Recycling Wood Fiber in Municipal Solid Wastes: Opportunity for Government-Industry Partnership, 1990 Pulping Conference Proceedings

Few issues in America have touched the concerns of our society so greatly as the need to recycle wastes. The issue is real, intense, widespread, and continuing. Since Earth Day 1970, the desire to clean up America has been growing. Fueled by small contributions and thousands of hours of dedicated volunteer leadership, along with enlightened commercial interests, environmental organizations have pushed for a cleaner America. This has resulted in more than 3,000 pieces of new legislation at the Federal, State, and local levels.

Juxtaposed with this urgent demand is another urgent international issue, namely that of industrial competitiveness. Competitiveness is mentioned because we must recognize that the public collects waste but generally cannot recycle wastes. Only industry can process these materials into new products. Therefore, looking at recycling through the eyes of industry, as well as through the eyes of the public, is important. Recycling of municipal solid wastes is therefore a joint industry- government-public responsibility of global proportions.

If we had all the tools at hand to recycle all our wastes economically, we would have no landfill problem. Things accumulate in the landfill because recycling them in uneconomic. It is uneconomic because we are a Nation with abundant resources and we have not pursued a vigorous research and development program to make recycling of wastes economically more attractive. If we wish to solve the landfill crisis through recycling, we need to make a third group responsible for recycling, namely the engineering and science community. Thus, the way out of our landfill crisis depends on successful cooperation of not two but three key groups: all levels of governments, industry, and the academic and research communities. No one group can solve this problem without the others as willing partners. All are stakeholders.

Up to this point in our discussion, the issue has been generic recycling of municipal solid wastes. As concerned representatives of the Forest Service research arm, we have a special obligation to focus on problems of waste from the forest products industry, namely wood and paper products that are now headed for our Nations’ decreasing number of landfills.