Recycling Vexes Rural Areas

CHARLESTON, W.Va.—Residents in this rural, mountainous region consumed at least 20 million bottles of water after a chemical spill contaminated the water supply earlier this year. Grant Davis, an elementary-school principal, worried what would happen to all the empty bottles. Like most of the roughly 300,000 people in the nine-county contamination zone, he doesn't have curbside recycling either at home or at work, and a drop-off site is 15 miles away. "You would go to the Sam's Club and you would see stacks and stacks and stacks of this plastic that you knew was going to be around forever," he said. The result: All but an estimated three million of the empty bottles were dumped in landfills.

West Virginia offers a stark example of the challenges of rural recycling, where the distance between homes makes curbside recycling expensive, and few people are in the habit of hauling recyclables to drop-off sites that can be more than 25 miles away. Only 36% of West Virginians have access to curbside recycling, compared with 91% in California and 95% in New York state, according to a 2008 report from the American Beverage Association, which surveyed regional and county-level recycling coordinators.

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Many small towns and rural counties struggle to offer recycling services, especially with tight government budgets, limited access to recycling processors and wide fluctuation in the market for recyclable materials. Only half the population of Mississippi has access to drop-off or curbside programs. Some small cities, such as Lynn Haven, Fla., eliminated recycling programs because there were no nearby processing centers.

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Shawn Lindsey, a recycling expert who advises the not-for-profit Center for Rural Strategies, said some towns cannot get vendors to bring in recycling containers because it takes weeks to fill a bin, tying up a company asset and providing an insufficient return. It also is cheap to dump trash, including recyclables, in a landfill in many rural areas, costing about $20 a ton in Athens, Tenn., where Mr. Lindsey is public works director. It can cost more than $100 a ton in New York and Pennsylvania, he noted.

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But advocates are optimistic that rural recycling will rise as technology such automated bin-lifting trucks and optical sorters make collection less expensive. Mississippi recently awarded $1 million in grants to four communities seeking to build "hub-and-spoke" networks, which could pool their collection to make recycling financially viable, according to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality.

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