Trash Wars

I'm in the Newman Paper factory, staring into a huge pot of churning, soggy paper on its way to another life. Though at the moment, the stuff looks like mashed scrapple and smells almost as rank.

In the gray light of this clanging old paper mill near Tacony along the Delaware, I imagine that Jabba the Hutt is hiding nearby, hoping someone will fall into the cauldron.

Not to worry, because this creature is a strict vegetarian: It can digest only wood pulp products. If you toss in enough other stuff, you can shut down the mill.

Around the clock, Newman's workers stew up a family recipe of cardboard, white paper and newspapers. After being mashed, the pulp is fed through rollers and emerges about as a thin slab of gray cardboard.

Since 1919, the Newman family's paperboard has become all sorts of things: legal pad cardboard backing, Monopoly game boards, cereal boxes and those baby blue boxes from Tiffany's.

For David Newman, a fourth-generation papermaker, finding paper-only trash is challenging. And it's getting tougher still, as more municipalities change to single-stream recycling ” letting homeowners mix paper, glass, metal and plastic.

To tell his story, Newman recently invited some 50 members of the Sustainable Business Network to tour his plant. As Newman sees it, local companies like his and outside national corporations are engaged in mortal combat.

Well, maybe a battle is brewing, but I'm not buying that it's a fight to the death. Because as recycling ramps up under a new administration, there'll be so many spoils, it'll be hard to pick a victor.

Newman's cross-town nemesis is Blue Mountain Recycling. Located in Grays Ferry, the seven-year-old recycling company was bought two years ago by FCR Recycling, based in Vermont. As the city's only local single-stream processor, Blue Mountain is the heir apparent to take over all of Philadelphia's curbside recycling, as the city shifts to single-stream.

Single-stream is easier for homeowners, admits Newman, but it's bad for recycling. Fact is, the more recyclables are commingled, the more difficult it is to pull them apart. Broken glass, especially, is a problem. Out of the 240 tons of recycled paper that Newman feeds his factory daily, some 20 tons of glass emerge as a thick, black, factory-crippling slurry.

What's more, unmixed items are more easily "up-cycled" into more valuable products. Which means less ends up in landfills.

That's all true, admits Blue Mountain's Bob Anderson. But that's an ideal world. In the real world of Philadelphia curbside recycling, despite threats and fines, residents have successfully resisted separating their trash for some 20 years.

Single-stream is the future, says Anderson, simply because more people will do it. So FRC has invested more than $6 million in magnets, air blowers, belts, screens and infrared scanners to sort the trash for customers like Anheuser-Busch, U.S. Steel and Kimberly Clark.

Unlike Newman's paper mill, which gags on glass, Anderson's facility can swallow just about everything. Including, some fear, independents like Newman.

But that's not going to happen. There will be no losers in this war.

Even if Blue Mountain has a lock on curbside recycling, that's only part of Philly's trash. Trash from office buildings and residential high-rises isn't picked up by the city. Which is where Newman says he's looking for new markets.

He might check out my own high rise, which I'll call Faulty Towers ” though to be fair, is no more bass-ackward than most. Faulty Towers still asks the residents of its 1,000 apartments to separate paper from plastic and glass. And yet its contract trash hauler still charges the same price to take away any and all, regardless of our sorting.

So could Faulty Towers do business with David Newman? Sure, said Newman, who did a quick, back-of-the envelope proposal. A thousand homes would yield about 5 tons of mixed paper a week. Which, at $20 a ton, means an extra $5,000 a year in our pockets. And he'll even pick it up.

Not a bad haul for keeping our trash tidy.