There was a time, not too long ago, when New Jersey was considered a national leader in recycling.
Not anymore.
Back in the 1990s, New Jerseyans routinely took more than 60 percent of recyclable materials out to the curb in those green and yellow containers every couple of weeks. That meant more than six out of every 10 glass bottles, plastic containers, aluminum and tin cans, cardboard boxes, newspapers, magazines and other recyclables were making their way back into the manufacturing process, rather than being disposed of in landfills or burned in solid waste incinerators.
Today, that number is down to 54.7 percent and falling. That means nearly half the glass, plastic, paper, cardboard, aluminum and tin that could be put to productive use through recycling is being tossed out in the garbage.
That’s shameful.
It’s also expensive.
New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the nation, cannot handle all the waste our residents generate. Those mountainous landfills in the Meadowlands that used to handle virtually all of North Jersey’s garbage (and still had room for some of New York’s) have been shut and sealed because they were doing serious damage to the environment. Many other large landfills around the state have closed down because they reached their capacity.
So whatever we don’t recycle winds up either in an incinerator (which can’t take glass, plastic, aluminum or tin) or gets shipped out of state by truck or rail to be disposed of in landfills in states as close as Pennsylvania and as far away as Texas.
Residents of the Garden State pay dearly for this privilege, either in the form of property taxes (if garbage collection is included in the municipal budget) or through steep collection fees charged by private contractors.
And shipping our garbage off to other states doesn’t exactly win New Jersey any friends; Pennsylvanians and Texans are as enthusiastic about receiving New Jersey’s trash as New Jersey used to be about receiving New York’s. So every year, they jack up the price a little more.
We pay in other ways, as well, for our failure to recycle. Think of the number of trees we save when we recycle paper, the natural resources we save when we recycle aluminum and tin, the energy we save when we recycle glass bottles and plastic containers instead of manufacturing new ones.
Think, too, about how we live on an earth of finite resources and finite living space. Every time we extract a resource and throw away the product, the resource is gone, too. Every acre of space we fill up with all those products we’re throwing away is an acre lost forever. Recycling conserves both our land and our natural resources. One example: Each ton of paper we recycle saves 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4,000 kilowatts of energy and 7,000 gallons of water.
The Department of Environmental Protection, which administers New Jersey’s recycling program, is pumping $8 million into efforts to get the state’s recycling numbers back to where they used to be. A new recycling enhancement law, funded by a $3-per-ton surcharge on trash taken to disposal facilities, has boosted the amount of grant money available to local governments to promote recycling.
That’s good news. The numbers tell us that the mere presence of those green and yellow containers isn’t enough to get New Jerseyans into the recycling spirit anymore. A timely reminder of why recycling is good for our wallets and our planet is definitely in order.

