Mail, Paper & Recycling Environmental issues are a leading public concern and with good reason: We all benefit from efforts to reduce, re-use, and recycle. It's not possible to avoid all waste -- the U.S. produces more than 13 billion tons of nonhazardous waste material each year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). (See: RCRA: Reducing Risk From Waste, EPA, EPA530-K-97-004, September 1997, page 5.) As a nation we accept the reality that without some waste we would not have houses, cars or commerce -- things most of us want and see as the reasonable benefits of a modern society. We also know the numbers associated with waste -- that 13 billion tons a year -- must be large because we are a nation with nearly 300 million people. However, we also realize there are opportunities to take potential waste and make it into something useful Figures from the EPA's most recent study of municipal solid waste (MSW) show that paper and paperboard yield enormously-high levels of recovery: In fact, paper-based materials represent 53 percent of all the MSW we recover and recycle, material we do not landfill. MSW Generation and Recovery Millions of Tons   Weight Generated Weight Recovered Percentage Paper & Paperboard 84.0 42.0 50.0% Metals 18.7 6.88 36.8% Other Wastes 65.0 20.6 31.6% Other Materials 4.57 1.17 25.6% Glass 12.8 2.76 21.6% Rubber & Leather 6.70 .96 14.3% Textiles 11.1 1.70 15.3% Wood 13.9 1.31 9.4% Plastics 28.0 1.65 5.7% Total MSW 245.7 79.0 32.1% Source: Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2005, EPA, page 7) Given that over time we learn more about the best ways to reduce, re-use, and recycle, the question is: Can we do better than we did in 2005? In recent years the recovery of paper-based products -- already the group of materials with the highest level of recycling -- have shown increasingly improved rates of recovery, from 45.5 percent in 2002 to 48.1 percent in 2003 and then 53 percent in 2005, the latest year for which we have EPA statistics. Figures from PaperRecycles.org show that between 1993 and 2006, recovery rates for paper-based products increased from 38.70% to 53.4%. These figures raise a question: Can we do better? The answer is likely to be yes because of several factors which impact recycling rates. More than 8,500 communities have curbside pick-up programs and many now collect all forms of paper-based waste. What started out initially as a newspaper pick-up plan has expanded in many areas to include a variety of paper such as office stock and mail. (See: Municipal Solid Waste Generation, Recycling, and Disposal in the United States: Facts and Figures for 2005, EPA, page 13) Scrap paper has become a cash crop, something in demand. Exports to China, as one example, now top $1 billion annually. Not only does recycling make environmental sense, it also makes financial sense. The issue of global warming has renewed public interest in ecological matters. More and more people see the value of personal environmental responsibility as well as the benefits of recycling.