Venkatesh enumerates those having a harder time in the face of the recession: office cleaners, squeegee men, informal security guards, "canners" who scavenge for recyclables (there's less consumption now, so less to recycle) and nannies whose employers have been laid off.
The Dual System Deutschland (DSD) required householders to wash containers, separate them from other waste, and sort them by type, but the annual volume of accumulated recyclables, estimated at 400,000 tons, exceeded the capacity of recycling plants, and DSD was DM 500 million in debt.
In 2006 CyclOpe estimated the value of the international trade in recyclables at well over $100 billion.Sort it yourselfAnother way to make recycling cheaper is to get the household or business that generates the waste to sort it free of charge.
Partly it's because the recycling model in most municipalities of picking up a bin with all the recyclables mixed together, especially the plastics, doesn't work well.
But industry veterans question whether the revenue from the recyclables and the fuel will justify the capital and running costs.Much the same doubt surrounds two other technologies called gasification and pyrolysis.
In general, the narrower the categories into which recyclables are sorted and the more meticulous the separation, the easier they are to process and the higher the price they fetch.
Operated by Norcal Waste Systems, it processes an average of 750 tons of paper, plastic, glass and metals a day.The process begins when a truck arrives and dumps its load of recyclables at one end of the building.
With its hunger for resources and the availability of cheap labour, China has become the largest importer of recyclable materials in the world.The China questionBut the practice of shipping recyclables to China is controversial.
As with all commodities, costs for recyclables fluctuate.
The cost of collecting, transporting and sorting materials generally exceeds the revenues generated by selling the recyclables, and is also greater than the disposal costs.
It inspects its trucks to see which buildings or neighbourhoods are throwing away lots of recyclables and gets its staff to contact the worst offenders to urge them to be more careful.
