When Columbia抯 curbside recycling program started 20 years ago, it was little more than an $11,000 blip on the city抯 solid-waste budget. In 1986, its first full year of monthly curbside service, the collections were made by a temporary worker with a trailer pulled behind a pickup.

City recycling has since become a $1.6 million per year operation, with 17 full-time employees, 25 temporary employees, six collection trucks, seven drop-off locations and, most recently, the 26,000 square-foot Material Recovery Facility located near the municipal landfill on Peabody Road. Added to that list are programs for collecting white goods and household hazardous waste.

Columbia抯 recycling program is one of the state抯 best, said Matt Harline, director of the Mid-Missouri Solid Waste Management District, which supports recycling projects in an eight-county area.

On paper, at least, the city recycling program also had a net cost of $963,993 in fiscal 2005, according to city figures.

揑t costs a lot to recycle,?said Sarah Talbert, a financial management specialist with the Department of Public Works. 揅osts just keep going up.?

The data indicates that over the past two decades, the more Columbia residents recycled, the more money the program lost. Since 2000, collected tonnage and recycling program losses increased by nearly 80 percent, though cost per ton has decreased since the program抯 beginning.

The main reason the recycling program is not able to support itself is because as the tonnage of recycled materials grows, the costs of collecting the materials and administering the program also increase proportionally, Talbert said, but revenues do not. That means the majority of recycling costs must instead be covered by city residents who pay a monthly solid-waste utility bill that includes $2.06 earmarked for recycling. The majority of the rest of the bill goes toward trash and yard debris pick-up.

The city took a step toward boosting short-term revenues by opening the $1.3 million recycling facility at the landfill in 2002, which enabled the city to process and sell recycled materials. But the facility is dealing with a host of difficulties, including the high costs of contamination and manual sorting. In order to recoup some of the costs the city sells the recycled material. However, the markets for the materials fluctuate month-to-month so even this method of making money is somewhat unreliable. So even though revenues skyrocketed from $37,000 in the year before the facility opened to $634,450 this fiscal year, that still is not enough to cover its day-to-day operations, much less the building抯 financing and depreciation costs.

To cover those expenses, the city ratcheted up monthly solid-waste bills from $9.85 to $11.17 per month in three phases. The first two phases were a 45-cent increase and the last phase was a 42-cent increase. All of the revenues from the increase went to the material recovery facility.

But when it comes to recycling, numbers are only half the story, Harline said.

According to a 2003 national study by the Environmental Protection Agency抯 Office of Solid Waste, the direct costs of operating a municipal recycling program typically are higher than the would-be costs of collecting and disposing of the goods as trash. And like Columbia, such programs are usually supplemented by user fees.

Nevertheless, the study finds recycling to be socially beneficial up to a cost of $425 per ton when advantages such as reduced landfilling and pollution are taken into account. Recycling in Columbia cost $116 per ton last year.

揑f you use most companies?fiscal-quarter outlook on life, then yes, it is more efficient on that scale to put stuff in the landfill,?Harline said. 揃ut if you抮e looking in the long term, it makes sense to recycle.?/p>

To illustrate the value of curbside recycling ?even when it costs ?Harline said he likes to compare the programs in Columbia and Jefferson City. Columbia recycles nine separate types of paper along with plastics, metals and glass, while Jefferson City recycles just three items: newspapers, cardboard and magazines. Columbia抯 program brought in 8,337 tons last year; Jefferson City just 346 tons.

And yet, because Jefferson City only offers drop-off rather than curbside recycling, its costs are low, and it typically receives payment from the private company that picks up recyclables.

揟he city of Jefferson can say without batting an eye that their recycling program makes money. At the same time, they have much, much less tonnage and much less impact on the environment,?Harline said. 揅olumbia recycles 8,337 tons a year, and it costs.?/p>

揟he question is, which is better? Maybe someone in finance will tell you Jefferson抯 program is much better,?he said. 揑 wouldn抰 tell you that.?/p>

CURBSIDE WOES

Even in the short term, most recycling makes clear financial sense. Across the country the number of private recycling companies is on the rise. In Missouri alone there are 1,228 recycling-related establishments that together employ more than 28,000 people, according to a 2005 study on the statewide economic impact of recycling by the MU抯 Institute for Public Policy. All told, direct yearly sales from these Missouri companies top $5.1 billion.

