Cheap oil, tainted loads reduce recycling profit

JOHNSTON – Since switching to single-stream recycling in June 2012, Rhode Island’s recycling rate has risen less than 2 percent and remains stubbornly below 25 percent.

During that same period, the market for sorted and baled recyclables, the end product of the statewide recycling program, has bottomed out, ecoRI News reported.

The result is less revenue for the Johnston-based Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, the quasi-state agency that manages the recycling program, from the sale of recyclables, and less revenue for municipalities, which receive a share of the recycling program’s profit.

In fiscal 2015, RIRRC shared $551,700 with the state’s municipalities. By contrast, it shared about $1.5 million in 2014, despite a modestly lower recycling rate. In 2011 and 2012, RIRRC shared about $1.9 million. This year, the agency that runs the Central Landfill expects to share less than $700,000, according to Sarah Reeves, RIRRC’s director of recycling services.

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The recycling program’s smaller profit margins are mainly the result of cheap oil. When oil prices are low, it’s cheaper for manufacturing companies to buy virgin plastic – a petrochemical product – than to buy recycled plastic. •

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