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.

Suddenly, solar power is hot.

And no, I don't mean the special oil heated by fields of mirrors in the Mojave desert (although that's hot too).

No, what I mean is that perhaps Malcolm Gladwell's famous "tipping point" may have been reached.

Prodded, no doubt, by the constant pleas on this blog and the mighty influence of the Thin Green Line's 13 regular readers, both the House and Senate this month passed by large margins, legislation that will extend tax breaks for investment in renewable energy sources like wind and solar power.

Of course, this being Washington, the bills are different so the two houses of Congress have to negotiate something they can both agree on, never a sure thing in this day and age when everyone talks the bi-partisanship talk, but almost universally fails to walk the walk.

According to this Sept. 26 article in The New York Times, "the tax credit would increase domestic investment in the solar industry by $232 billion by 2016 and generate 440,000 jobs, many in manufacturing, construction and engineering."

But now that we have Washington on board (we hope) with taking advantage of the most free, most renewable, most dependable energy source in the solar system, we turn around to find our fellow tree huggers raising a fuss.

What am I talking about?

Well according to this Sept. 23 article in the Times, environmentalists in the southern California desert are protesting massive solar projects planned for flat land where the sun shines 364 days a year.

Their problem? The Mojave ground squirrel, the desert tortoise and the burrowing owl. (Why is it always an owl?)

Time for a little hypocrisy.

Yes, this blog supports protecting old-growth forests from logging for the spotted owl. Yes, this blog, with some reservations, believes hydro-power (another green source) needs to take the needs of migrating fish into account.

So do we need to worry about the squirrel, the tortoise and the owl too? Aristotle would argue that we cannot support the preservation of one habitat and support the disturbance of another only because it's hot and dry and only crazy people would want to live there. (Sorry mom).

But Aristotle, hemlock and all, lived in a world of theoretical absolutes and we live in a world where even crazier people live in an even hotter desert half a world away and sometimes you have to choose the lesser evil.

Condemn me if you will green purists, but I'm afraid I have to come down on the side of massive solar power installations on this one. And for justification, I will turn to a justification so often over-used by the administration I love to criticize.

The answer, folks, is national security. This country can simply no longer afford to depend on a fossil fuel technology. When Barack Obama talks about building a new energy infrastructure in ten years, he is talking about a necessity, not a frill.

If you doubt me, ask the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, it's not just in California's deserts that such projects are being proposed.

According to this Sept. 24 article in The Mercury (written by yours truly), one use being championed for the former OxyChem site in Lower Pottsgrove is a solar power park.

The proposal comes within the framework of a joint project of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Dept. of Energy. It is a push to put alternative energy projects on former industrial sites, often called "brownfields," on which it is often difficult to attract redevelopment. Talk about a win-win.

(Click here to learn more about this program.)

Meanwhile in the win-win department, and also to show that not all Californians lean toward lunacy, I point to yet another article in the Times which is cause for hope.

In the far-left bastion of Berkeley, the city council is doing something innovative.

As this Sept. 17 article illustrates, the city is starting a low-interest loan program to encourage the installation of solar power in its homes.

"The loans, which are likely to total up to $22,000 apiece, would be paid off over 20 years as part of the owners’ property-tax bills," according to the Times. This will make solar power more accessible to people who cannot afford the up-front costs and thus cannot benefit from the usual tax-break incentive government favors.


Already cities from San Francisco to Annapolis, Md., and Seattle, to Cambridge, Mass., are calling to get the details.

Here in Pottstown however, we're actually trying to limit solar power installations under the rationale that they could ruin the lines of our historic architecture.

According to this Sept. 13 article in The Mercury (also written by yours truly), the Pottstown Planning Commission has proposed changes to the zoning law that would regulate how solar panels could be installed. Borough Council has agreed to hold a public hearing on the subject, but no date has yet been set.

This may once again be an occasion for hypocrisy as I am not sure, despite my love for old homes (I live in a house built in 1916 after all), whether its wise to deny energy-efficiency to those whose homes are least likely to have it.

