Room for a View > Editorial

Bill Bottle Blues
By Todd Paul

It’s Monday night in Albany, and the hills are alive with the clank and rattle of shopping carts full of empty aluminum cans and bottles being pushed up and down the streets by weary indigents.

You see, Tuesday is trash day in my neighborhood. It’s also curbside recycling day. Every Tuesday morning, a big truck crawls noisily up my street, collecting paper, cans, bottles, and plastics. And every Monday night, the homeless, jobless, and poor of the city go through my trash and everyone else’s, spiriting away most of the cans and bottles the truck would have collected the next morning.

Albany is proud of its curbside recycling program, and it should be. Recycling is mandatory here. According to Bill Bruce of Albany General Services, which oversees the program, some 1,700 tons of mixed glass, plastic, and cans are collected each year. Taxpayers fund the curbside collection program, and taxpayers pay the $35 per ton tariff to have the stuff trucked to Claverack in Columbia County, where it is sorted for recycling. The program doesn’t make money, but it’s cheaper than the $50 per ton landfill disposal fee.

And what happens to the redeemable bottles and cans that get picked up, sorted, and transported by the poor? Well, they go to Price Chopper.
The state’s Returnable Container Act, better known as the Bottle Bill, has been in effect since 1983. The RCA forces distributors to take back returnable containers, which are washed and refilled. Consumers pay a premium for these containers at the store, and get the five cent refund when the container is returned.

Anyway, that’s how the system is supposed to work. In reality, nobody but the city’s poorest citizens bothers to return an empty bottle worth five cents. At best, we throw them into the curbside recycling box. At worst, we throw them out with the trash. Then our poorer neighbors collect them for redemption.

Since the RCA went into effect, redemption rates have been 70-80 percent and litter has been reduced by 75 percent, according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation.

I can’t help but wonder how many more hundreds of tons of recyclables would be trucked to Claverack each year if street people weren’t doing our work for us. In effect, we’ve hired them at far below the minimum wage. It takes a lot of five cent bottles to scrape your way up the ladder from underclass to poverty in this part of the world.

But hell, at least they’re working.

Twenty years ago, many of these people would have been living in mental institutions and halfway houses. When Reagan gutted the social safety net, a large, previously invisible class of mentally and emotionally disturbed and drug-addicted people were turned out to begin the long, bumpy transition from hospital to prison. Those who didn’t get swept up by the criminal justice system are on the street.

Maybe that’s what Bush Sr. meant when he talked about a thousand points of light that would step in and take up the slack when our government let go its end of the rope.

On June 19 in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council agreed on a budget that involved a compromise regarding the city’s own recycling program. The mayor wanted to cut the program, the City Council wanted to keep it. They compromised: The city will continue curbside recycling of metal, but will suspend the plastic recycling program for one year, and the glass program for two years.

Of course there’s no guarantee these programs will return after that period, and since next year’s budget is expected to be even tighter, it’s a losing proposition fiscally for the city, according to the mayor. Another drawback is that people who have been taught, over years and at great cost, to separate their recycling from their garbage, will now revert to their old ways. Mayor Bloomberg has also appealed to the state legislature to repeal the Bottle Bill.

I don’t know, really, how important curbside recycling is in the vast, underground economy that supports the underclass in America’s cities.
I just know it’s hard to sleep around here on Monday nights.