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Warehouses full of unsaleable recyclables.

And was this not predictable?

?We?re warehousing it and warehousing it and warehousing it,? said Johnny Gold, senior vice president at the Newark Group, a company that has 13 recycling plants across the country. Mr. Gold said the industry had seen downturns before but not like this. ?We never saw this coming.?...

The downturn offers some insight into the forces behind the recycling boom of recent years. Environmentally conscious consumers have been able to pat themselves on the back and feel good about sorting their recycling and putting it on the curb. But most recycling programs have been driven as much by raw economics as by activism.

Cities and their contractors made recycling easy in part because there was money to be made. Businesses, too ? like grocery chains and other retailers ? have profited by recycling thousands of tons of materials like cardboard each month.

But the drop in prices has made the profits shrink, or even disappear, undermining one rationale for recycling programs and their costly infrastructure.

Isn't this revisionism? I remember reading all along that recycling was not the economic benefit it was cracked up to be.

Full post as published by Althouse on December 08, 2008 (boomark / email).