landfilled (at a rate of half ton per car) down in New Jersey scrap yards. Moreover, people who live in large buildings with more then 4 people do not generate residential waste under city ordinance, and are not counted. Nobody has numbers to find out at what rate they recycle.

Very little waste dumped at the landfill was actually residential waste from city residents. Indeed, 31,567 tons of waste where landfilled from residential streams in the city of Albany. This pales in contrast to 252,000 tons the city buries in the landfill per year (1,000 tons per day x avg 21 days per month x 12 months per year). About 12.3% of the waste landfilled at the landfill was residential waste from the city. Moreover, the numbers the city provides for recycling only deals with a relatively tiny portion of waste processed by the city.

At any rate, Albany’s recycling numbers are not that rosy despite what people may say. Indeed, the ‘cheating’ on recycling rates is widespread across our country. There is enormous pressure to inflate numbers and make things appear better then they are. Inflating the numbers make you not only look green, it also justifies consumption and the continued expenditures for recycling programs that do little to actually divert waste from the landfill.