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Compounding the problem was a nosedive in demand from China brought on by the end of the summer Olympics. For months Chinese manufacturers had ramped up production and gobbled up recycled commodities because they knew they’d have to scale back operations during the games, when the government ordered cuts in air pollution. By fall many of them had excess inventory and weren’t buying anything else.
“From September to November, the markets dropped 75 percent—in a few weeks,” says Cal Tigchelaar, the president of Resource Management, a recycling firm based in south suburban Chicago Ridge.
“The value of recyclables did experience a significant drop recently but is making a slow comeback,” Department of Streets and Sanitation spokesman Matt Smith told me in an e-mail. “This drop in value of the material that we collect does mean that we make less on those materials. But everything that we collect is still recycled and we still benefit financially when people recycle because of the safeguards that we put into place.”
This means the economy isn’t so bad that the city’s waste can’t be recycled. Tigchelaar has been forced to lower his prices, but he isn’t having any trouble selling the material he brings in. “The reason that this stuff is being used is still fundamentally there,” he says. “It’s cheaper to use recycled commodities.”
