Robert Megela goes out of his way to recycle — about 17 miles out of his way.

Megela, 70, of Penn Township will drive from his home to the Westmoreland Cleanways and Recycling Center in Pleasant Unity to drop off used glass items, which are not collected by the township’s recycler, Republic Services Inc. of Phoenix.

“We’re big environmentalists,” Megela said.

Despite die-hards such as Megela, recycling finds itself in a state of flux. Count it among the myriad aspects of life changed by the covid-19 pandemic.

Demand from manufacturers for many products made from recycled corrugated cardboard, office paper, junk mail and newspapers is down because of a number of factors, including consumer usage, both domestically and globally, those in the industry say.

Conversely, the recycling rates for paper and corrugated cardboard are about 68% and 93%, respectively, totaling 35 million tons last year, according to the American Forest & Paper Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade association. That ultimately is affecting the bottom line of those agencies and businesses that collect recyclable paper and cardboard products and send them to processors.

“The market is flooded” with paper and cardboard, said Michael Skapura, executive director of Westmoreland Cleanways and Recycling Center.

Corrugated cardboard that Westmoreland Cleanways receives and bundles in bales for a West Virginia paper mill has dropped in price over the past year from $165 a ton to $35 a ton, Skapura said.

And it’s not just cardboard, he said. Prices also have fallen for the aforementioned recyclables that are made into toilet paper, paper towels, office paper and tissue, he said.

“It doesn’t cover the cost of the operations,” Skapura said.

The recycled glass that Westmoreland Cleanways sends to its processor, Carry All Products in East Huntingdon, costs $15 a ton, Skapura said.

The company crushes recycled glass into 1/4 — to 1/2 -inch pieces from resources including Westmoreland Cleanways, City Brewing Co. and Castle Co-Packing — both in Latrobe — and cities including Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Baltimore and Akron, to the tune of 10,000 tons a month, said Chris Koontz, operations manager. The glass is separated by color and sent by railcar — eight to 10 a week from West Overton — primarily to companies that make packaging for food and beverage companies, Koontz said.

The value of that glass cullet, which is the crushed glass from bottles that people drop into bins, has risen as the demand from glass manufacturers increases, Koontz said.

Koontz attributed the rise in cost of cullet to several factors, including the post-covid increase in labor prices, fuel prices and general inflation. Glass manufacturers can reduce their carbon footprint by using the recycled glass and reduce their costs associated with trucking raw materials.

Like other commodities in a global economy, the value of the glass jar, beer can or plastic container someone recycles in Western Pennsylvania is impacted by global supply and demand. International regulations, and in some cases restrictions on what recyclables countries will accept to be imported, have an effect on the prices of those materials, Waste Management said in its 2022 annual report.

Those products can change in pricing “minute to minute on a commodities index,” said Robert J. Bylone Jr., president of the Pennsylvania Recycling Markets Center, a

Harrisburg-based nonprofit that seeks to develop and expand recycling markets in Pennsylvania.

“At the moment, prices have gone down somewhat from .2022,” Bylone said.

Waste Management Inc. of Houston, which describes itself as North America’s leading recycler of post-consumer materials, said it experienced lower profitability from its recycling business in the second quarter this year, according to its quarterly financial report.

“Overall, demand for recycled material has fallen, causing lower commodity prices,” said Erika Deyarmin Young, a spokeswoman for Waste Management, which sells recyclables to processors that make products sold in North America.

Skapura, who doubles as Westmoreland County’s recycling coordinator, is aware of the fluctuation in prices and those “significant headwinds” in 2023 that Waste Management predicted would hurt the recycling market, such as a slowdown in the economy.

Skapura has found a plastic processor in New Jersey that will transport Westmoreland Cleanways’ bundled plastic and grind it into small pieces that are then processed into picture frames, household trim and television parts, Skapura said. But the price for plastics “is below water,” he said.

From a national perspective, Republic Services spokesman Jeremy Walters sees the demand for recycled plastics outstripping supply, “as brands make their progress toward sustainability goals” using recycled plastics in packaging.

There is a profitable market segment for what is referred to as e-waste — the discarded electronic devices such as cellphones, computers, monitors and televisions because those electronics contain valuable metals, said Michael Liscinski, household hazardous waste and e-waste manager at Noble Environmental of Pittsburgh.