We may even have to get the police may have to get involved.

For it seems that solar panels are popular not only with city councils and other law-makers and law-abiding citizens. According to this Sept. 23 article in the Times, solar panels are now in such demand that people are stealing them!

"Police departments in California — the biggest market for solar power, with more than 33,000 installations — are seeing a rash of such burglaries, though nobody compiles overall statistics," according to the Times.

"Investigators do not believe the thieves are acting out of concern for their carbon footprints. Rather, authorities assume that many panels make their way to unwitting homeowners, sometimes via the Internet," the paper reported.

So (wait for it....) when I said solar power is "hot," I meant it in more ways than one!

(Oh come on, don't groan. That one was sweet!)

I suppose you are all very tired of reading introductions in which the novice blogger professes to have never blogged before, but this being the truth, I suppose it can't be helped. So this is one of those introductions.
But there, we've dispnesed with that, so let us get on with the business at hand.
My name is Evan Brandt and I have been a reporter at The Mercury newspaper here in Pottstown, PA for more than 10 years now.
Having lived in the environment all my life, I have been a fan of it even longer than that.
As such, I have watched with dismay during most of my lifetime, mankind's speedy unraveling of the systems nature put in place to make this a planet capable of sustaining the life upon it -- ours in particular.
It is within the last two or three generations after all that we finally passed the tipping point (to use a phrase popular with pundits these days) into an era in which we are using resources faster than they can be replenished.
Two generations ago, would anyone have believed that we could actually deplete all the fish in the ocean?
It is now a question of when, not if.
Two generations ago, would anyone have believed that we would release so many noxious chemicals into the environment that their traces can now be found in blood samples of every human?
Two generations ago, would any American have believed that a land built on the tradition of an endless frontier would seek to satisfy its teeming population's yen for their own little corner of heaven by consuming -- as The Philadelphia Inquirer so succintly put it a few years ago -- "An Acre an Hour" of land?
If all politics is local, so too are all environmental issues and thus, all environmental reporting is local.
All things are entertwined and interrelated in the environment and so it is with environmental reporting.
A federal court case in Georgia declares as dangerous sewage sludge spread on a farm field? We do that here too.
Canada declares the chemical Bisphenol A dangerous? That chemical is found in half a dozen products at the local Giant.
That is way we have always tried to cover the environment at The Mercury, and the fair share of awards we've won along the way testifies to the boast that we know a thing or two about how to do it.
But space is limited in a newspaper, but the space on the Internet is limited only by the size of your server and this one isn't ours so .... expect to see a lot of extras.
Being new to blogging, as I noted above, we're starting slow, with this first, super-secret post, which we will re-tread in the newspaper on Earth Day for our big, splashy grand opening.
Expect to see technical difficulties by the score, and periods during which it seems I've fallen off the end of the earth and taken my blog with me.
We run with a slim crew at The Mercury and finding the time to post can be difficult on days filled with car crashes and misbehaving school board members.
Our goal here is to create a place where your desire for all things green -- from tips on which cleaner is more earth-friendly to which local streams are being threatened.
We will also be reaching out to the many local and state-wide organizations we know that are experts in everything from green gardening to sustainable communities in the hopes that they will share their expertise with us and, thus, with you.
To keep in touch with the wider world out there, it is my goal to post a link every day to a major environmental story somewhere in the world that might be of some interest to readers in the TriCounty area.
Some days, without a doubt, I will fail to do so, but keep checking back.
And write in.
Suggestions, criticisms, praise all are welcome here (some more than others obviously).
So long we we can keep it clean (no pun intended) all comments and replies will be immediately posted. If people start to misbehave, we'll have to revisit that promise.
That's about it for the first post.
Sorry if it's too long, but then anyone who reads me regularly knows I tend to get a little wordy.
But hey, there's a lot to say about the environment.
After all, it's the whole world.