This New York Times photo shows how cardboard once bound for recycling is piling up as a result of the crashing recycling market.

For a while there, it looked like a stagnant economy would be a recyclers best friend.

With energy prices sky-rocketing and the price of raw materials going through the roof, making things with with other things was starting to look like a smart move economically as well as ecologically.

But what an economic slow-down giveth, a full-blown recession can take away.

Just as Pottstown tries to bolster its struggling budget bottom line by recycling its way to garbage pick-up parity, it looks like you can add recyclables to the list of markets bottoming out in this God-awful economy.

Many green types, like those populating the corporate offices of The Thin Green Line, have always argued municipalities should recycle because its the right thing to do, reducing the amount of trash we bury in zip-locked landfills, ecological time-bombs we've kindly set for future generations.

Then the economy went crazy and suddenly, there was a whole new argument for increasing recycling, it would save you money like crazy. This was the kind of argument even the most landfill-loving politician could get behind.

But the market is a harsh mistress and now, um, not so much.

According to this Dec. 7 article in The New York Times, "trash has crashed."

"There are no signs yet of a nationwide abandonment of recycling programs. But industry executives say that after years of growth, the whole system is facing an abrupt slowdown.
Many large recyclers now say they are accumulating tons of material, either because they have contracts with big cities to continue to take the scrap or because they are banking on a price rebound in the next six months to a year," the newspaper reported.

“We’re warehousing it and warehousing it and warehousing it,” said Johnny Gold, senior vice president at the Newark Group, a company that has 13 recycling plants across the country. Mr. Gold said the industry had seen downturns before but not like this. “We never saw this coming.”

Poor guy is starting to sound like an auto industry exec.

In the meantime, poor Pottstown is gearing up to increase its recycling stream, preparing 65-gallon toters for distribution around down and preparing what they're saying will be a massive public education campaign to increase participation.

The selling point has been that the more we recycling, the less we landfill, the lower our trash bill will be; all of which makes sense so long as there is a market to take the recyclables to.

Sadly, if the market stays collapsed so too will that argument, and just as people are being urged to recycle more to save money, it won't save money and that extra motivation will evaporate just at the moment when people's habits stand to be most permanently changed.

I suppose it's too much to hope for that recycling will increase simply because it's the right thing to do.