“I love the garbage business,” says Jane Witheridge, vice president of recycling and strategic affairs for Waste Management of North America Inc.
And the attraction goes back before she got her first job in the business. “During my senior year (in college),” she says, “I followed garbage trucks around to see how routing efficiency could be improved in Allentown, Pa.”
The 38-year-old engineer, a graduate of Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., even met her husband through the sludge business. He owns a chemical-engineering firm.
Witheridge has been a rising star at Waste Management since joining the company in 1976 as a staff engineer in the Oak Brook headquarters. She became a regional engineer and manager of special projects in 1980, a job that took her to Argentina, Peru and Venezuela for cleanup projects.
In 1984 she developed Waste Management’s environmental audit program to ensure its landfills comply with government rules, and in 1985 she was named director of environmental management to track compliance programs.
In 1986 she moved to Ben Salem, Pa., to become district vice president of landfill operations, and she became regional operations vice president for landfills in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Witheridge returned to Oak Brook in 1989 as staff vice president for recycling and this year also was named vice president of strategic affairs, placing her in the ranks of Waste Management’s top executives.
“When I started,” she says, “I was one of the first women in the company. I feel I can do more good for environmental protection by handling things that other people don’t want to handle in an environmentally sound manner.”
Since she joined Waste Management, it has grown from a $180 million garbage-hauling firm to a $10 billion environmental-services conglomerate. And recycling played a key role in that growth.
“It’s one of the most important services we provide to our customers,” Witheridge says.
She adds: “I was asked to come here and make heads or tails of recycling. I think I am doing that.”
Despite its popularity, waste recycling-in which usable paper, metal, glass and plastic are collected and sorted for resale-has always been an economic riddle.
Unexpectedly, the recycling symbol of three chasing arrows also has come to portray a national program going in circles without clear objectives.
A 1992 report by the Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University in St. Louis, titled “Recycling for Recycling’s Sake,” finds that “political decision-makers are less concerned with cost-effectiveness and more interested in promoting recycling at any cost.”
Twenty-nine states have mandated recycling 25 percent to 60 percent of solid wastes, but none of them mandates uses for material collected.
Waste Management has been in the recycling business since the mid-1970s, operating 125 materials-recovery facilities across the country. It finds that:
– Despite public expectations, recycling does not pay for itself.
– On average, collecting and sorting a ton of trash costs $175. Revenue from selling recyclable material covers 25 percent of that cost.
– The average price paid for recyclable material dropped to $44 a ton in 1992 from $97 a ton in 1988.
Actually, says Witheridge, Waste Management doesn’t really expect recycling to pay for itself.
“I think materials are moving at lower and lower prices because there is no requirement for anybody to use that material,” says Witheridge. “Consumers don’t understand that putting material on the curb is the first step in recycling.”
Recyclers want consumers to demand products containing recycled material, and they want government to define recycled products to avoid confusion and false claims.
The cyclical nature of the market for recycled commodities complicates recycling, because prices will be strong some years and weak in others.
The market price for a ton of recycled paper now is $30, compared with collection and sorting costs of $75 to $125.
Plastic seems to be a recycling economic disaster.
“For every ton of plastic recycled,” says Witheridge, “as much as $1,000 a ton could be lost” because truckloads of the fluffy material can be compressed into a bale.
In 1992 recycling accounted for $250 million in revenue for Waste Management, though only a fourth of that was from reselling material. The rest, which made the operation “marginally profitable,” came from municipalities for collection and sorting services.
“It has to be cost-effective to be sustainable,” says Witheridge.
But that could lead to more selective recycling of materials with high resale value, such as aluminum, as waste-disposal budgets tighten.
Given the economic pitfalls, recycling may sound like a mission impossible, but Witheridge says the outlook is not that grim.
“Outlets exist for virtually all materials,” says Witheridge. “The question is, what price does one receive for that material, or what payment does one have to make to use that material?”
The next big step in recycling “is to see where recycling fits in the overall, integrated waste services in a manner that focuses on customer needs,” she predicts. In effect, this means that recycling cannot be seen as a stand-alone service, but must operate in the context of waste-management schemes that include treatment, composting, waste-to-energy incineration and land-filling and best serve community needs.
Meanwhile, even in casual visits to industry or public buildings, Witheridge will ask where the empty bottles and cans go.
