The price on recyclables varies by market demand. The price in MA is down right now. We read that some recylers are “walking out” on their contracts to buy them from local collecting authorities because their warehouses are full. If you are a local and don’t buy that it’s the ‘city folks’ doing the dumping. Even the state road crews just dump their old culverts, etc. over a bank somewhere.

Don’t leave waste behind

By crassly consuming resources and leaving behind waste, we’re dumping the cost of restoration on them. The measure of our humanity is the degree to which we conserve Earth’s bounties for those who follow in our footsteps, while sparing them the burden of cleaning up our messes.
 
This whining gets to the heart of why The Times would run such a sloppy piece–out of sheer desperation. With up to 223 million North Americans now surfing the World Wide Web–where superb up-to-the-minute news and features are readily available–The Times and other newspapers stand to lose readership and clout, not to mention advertisers.

But for The Times to blame recycling laws for its inability to maintain a competitive edge in a fast-changing field is like Detroit auto makers crying that fuel-efficiency requirements keep them from competing effectively against the Japanese.

The fact is The Times, like auto makers and other industries, needs to find more efficient ways of producing its product, rather than demanding a licence to destroy the environment in pursuit of profit.

Can you tell me about cities (in the US, primarily) that have taken steps to promote or encourage recycling of mixed office paper (or any office paper) by office buildings (multi or single tenant) in their jurisdiction? I am asking on behalf of the City & County of San Francisco, a very office-intensive town, which is trying to raise its recycling rate to the neighborhood of 50% in the foreseeable future.

Actual recycling programs

We’d like to get in touch with people who have been involved with both the outreach to businesses and the actual recycling programs, to see if an approach can be well adapted for Boston.

The city has strong programs, both public-sector and private-sector, in place for high-grade paper and newspaper; and commercial recycling companies serve many of the area’s big businesses, for those grades of paper and the mixed office waste papers using Boston dumpster rental services; but what can local gov’t do to promote these efforts further, help them grow into “lower” grades of paper, and increase the customer base?

What’s been done in your town? Who can we talk to to learn more about it? We will check on this message daily. Feel free to respond here or email, and thanks in advance.

Scavenging and junk buying have frequently appeared in development literature as symbols of urban environmental deterioration, human degradation and lost hopes.

Beyond these images, however, lies a reality in which these disparaged occupations provide refuge for the unemployed, a secure economic niche for particular ethnic, caste, or territorial communities, material inputs for local industries, commodities for export, and a means of diverting large amounts of recoverable materials from landfills and composting plants.

While the social and economic arrangements that provide the structure of these occupations differ in their particulars from city to city, some general characteristics are evident across their occurrence.