揟hey抮e not in it solely to get to heaven,?Harline said of these private recyclers. 揟hose businesses are either profitable or they go away.?/p>

To remain profitable, many companies steer clear of municipal curbside programs, which typically require stops at thousands of homes just to net a few tons of contaminated materials that need to be sorted and processed before they can be sold. Instead, most private firms prefer to focus on higher-volume commercial recycling, where a single stop can yield a ton or more of clean, presorted material.

Originally, Columbia residents pre-sorted all their recyclables, which were collected by the city in partitioned flatbed trucks and then processed by Civic Recycling, a private company. While that system made the material relatively easy and inexpensive to process, household participation hovered at around 5 percent.

In 1998, the city switched to a program designed to ease the burden on residents. It requires that fiber materials such as paper and containers be presorted. Containers are to be put in blue bags, that are distributed free of charge to households. Papers and fibers can be bundled with string or placed in a recyclable non-plastic container, such as cardboard or a paper bag. Participation surged, and within a year collected curbside tonnage tripled.

But dealing with the recyclables was so labor-intensive and inefficient that Civic Recycling ended its contract with the city in 2001 to focus instead on commercial recycling, said Cynthia Mitchell, superintendent of both the landfill and the material recovery facility.

Rather than find another contractor, the city decided to tackle sorting on its own. Within a year and a half of building the recycling facility, the waste management district awarded the facility nearly $500,000 in grants for equipment such as a baler and fiber and container sort lines, which enable recyclables to be processed and baled on-site as well.

Before the recycling facility opened, the program抯 annual tonnage was just shy of 5,000 tons. Lowell Patterson, then-director of the Public Works Department, said the new facility would begin to pay off when the volume of recyclable material reached about 7,000 tons per year. This year, the facility processed 8,300 tons, and while revenues from the recycled materials were $147,000 short of covering the costs of running and staffing the facility, Mitchell said the recycling facility doesn抰 need to be totally self-sufficient to be a winning proposition.

揑f we didn抰 recycle and just put everything in the landfill, we抮e taking up the landfill space and our cost on that is $32.50 per ton,?she said. 揝o it抯 good, of course, to have an operational goal of balancing things out, but if we can keep (the cost of running the facility) cheaper than going in the landfill, we feel like it抯 worth it.?/p>

In its first year of operation the facility lost $49 per ton on recyclables. In 2004 it lost $33 per ton and in 2005, for the first time, the losses came in below the landfill fee, at $18 per ton.

SYSTEMIC INEFFICIENCIES

Winter is always a boom time for recycling in Columbia, and these days the recycling facility is running at maximum capacity. A backlog of recycled goods that have yet to be sorted and baled are crammed onto the 10,000-square-foot tipping floor, piled into virtual mountains of paper and blue bags. Though Mitchell recently extended the facility抯 operations to 80 hours per week, the two 11-person crews still can抰 keep up with the daily influx of 20 tons to 40 tons of recyclables. For now a portion is shipped each week to a 搒ingle-stream?plant in St. Louis that doesn抰 presort recyclables.

Sorting through the items remains the most tedious part of the process, as well as the major obstacle to achieving profitability, Harline said. At larger, higher-volume facilities that process upward of 13,000 tons per month, the sorting work is almost entirely automated. But with the city's comparatively low volume, the only automated part of the sorting process is a magnet for cans.

The biggest problem doesn抰 come from the collection of the blue bags, but from the way the city collects the materials, Mitchell said. Residents are asked to separate blue bags, paper and fiber bundles and yard debris at the curb, but the trucks used to collect recyclables are double-hoppers, with only two separate storage compartments.

That means yard debris ?which is collected year-round in Columbia ?is put in one of the two compartments, while the paper and fiber bundles and blue bags are thrown together in the other hopper. As the tonnage in the hopper increases, the once-sorted paper and containers often get squished together. Glass can break and tear the bags, allowing the containers to mix with the fibers, she says, and if blue bags are not tied tightly, the problem is even worse.

There are a variety of technologies that could prevent this predicament, such as automated or triple-hopper trucks, but Mitchell said it抯 simply a trade-off between equipment costs and sorting efficiency.

揝o far the city has preferred to invest in manual labor and keep the number of trucks on the street limited,?she said.

