What looked good then

Doesn’t look so good now.

First, a little background on recycling: Someone picks up your recyclables from your curb. Said “Collector” takes them to a sorting plant (in some areas you are lucky enough to be able to just drop them off directly at said plant).

The plant sorts them into different grades of whatever commodity. Newspaper goes in a different pile than, say, your cereal box or your corrugated cardboard. Then there are the plastics, aluminum and other metals and glass (we won’t go into the recycling of concrete, wallboard/drywall, wood or other metals here to save space).

These commodities are then bundled into standardized bales, weighed and warehoused for sale. The metals are usually (though not always) kept local. Plastics and glass are usually regional (Gallo wines uses a lot of recycled glass). Paper and cardboard, on the other hand, usually get loaded into shipping containers for shipment to Asia so that your new DVD player can arrive in the US a box (we Americans are picky about that shit).

Like everything else, the prices for these commodities fluctuate with supply and demand.

Currently, the prices do sucketh.

Demand for new products is down and with communities across America instigating recycling programs, or in Seattle’s case, mandating recycling, the supply of the materials has risen exponentially.

Because government has decided that it is solely their job to figure out how the trash and recycle gets picked up, the local municipalities either have their own Solid Waste division or they contract out the work.

If said municipalities do their own collection, then they get the monies from the people willing to buy, sort and sell them (aka: the sorting plant folks). If the municipalities contract out the work, the collector then gets the money. Nearly always, the municipalities who contract out the collection work demand part of the proceeds from the collector as part of the contract. Some of them are even high minded enough to use part of those new dollars to offset the cost of collection.

Smart contractors set guidelines for a set amount of that commodities money. The municipalities get anything over the set amount. But if there is a fall in the market and the contractor cannot get that minimum amount for the commodity, the municipality has to pay the difference. Smart municipalities set aside money for those lean times.

Seattle is not one of those municipalities.

All the recycling that Seattle residents bent over and willingly let get mandated upon them “For Free!!!1!” is now going to cost each and every resident of the city.

Not much. Yet. Just a couple bucks a month for now.

But you know and I know that even when the recycled commodities markets pick up again, it’ll be a cold day in hell before those charges disappear. And for the rest of their lives as residents of the City of Seattle they will pay for the privilege of being forced to recycle at the point of a gun.

I’m so glad I don’t live in King County any more.