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Tilted Cat Head
Administrator
Location: Manhattan, NY
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by Charlatan
Very little of it is about profit. It depends on the material and what the market requires but there have been many years where the BlueBox system has lost money.
Business subsidizes it here. The bottlers do not have to run a deposit bottle system. In return they help finance the BlueBox.
Additionally, if we left it up to everyone to take their recycleables to the depot to get paid, very few would. Would you?
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here's some idea as to how much money is actually flows through the recycling plans of NYC:
Quote:
What happened to glass and plastic recycling?
In February 2002, shortly after taking office, Mayor Bloomberg announced plans to cut glass, plastic, paper and metal recycling as a way to bring the city out of its $3.8 billion dollar budget deficit.
Due to public opposition the City Council worked with the mayor to save metal and paper recycling.
Recycling of glass and plastic collection was suspended beginning in July 2002. Plastic recycling returned in July 2003 and glass recycling resumed in April 2004.
Was the suspension of glass and plastic recycling a good idea?
The Department of Sanitation Fiscal Year 2001 budget had artificially inflated the cost of recycling by not accounting for the revenue from the sale of material. New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. calculated that a more accurate reflection of the cost of recycling contracts would lower the cost of this program from the DOS' $126/ton estimate to $82/ton, resulting in a net savings to the city of $3.4 million.
In 2003, the sanitation department's budget topped $1 billion for the first time--up from $631 million. Almost all of the new cost is linked to trucking waste out of town.
NYC anticipated a savings of $51.4 million if recycling was cut. The savings estimate dropped to just under $40 million (a mere one percent of the budget deficit) with the retention of paper and metal recycling.
NYC Comptroller William C. Thompson estimated that operating a full-scale recycling program meeting diversion rates achieved in FY 2002 would save the City $16.7 million per year.
Did the cuts work according to plan?
The actual savings from cutting the glass and plastic recycling programs have been chipped away by increased costs elsewhere by seemingly unanticipated resulting problems.
The city saved only $2.6 million by reducing the number of recycling trucks (less than 2% of total truck shifts).
Comparing the number of weekly metal recycling truck shifts and refuse truck shifts, DOS actually had a net INCREASE of 47 weekly collection truck shifts, increasing DOS’ costs by about $1.4 million.
Once the cost of hauling away the larger regular garbage collections was taken into account, the city's savings amounted to perhaps only $10 million, not the $50 million the department projected last year.
In a February 7, 2003 letter to the DOS Commissioner, NYC Comptroller William Thompson requested a full reinstatement of the recycling program, finding no logical reason to continue the cuts.
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Now here I cannot bring bottles and cans to the redemtion machines as I please. There are many rules so that I can get my $.05 deposit back.
So if I buy a Sam's Soda from Walmart, I cannot bring it to my local grocery store for redemption because redemption machines are keyed to read UPCs. No UPC No nickel. I can also not use the machine on Sunday. They also limit how many bottles I can recycle on each day.
Also, water bottles are exempt from this recycling program.
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