The administrative making of the recycler

ABSTRACT

The New York Department of Sanitation's recycling program is under threat by an “an organized, sophisticated mob of scavenger collectives.” How is this “mob” threatening the NYC Department of Sanitation? They are removing scrap metals before the city can collect it. We use this event as an entry into exploring the practice of recycling in relation to administrative constructs through the lens of deliberative policy analysis (DPA). We discuss how the identity of “the recycler” derives from administrative conduct and concern. In the interest of fulfilling the goals of “recycling,” administration influences the collective understanding of who is a recycler and how the related practice of recycling is understood in the management of waste. We use the case to distinguish between the idea of social construction and that of administrative construction by highlighting the production of an identity (the recycler) through administrative practices that define an activity (recycling). Doing so highlights the conflicting concerns in key pillars of DPA, particularly how the interpretive power of administration to define and determine practice can restrict deliberative potential.

KEYWORDS:

• Recycling
• administrative construction
• social construction
• deliberative policy analysis
• waste management
• municipal administration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Roy L. Heidelberg is an Associate Professor at Louisiana State University. His research interests include accountability, rules, democratic theory, and the political status of the administrative state. He likes to garden and is a mediocre but passionate potter.

Sarah Surak is an Associate professor who holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Political Science and Environmental Studies at Salisbury University. Her teaching and research interests include civic engagement, environmental policy and political theory, public administration, and modern political and social theory. Her forthcoming book, Governing Waste: Politics, Process, and Public Administration (expected Routledge 2019), assesses the practices of sustainability and waste management by municipal authorities.

Notes

1 Most notably today, China's 2018 National Sword policy is in the process of rearranging municipal recycling programs. First impacting plastic and now paper, China's ban on the import of materials for recycling is impacting all states. The online publication Waste Dive catalogs these results: https://www.wastedive.com/news/what-chinese-import-policies-mean-for-all-50-states/510751/.

2 The environmental benefit of recycling is linked to the “embedded value” of a commodity. The initial processing of raw material into industrial form requires high levels of energy, water, and other materials in comparison to the processes needed to reprocess used commodities.

3 It is important to note that we are focusing primarily on the example of New York City in this paper, but the curbside system is comparable to around 75% of municipal collection programs. Approximately 25% of municipalities fund waste and recycling programs through a “pay as you throw.” Rather than absorbing the cost of waste management, municipalities levy disposal fees on residents based on disposal volume of garbage, excluding recyclable materials in the cost equation. In this case separating recyclables from household garbage does result in cost savings for the consumer (Brown 2011). We are not addressing in this article collection requiring residents to drop off of garbage and/or recycling at county or city run locations.

4 Similar to the glass bottle and plastic recycling example in the first footnote, cardboard recycling possibilities are notorious for rising and falling with the market. Many things can cause a market decline: technological advances, weather patterns (impacting both collection and trade), and market variations. Cardboard commodity prices, for example, are driven by strong product sales (the end product of cardboard recycling is new cardboard boxes containing new commodities). An oversupply of cardboard in the mid-1990s for example created a glut of which resulted in trashing (i.e., landfilling) of large volumes of cardboard slated for recycling but no longer needed and subsequently tossed into landfills (Cooper 1998).

5 Of great debate within the recycling community is whether or not to disclose to residents when collection programs “trash” collected recyclable materials due to a lack of profit or even the inability to offload material at no cost (MacBride 2011). The underlying fear is that in a system-dependent upon the participation of some persons motivated by something other than reward, raising doubt as to whether or not future materials will actually be recycled (given past experience) might decrease program participation. Recycling programs are dependent on household participation for supply, and a diminishment of reputation would likely mean a loss in material and revenue.

6 In 2012 the private sector controlled around 80% of all municipal waste management with Republic Waste and Waste Management responsible for approximately 40% of this market.

7 Curbside recycling collection is available to somewhere between 45% and 60% of United States households (Desilver 2016). The other predominant form of recycling collection offered on the municipal level in the United States is drop-off centers, which accounts for around 21% of U.S. municipal solid waste recycling. Curbside programs tend to use a “single stream” collection process which requires additional sorting and degrades the value of the commodity during collection.

8 A bottle deposition does not, however, make a bottle lighter. Even with a deposit, glass bottles are far less frequently scavenged from NYC recycling bins (MacBride 2011).

9 While contamination (material included in recycling bins that cannot be recycled) rates are not reported to the Environmental Protection Agency, a 2014 municipal solid waste estimate of contamination rates of household recycling put the range between 14% and 50%, with higher rates for curbside programs (Robinson 2014). Not all contamination may be careless, though. The term “wishcycling” describes actions of placing an unrecyclable material in a recycling bin not as careless but as hopeful. The consumer really wants to recycle that plastic spoon, and hopes, somehow, even though it is not listed as acceptable material, that it will end up recycled (Somerville 2017) [NOTE: it will not].

10 See Appendix A for a dramatic visualization of this sentiment on the cover of Lange's piece.

11 It should be noted that the process of construction is not either social or administrative, but is better understood as a co-construction involving both. For this article, our interest is the administrative dimension of this construction. Moreover, we hasten to note that we are not talking only about “the state” or “the public” in this administrative construction to avoid a false dichotomy between public and private.

12 The federal government distinguishes between hazardous and non-hazardous waste in the Subtitle D of the Resources Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) which is further detailed in Title 40 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) part 258. Non-hazardous waste (or municipal solid waste – MSW) is categorized as that which does not fall within specifically designated hazardous categories. MSW is also defined through the method of allowed discarding – disposal (regulated landfill), incineration, long-term storage, or recycling and relegate to the state for management. States (sub-national governments) in turn relegate this management to municipalities.

13 See again Appendix A.

14 It is important to note here that we are making a broad generalization of recycling of common household items such as paper, cans, and bottles as generally “good.” This is a contestable normative claim.

15 See, for example, Germany's Der Grüne Punkt program: https://www.gruener-punkt.de/en/company/der-gruene-punkt.html.