As those who have followed my last several Web logs will recall, I was invited to take part in a roundtable of editors discussing recycling issues at last week’s Resource Recycling Conference at San Antonio, TX. Before going any further, let me say that event host, Jerry Powell, and his staff are to be roundly congratulated for the sensational job they did in putting together an extremely interesting and well-organized conference.
There were a number of take-aways that I will be discussing over the next several weeks, but one that ranks high on the list relates to one of the questions to which we editors were asked to respond, namely; Similar to SWANA, NSWMA, or ISRI, should there be an association of municipal recycling organizations formed to tie together groups such as RCBC, RCA and RCO?
While the answer to the question should is yes, the real question is can such an association exist? And I think it is here that recycling advocates continue to run into difficulty. While the waste management associations have their constituencies, their differences are subservient to their basic purpose, which is the advancement of safe, efficient, and effective practices and operations. In recycling, however, the differences between groups often outweigh the fundamental pursuits, in some cases becoming irreconcilable.
I spoke with people opposed to conversion to energy of wastestream materials—even those beyond the reach of present-day recycling processes—on the basis that this effectively raised a barrier to increased recycling. Others welcomed innovative diversion practices, while what I suspect to be the majority considered that the current practice of shipping materials offshore was an acceptable approach to recycling. Personally I would have liked to have seen a session where the proponents of these different approaches engaged in debate, but I don’t imagine that anything like consensus would emerge.