SCRAP THE RECYCLING MANDATES; CITIES, MANUFACTURERS NEED FLEXIBILITY TO MAKE MOST EFFICIENT USE OF WASTE.

Byline: Lynn Scarlett 

TRASH is on the legislative radar screen - again. California's legislators have proposed several new bills that tinker with trash. Many of these bills have one goal: to boost recycling.

No one likes waste. The idea of waste conjures up visions of thoughtless and careless use of resources. But the perpetual push to meet the waste challenge through mandates and regulations is wrongheaded. Recycling is often a good idea. Mandates are not.

By state law, California cities must divert 50 percent of waste from disposal facilities by 2000. Yet these cities face widely varying situations. For example, rural communities often find it more costly to implement aggressive recycling programs than some suburban and urban communities. Some areas - like Los Angeles - face constraints on landfill capacity. Other California cities do not face these constraints.

Mandates don't give communities adequate flexibility to determine what makes economic and environmental sense.

The waste stream is not a homogenous and uniformly recyclable or compostable mass of material. A Duke University symposium of waste and recycling experts estimated that 35 percent to 40 percent of the waste stream might be composted and recycled at reasonable cost using current technologies and infrastructure.

Specific communities may (and are) exceeding 40 percent diversion rates, but their circumstances do not apply to all California communities.

Waste-diversion mandates generate more supplies of recyclable stuff. These supplies, in turn, create pressure for new regulations mandating that manufacturers use recycled materials. California already mandates that plastic bags, newsprint and some glass and plastic containers have some recycled content.

Yet these mandates are not environmentally beneficial. Proponents believe they are necessary to create a sustainable, resource-conserving economy. Resource conservation is important. However, recycling must be understood as a means to this end - not an end in itself.

Sometimes recycling does result in resource and energy conservation relative to use of virgin materials. But recycling is not always the best environmental choice.

New research demonstrates that under certain circumstances recycled content produces net benefits; under other circumstances it does not. But whether recycled content makes sense depends on the product. And where recycling does save resources, many manufacturers already use such materials without government intervention.

In its report ``Green by Design,'' the former Office of Technology Assessment offers an example of how complex resource conservation decisions are. A modern snack-chip bag is made of thin layers of very lightweight materials, each of which serves a different protection function. this multilayering makes recycling difficult. However, the OTA points out that the package is ``much lighter than an equivalent package made of a single (recyclable) material and provides longer shelf life, resulting in less food waste.'' Examples such as this abound.

There simply is no single formula in the resource conservation process. Many conservation efforts take place in small, almost invisible and difficult-to-regulate steps. These little steps have big consequences. For example, one juice company reduced the size of its package by 10 percent. This reduction saved 20,000 pounds of material, 500 truckloads of outgoing freight, 7,000 pounds of shrink-wrap and 20,000 square feet of chilled warehouse space.

Juggling all the details that determine what mix of resources works best is a persistent challenge for manufacturers. But the competitive marketplace provides a constant impetus to find ways to use fewer resources through price signals. Using less stuff means saving money.

Worried about recycling costs, many local governments now support the idea of ``manufacturers' responsibility,'' in which producers would pay an upfront waste-handling fee on all their products. The idea is that these fees could support recycling programs and might give manufacturers more incentive to reduce packaging or ``design for recycling.''

Yet a look at such fees in Germany shows that overall reductions in packaging there were not very different from those in the United States, which has no special packaging fees.

There are lots of things California could do to nudge recycling along without imposing high costs on cities or inadvertently wasting resources. The state could maintain a waste-diversion goal, as many other states have done, but eliminate the mandate so each city could figure out what makes sense.

Following an Indiana model, the state could encourage cities to use business-based accounting methods, so they could better identify cost-saving opportunities in their recycling programs. Better still, the state could encourage (but not mandate) competitive contracting of recycling and waste handling. Private haulers usually can provide recycling services at lower cost - and they often have access to broader markets for the stuff they collect.

California could also borrow an idea from the state of Washington. There, rather than mandating recycled content, the state's Clean Washington Center provides technical assistance where using recycled stuff looks promising.

All these ideas harness, rather than shackle, the private sector. And they provide to cities and manufacturers the kind of flexibility they need to select the best options for environmental progress.

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