Photo: Chris Steller, Minnesota Independent

The rapid devolution of print journalism is regularly lamented for all the right reasons – among them the losses of investigative voices, institutional memories and checks on the powerful. A less-noted side effect is cities’ loss of revenue from recycling newsprint.

Last year Minneapolis recycled fewer than 10,000 tons of newsprint for the first time since at least 1993, according to the city’s Solid Waste and Recycling department, with residential newsprint pickup accounting for only 5 percent of the total recycling collected by the city. Compare that to 15,000 tons of newsprint recycled in 1998, more than 9 percent of all materials that year.

Everything about newspapers is getting smaller, according to department head Susan Young. “Newspapers are using thinner paper,” Young says. “The pages are not as tall or as wide, and ads [particularly inserts] are way down.”

Minneapolis earns top dollar for its recycling because residents sort by type of material — newsprint, glass, aluminum and so on — whereas many communities, including St. Paul, collect mixed recycling, which is worth less.

In Minnesota, 40 percent of municipal solid waste is recycled, according to Recycle More Minnesota, for an annual payout (as of 2006, including sales of waste to energy facilities) of $10 million.

In 2007, Young’s department added $1.9 million to city coffers by collecting and marketing sorted recyclables. This year, she says she’ll be lucky to clear half that amount, projecting a net income of $800,000–900,000: “My worst year in a while.”

That’s due in large part to declining markets for most materials. But because newsprint and aluminum consistently account for the largest shares of what Minneapolis has to market, she also lays the precipitous decline at newspapers’ doorstep.

Part of the problem: People take papers delivered at home to read on the way to work or on the job, where they aren’t as likely to be recycled — or at least not on the city’s residential collection routes.

Still, Minneapolis is better off than cities that don’t sort and are “hemorrhaging money,” as Young puts it. In Blaine, for example, residents now pay a fee of $11 per month to have recycling picked up.

A representative at Veolia Environmental Services, the private company that picks up recycling in Blaine and eight other local cities, said a single stream of mixed recyclables makes it hard to measure trends in quantities of newsprint. The impact on St. Paul is likewise unclear, where a spokesperson said the recycling point person left the city’s employ late last year.

Both Blaine and St. Paul have their recycling taken to Eureka Recycling for sorting. (Repeated calls to Eureka for this story weren’t returned.)

The impact on cities in which citizens sort their recyclables is likely greater than elsewhere, since they have a more lucrative product to sell. Young proudly asserts that the newsprint Minneapolis collects, however skimpy by comparison to past years, is still a higher-value item than other cities’ “newspaper drenched in beer.”

(Speaking of beer, beverages that come in glass are fueling a rise in tonnage for that material in Minneapolis: from 4 million tons in 2003 to almost 6 million tons last year. And that’s mostly drinks, Young reckons: “You don’t buy pickles [or other foods] in glass anymore.”)

Young will ask the three local recyclers — Allied Recycling, Waste Management and Eureka — to bid for the city’s recycling business when the current contract with Allied runs out next year. She expects the drop in newsprint to make a dent in the size of the offers she receives, but there’s not much she can do about it.

“All I can do is take what people give me,” Young says.

But recycling markets are cyclical like any others, and Young expects even newsprint to stabilize. “People want their local news. Even I, who am supposed to be really tech-savvy, … like to be able to settle in with the newspaper.”

Young has a Friday-through-Sunday subscription to the Star Tribune and expects many Minneapolis residents will keep receiving — and recycling — at least weekend newspapers.

If the bankrupt Strib eventually goes bust? Readers will take the St. Paul Pioneer Press, she says, plus there are the community newspapers.

One community newspaper, The Bridge, won’t be weighing down recycling bins on the east and southeastern sides of Minneapolis. The Bridge just published its last printed edition (it’s now online-only).

That was news to her.

Photo: H2OAlchemist, Flickr

“We’re expecting a tsunami of stuff,” state Rep. Paul Gardner, DFL-Shoreview, told the Star Tribune last month. The former executive director of the Recycling Association of Minnesota, he predicts a spike in analog TV sets hitting recyclers as the digital TV conversion deadline approaches.

A four-month delay of the mid-February switchover passed in the Senate Monday would seem to lessen the severity of that storm into a mere squall, but this afternoon House Republicans shot down a similar effort to extend the deadline, leaving the Feb. 17 transition in place.

With just three weeks to go, it raises a few questions. Will consumers opt for converting their old analog TVs or end up ditching them for newer digital-ready sets? If so, how big will the spike in discarded and toxin-laden televisions be?

The picture on that last question is fuzzy, according to local government officials, thrift store owners and landfill operators who’d likely be processing discarded sets.

Dwight (who wouldn’t give his last name), the attendant at the Burnsville Sanitary Landfill, said, “There’s probably more [TVs dropped off] than usual.”

But Mary Sherman, manager of the Savers thrift store on Minneapolis’ Lake Street, said the expected “deluge” of analog sets coming into the store didn’t come to pass. “There are more coming in, but not what I was thinking. I think maybe people are converting more than anything else,” she said.

Likewise, Susan Young, director of Minneapolis’ Solid Waste and Recycling Division, said, “Amazingly, our TV pickups are down right now.”

The city, which includes the disposal of appliances like TVs in regular solid waste fees paid by residents, is seeing far lower rates of appliance and metal pickups than the average, she said. The city usually has around 400 such pickups a day, but now that number is between 50 and 60 daily, Young said.

By contrast, the Twin Cities Salvation Army has seen a 30 percent to 40 percent increase in TVs left at their “in-demand donation sites,” the drop-offs not monitored by employees.

Three months ago, the organization stopped accepting TVs, says John Hulteen, director of operations at the Minneapolis Adult Rehabilitation Center, “because it becomes nothing but an e-waste product for us.”

Disposal of such TVs can cost $15 to $20 per set at area recyclers, but the Salvation Army has a deal with a recycler who charges 12 cents per pound. Currently, Hulteen says, the eight-store network pays nearly $4,000 each month in recycling fees.

Same for Hennepin County, which partners with the city of Minneapolis in recycling appliances. Last year, the county had 12 percent more pickups compared to 2007, said Amy Roering of Hennepin’s Environmental Services division. In 2008, 50,005 televisions were collected — 5,400 more than the year before. (Since 2001, Hennepin County has collected 278,379 sets for recycling, Roering added.)

That volume of discarded televisions could pose serious environmental problems. According to John Nordwell, owner of Hopkins’ Avista Recycling, “There’s lead in the tubes, and in the green board, there’s material that’s not good for the ground.”

But little of it will actually get into the ground. Thanks to legislation banning electronics dumping in 2006, the 2007 signing of the Electronics Recycling Act, which requires manufacturers of monitors and TVs to “collect and recycle 60 percent by weight of their products sold in Minnesota,” numbers are way up for recycling programs, according to a Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) report.

According to data provided by the MPCA’s Garth Hickle, the first year of the Act saw 153 collectors pick up a whopping 33.4 million pounds of such devices statewide.

As for Rep. Gardner’s “tsunami”? Reached by email this week, he was optimistic about recyclers’ ability to deal with discarded TVs.

“The good news is that the collection programs have been in place for awhile, a lot of consumers have gotten rid of their stockpiles and the recyclers are ready,” he said. “So hopefully the tsunami will end up being just a big wave.”

Photo: H20Alchemist, Flickr