Another obstacle to the program抯 efficiency is contamination.

Rick Hudnell, a shift supervisor at the recycling facility who has worked with the program for seven years, said he抯 been splattered with motor oil, stuck his hands into blue bags full of fish guts and dirty diapers and pulled out an array of siding, timber and appliances. He estimates that while 80 percent of residents know what belongs in the blue bags and follow accordingly, the other 20 percent either don抰 know or don抰 care.

揥e deal with so much contamination, it抯 unbelievable,?Mitchell said. 揝ome people don抰 know, but some people are just being mean.?/p>

Yet another problem is that the city抯 recycling program has 17 full-time employees, but only three work at the materials recovery facility. The rest of the facility抯 staff is made up of 20 part-time employees who are allowed to work only 1,500 hours per calendar year.

That makes turnover high. Getting people to show up from day to day is a serious challenge, Hudnell said. On days when the facility is short-staffed, temp workers are brought in, if possible. Otherwise, the speed of the sorting conveyors is simply slowed down.

In all, Hudnell said, running the recycling facility is by its nature a messy, inconsistent undertaking, and there are numerous factors that can impact efficiency. 揑t抯 a lot of variables,?he said. 揟his whole place is full of variables. You never know what抯 coming in.?/p>

OUTLOOK

In recent years recycling rates for aluminum and plastics are well below rates of a decade ago. Programs in cities including New York and Chicago have been drastically scaled back.

In 2002, the market research firm GfK NOP抯 annual Green Gauge report on environmental attitudes in America found the biggest drop in participation in environmentally-friendly activities was for recycling, and in an opinion survey conducted in 2005 by the state抯 Solid Waste Management Program, Missourians ranked the environment as the least important of six issues that included education, health care, crime and safety, the economy and family social services.

And yet, despite its difficulties, Columbia抯 20-year-old recycling program keeps barreling along, providing a model for other Missouri cities, such as Kansas City, which only recently launched a curbside program. Columbia抯 recycling tonnage has increased 65 percent over the past five years ?much faster than the city抯 2 percent population growth rate or the landfill抯 5 percent tonnage growth rate.

Part of this rapid growth is due to the addition of a commercial recycling program last year, which now has 60 customers and accounted for some 1,000 tons of recyclables. Apartment recycling has also increased to nine bins serving 27 apartment complexes around the city.

Angela Gehlert, the city抯 former waste minimization coordinator, said that, as ironic as it sounds, the deposit ordinance debate in 2001 and early 2002 went a long way in boosting public awareness of recycling ?even if it didn抰 result in a dramatic increase in the amount of aluminum collected. The debate pitted those who favored the required recycling of aluminum cans against those with concerns about the cost and inconvenience.

揅olumbians want to recycle. I think that抯 evident,?Gehlert said. 揥e抮e always getting calls asking 慦hy are there no bins here?挃

Since a statewide target of diverting 40 percent of waste from landfills was met in 2001, Gehlert said Columbia has no specific recycling goals for the future. The focus now is simply to continue to increase the yearly recycling tonnage collected, expand the city抯 commercial program and reduce contamination levels, she said.

Mitchell said she抎 also like to get all government buildings to participate in the city抯 commercial recycling program and to continue to divert more material from the landfill. She estimated that at least 30 to 40 percent of what is thrown out could be recycled.

揥ith information, dedication and a little education up front, I think we could get a lot of it out of there,?Harline said.

In cities such as San Francisco, where the diversion rate hovers at upward of 65 percent, he said it抯 not necessarily that those residents are more environmentally conscious, but that landfill prices often exceed $100 per ton, which provides a strong incentive to recycle. Columbia has maintained its tipping fee at $32.50 since 1994.

In the Missouri Department of Natural Resources survey, one-third of respondents said they agreed that trash disposal costs should be raised as a way to encourage more recycling. Respondents also said the thing that would most motivate them to recycle more is having curbside collection, and yet half those surveyed said they would not be willing to pay anything extra to be able to recycle.

In her role as waste minimization coordinator, Gehlert ran recycling educational programs at local schools. Her hope, she said, is that by teaching kids the value of recycling, they抣l be eager to participate as adults, and by showing them what belongs in the blue bags they抣l go home and educate their parents.