Steenstra's budgeting worries mount with each new load of cardboard, aluminum cans and plastic jugs dumped at West Virginia's largest county recycling center.
Faced with a dramatic slump in the recycling market, the director of the Kanawha County Solid Waste Authority has cut 20 of his 24 employees' work weeks to four days from five and is urging residents to hoard their recyclables after informing municipalities with curbside recycling programs that the center will accept only paper until further notice.
"The market is just not there anymore," Steenstra said.
Just months after riding an incredible high, the recycling market has tanked almost in lockstep with the global economic meltdown. As consumer demand for autos, appliances and new homes dropped, so did the steel and pulp mills' demand for scrap, paper and other recyclables.
Cardboard that sold for about $135 a ton in September is now going for $35 a ton. Plastic bottles have fallen from 25 cents to 2 cents a pound. Aluminum cans dropped nearly half, to about 40 cents a pound, and scrap metal tumbled from $525 a gross ton to about $100.
"It's never gone from so good to so bad so fast," said Marty Davis, president of Midland Davis Corp. in Pekin, Ill., who has been in the recycling business since 1975.
The recycling market has gotten so bad that haulers in Oregon and Nevada who were once paid for recyclables are now getting nothing or, in some cases, are having to pay to unload their wares.
In Washington state, what was once a multimillion-dollar revenue source for Seattle may become a liability next year as the city may have to start paying companies to take their materials.
Trey
Granger, spokesman for Earth911, a national environmental resource group, said the public's interest in recycling should be able to weather the downturn in an industry that has been growing for more than 30 years and has always been cyclical.
But the market shift is now jeopardizing hundreds of millions of dollars in long-term contracts for scrap metal as some companies that signed when prices were high are trying to cancel or postpone deliveries to take advantage of the cheaper spot market, Garino said.
Davis, of Midland Davis Corp. in Illinois, said he hopes to wait out the market and may rent warehouse space to store his more perishable recyclables, such as paper, until he can find buyers. He has some room to stockpile cans and plastics because in July, when prices were high, he unloaded more material than during any month in the past 10 years.
"It's going to be bleak for a while," he said. "We can just make our piles taller, and hopefully by spring, things will be a little better.”
Neither St. Louis County or St. Louis City is exempt from this situation which is affecting the recycling business nationwide. ABC Nightline recently presented an excellent program on this situation. You can view this at http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=6583361.
If this continues for an extended period, county residents will have two choices. One, start stock piling your recyclables until the recycle market goes back up. Second, don’t recycle and start throwing your recyclables in with your trash.
Speak up. What are your thoughts? How will Charley Dooley and the county council solve this dilemma?
Faced with a dramatic slump in the recycling market, the director of the Kanawha County Solid Waste Authority has cut 20 of his 24 employees' work weeks to four days from five and is urging residents to hoard their recyclables after informing municipalities with curbside recycling programs that the center will accept only paper until further notice.
"The market is just not there anymore," Steenstra said.
Just months after riding an incredible high, the recycling market has tanked almost in lockstep with the global economic meltdown. As consumer demand for autos, appliances and new homes dropped, so did the steel and pulp mills' demand for scrap, paper and other recyclables.
Cardboard that sold for about $135 a ton in September is now going for $35 a ton. Plastic bottles have fallen from 25 cents to 2 cents a pound. Aluminum cans dropped nearly half, to about 40 cents a pound, and scrap metal tumbled from $525 a gross ton to about $100.
"It's never gone from so good to so bad so fast," said Marty Davis, president of Midland Davis Corp. in Pekin, Ill., who has been in the recycling business since 1975.
The recycling market has gotten so bad that haulers in Oregon and Nevada who were once paid for recyclables are now getting nothing or, in some cases, are having to pay to unload their wares.
In Washington state, what was once a multimillion-dollar revenue source for Seattle may become a liability next year as the city may have to start paying companies to take their materials.
Trey
Granger, spokesman for Earth911, a national environmental resource group, said the public's interest in recycling should be able to weather the downturn in an industry that has been growing for more than 30 years and has always been cyclical.But the market shift is now jeopardizing hundreds of millions of dollars in long-term contracts for scrap metal as some companies that signed when prices were high are trying to cancel or postpone deliveries to take advantage of the cheaper spot market, Garino said.
Davis, of Midland Davis Corp. in Illinois, said he hopes to wait out the market and may rent warehouse space to store his more perishable recyclables, such as paper, until he can find buyers. He has some room to stockpile cans and plastics because in July, when prices were high, he unloaded more material than during any month in the past 10 years.
"It's going to be bleak for a while," he said. "We can just make our piles taller, and hopefully by spring, things will be a little better.”
Neither St. Louis County or St. Louis City is exempt from this situation which is affecting the recycling business nationwide. ABC Nightline recently presented an excellent program on this situation. You can view this at http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=6583361.
If this continues for an extended period, county residents will have two choices. One, start stock piling your recyclables until the recycle market goes back up. Second, don’t recycle and start throwing your recyclables in with your trash.
Speak up. What are your thoughts? How will Charley Dooley and the county council solve this dilemma?
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