Crain's coverage of the Manhattan SWAB recycling event (kinda old news)

[Coquille]

In April, Manhattan's SWAB organized a panel discussion on recycling.
I can't remember if I posted this or not, but this article by Crain's
New York was the only coverage:

Recycling Local Law 19

Twenty years ago, the city passed a law establishing municipal
recycling. Its goal was to divert 25% of the residential waste stream
by 1994. The rate today is a meager 17%.
The Bloomberg administration and the City Council are beginning
negotiations on revising the measure, known as Local Law 19. Insiders
say the administration wants to get rid of the recycling targets
(which it has consistently failed to hit), while “the council seems to
be interested in a broader reform effort to strengthen the program and
enhance its cost-effectiveness,” notes Eric Goldstein, the Natural
Resources Defense Council’s expert on solid waste.

In the city’s defense, the law’s tonnage requirements became harder to
reach as the bottling industry moved from glass to plastic, making
recyclables much lighter. But other factors impaired the effort. Mayor
Bloomberg temporarily suspended the recycling program in 2002, which
got many New Yorkers out of the recycling habit—and did not save money
anyway, subsequent analysis showed. Various changes to the program
confused people.

A recent study predicted that in five years, it won’t cost the city
any more to recycle waste than to dump it in landfills. But that's
primarily because of the 8% annual increase in the cost of disposing
of regular waste, not the efficiency of the city’s recycling program.
Indeed, residents are recycling less than 40% of the plastic, metal
and paper accepted by the program. And they are putting into recycling
bins a huge amount of material that is not accepted—everything from
plastic toys to containers for Chinese food. The city’s recycling
contractor, Sims Metal Management, receives 200,000 tons of the wrong
kinds of plastic every month. That’s half of the plastic it gets.

Moreover, plastic bags improperly mixed with recyclables gum up Sims’
machinery. Goldstein says residents might assume that they can include
bags because supermarkets are now required to recycle them. Sims
struggles to dispose of the foreign material it receives, a company
official says.”