In coming up with a plan to save polar bears from climate change, students at Colfax Upper Elementary School decided to encourage recycling. But Springdale, where their school is located, doesn’t provide recycling to residents at their homes 鈥� nor does any municipality within the Allegheny Valley School District 鈥� because the state’s 30-year-old recycling law says they don’t have to.
Some say it’s time to rethink that. The law “as it exists today sets a very low bar, because that bar was a very high bar in 1988,” said Justin Stockdale, regional director of the Pennsylvania Resources Council, a grass-roots environmental organization.
“That’s the nature of public policy. It was a very progressive, cutting-edge piece of legislation back then, the first of its kind in the nation.” Under the state’s recycling law, Act 101 of 1988, municipalities with fewer than 5,000 residents are not required to provide at-home, curb-side pickup of recyclables.
As a result, only 18 percent of the state’s more than 2,500 municipalities are mandated to provide recycling, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection. At-home recycling is popular, state officials say, especially in larger communities such as Hempfield Township, which in 2016 began picking up recyclable trash every week instead of every other week. “That seems to have gone over very well,” township Manager Andrew Walz said. “This is a lot better. We can recycle more.”
Preventing a Fee Sunset
The looming expiration of a $2-per-ton fee on waste to support recycling programs could provide an opportunity to modernize the act. The fee is scheduled to sunset on Jan. 1, 2020, and advocates such as the Professional Recyclers of Pennsylvania are calling for its renewal before the end of 2017 so applications for future grants aren’t affected.
The fee raises more than $36 million each year to promote waste reduction and recycling. “Should the funding sunset, grant programs will be discontinued, yet the requirements set forth in Act 101 will continue,” the recyclers’ association says.
Leaders of the legislative committees that would tackle the issue have differing views. Adam Pankake, executive director of the Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, wants to focus only on renewing the fee. “Generally, people are supportive of Act 101. It’s done a lot of great things across the state for recycling and seems to be working,” he said. “Reauthorization (of the fee) is palpable for a lot of people.”
Meanwhile, state Rep. John Maher, R-Upper St. Clair, chairman of the House committee, said the fee’s expiration offers an opportunity to open the act to updates. “Sometimes you need an element within the greater subject that creates a sense of urgency,” Maher said. “It’s time for us to revisit and update this law. If we’re going to have the fee, it becomes a question of, ‘What’s the fee for? What are we trying to accomplish?’ ”
State Rep. Frank Dermody, D-Oakmont, supports the existing fee and thinks lowering the population threshold is something to consider, but he feels the state needs to provide more grants to help smaller towns get recycling programs going. “Having this law in place really changed the way that people think about recycling in Pennsylvania. There’s a common expectation of it now that didn’t exist 30 years ago,” he said.
“I agree that having to reauthorize the (fee) gives us a good chance to review it and see if there are things the state can do better.” An opportunity to update? Widener University law professor John Dernbach, who drafted the original statute, said the act “could stand to be updated.” “The program is rudderless and drifting,” he said. “There has been no new goal in over a decade.”
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