So many people want to get rid of their old phones, televisions and computers through recycling that Westmoreland Cleanways can fill 43 to 44 pallets of the e-waste a week, Skapura said.

Yet even among the same recyclable products, not all are valued equally because all of the materials are graded after being sorted, the state Recycling Center’s Bylone said.

“Generally speaking, the value of the commodity is less than the cost of recycling,” which includes the cost of collecting the material, Bylone said.

Tons of recyclables

Pennsylvanians recycled about 4.6 million tons of materials in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. That was down 7% from 4.96 million tons in 2020, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection. Before the pandemic, 5.25 million tons were collected and processed in 2019.

Westmoreland County also saw a dip in its residential recycling from 15,000 tons in 2020 to 13,000 tons in 2021, which accounts for both curbside pickup and drop-off sites, Skapura said. In 2018, 16,000 tons of residential recyclables were collected.

Skapura attributes that drop-off to the change in people’s habits during the pandemic.

“There was less foot traffic” at the recycling center, Skapura said.

In Allegheny County, residents’ recycling habits began dropping even before the pandemic, said Patrick Dowd, the acting health director.

Skapura attributed the decrease in recycling tonnage in Westmoreland County to the decline in population — fewer people, thus fewer recyclables.

Westmoreland Cleanways received more than 1,297 tons of glass, aluminum, metal cans, plastic, cardboard, paper, electronics, televisions, books and Styrofoam in 2022. It also recycled more than 10,000 tires and 1,200 Freon-laden appliances, Skapura said.

“That’s 72 tractor-trailer loads we kept out of the landfill,” he said.

“We’re on pace to do 3 million pounds (1,360 tons) this year, and that’s with the televisions getting lighter,” he added.

That’s a 60% increase in the weight of collected recyclables than the covid-impacted year of 2021, said Skapura, a former vice president and general manager of Westmoreland Plastics Co. of Latrobe.

The desire among some people to recycle is so great that they come from as far away as Armstrong, Indiana and Fayette counties, Skapura said.

Mike Uschak is willing to drive about 8 miles from his Derry Township home in Loyalhanna to Westmoreland Cleanways about once a month to ensure his recyclables end up reused instead of in a landfill.

“This is my only option. This is the only place that will take the plastics, glass and electronics. They take bubble wrap and Styrofoam as well,” said Uschak, 71, who also takes some recyclables to Latrobe’s transfer station on Mission Road, which has drop-off boxes.

With customers like Megela and Uschak, “we have seen a steady increase in car counts at our facility over the years,” Skapura said.

Single-stream recycling — which permits residents to drop their plastics, cans, glass, metal and paper in one container that usually is collected by the municipality’s trash hauler — has become a double-edged sword for recyclers.

It has increased the amount of products people will recycle. Communities that switch to single-stream recycling experience an almost instant 45% increase in recyclable materials collected, according to the Pennsylvania Waste Industries Association, a Harrisburg-based trade organization.

But it also increases the likelihood of contamination of products, Waste Management’s Young said.

“The ongoing challenges for recycling operations in our region seem to revolve around the fact that we have a single stream here locally. In the last few years, that has meant that waste management companies have stopped accepting glass because of the amount of contamination that it was causing with other materials,” Dowd said.

Noble Environmental often sees cardboard pizza boxes with cheese on them put into the recycle bin. Food and liquids can contaminate an entire load which is rejected by the third-party, single-source recycling facility, and those items instead end up in a landfill, said Alex Sulkowski, a Noble Environmental vice president.

Contamination is becoming such a problem at Westmoreland Cleanways that it is considering shutting down its plastic collection, Skapura said. They have found items such as crib mattresses, lawn furniture, cushions, printers, plastic hangers, straws, toys, scrap metal, plastic bags, Styrofoam and cardboard in the plastic container-only bins, he said.

The profitability of the recycling business also has been impacted by the fuel costs for transporting those materials.

“The cost to recycle materials has grown exponentially, particularly because of fuel expenses related to transporting product,” Sulkowski said.

Yet it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that “those commodities go back into manufacturing products” processed by Pennsylvania companies, whether it is glass, paper or plastics, Bylone said.

“It’s creating jobs and markets to support other jobs,” he said. “It’s a valuable part of the economy of our state.”