SHERIDAN - I am a recycling fool, but recently I've been pondering the petro-wisdom of schlepping a flattened tuna fish can from Sheridan to Portland. Recycling has always been a problem in the land of long haulage.

It takes a lot of diesel to haul paper, cardboard, cans, and glass from Wyoming to various paper or steel mills or scrap exporters on the west coast. If you’re not careful, you'll burn as much energy as you save.

   But now with the price of commodities sky-high, does recycling make more sense? This depends, mostly because fuel, too, has climbed and now shares a price bracket previously reserved for single malt whiskies.

   The answer is mostly yes, but not easily so.

   In a state that - next to Alaska - has the fewest people per square mile, the classic Wyoming solution to garbage is to dig a hole and bury it. And the hole's called a dump, not a landfill. The idea of paying someone to take your garbage smacks of subversive activity.

   As a result, Wyoming is, as one recycling expert said, "so far behind the eight ball in recycling we don't know what ball we're really behind.''

   Because few Wyoming landfills or recycling companies keep records, it’s only a guess what percentage of its garbage gets recycled, but it’s about three-to-five percent. The national average is 26.7 percent.

   But this sorry status is changing and pretty fast, too. The increase in recycling has less to do with the high price of commodities than does the steep costs of running a landfill.

   A few years ago, the town of Glenrock's director of public works, Dave Andrews, penciled out the cost of operating the local landfill. It came to a heart-halting $168 per ton. Glenrock doesn't have much trash and that's a problem: the economics of scale hurts small operators.

 

   ''Whether you're dealing one ton per year or 1000 tons per year, you've still got to have the same equipment and the manpower to run it," said Andrews.

   Moreover, Andrews said the town had little enthusiasm for meeting the cost of a building a needed new, lined landfill: $100,000 per acre.

   Then he figured out he could truck the town¹s waste 20 miles to Casper and get charged $40 per ton. Even with the cost of fuel, this made sense. Besides, the less you carry and dump, the less you pay, an instant incentive to recycle.

    Glenrock used full-cost accounting, an analysis that encompasses all economic impacts. This is an alien form of math in Wyoming. For decades, Wyoming municipalities did what we all do when we don't to pay actual costs: we lean on the mineral properties to subsidize us. Cities and towns put a mil levy on mineral properties. The individual trash tosser paid little. This encouraged all of us to back our F-250s up to the pit and offload to our heart's delight.

   Increasingly, municipalities (and individuals) now pay as they pitch.

   This means installing scales and introducing a tipping fee, the charge per pound (more commonly, per ton) of garbage brought into a landfill.

   A scale at a Wyoming landfill is analogous to having a posted speed limit on our highways: It insults our sharply honed sense of self-regulation. They're tolerated because they're ignored whenever possible.

   But we can't ignore this: out of 130 known Wyoming landfills, of which 51 are still open, roughly 80 have no groundwater monitoring system; only two are lined; 21 percent are leaching undesirables such as vinyl chloride, benzenes and various solvents into the water table. Eighty percent of Wyoming’s water supplies come from groundwater. The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality's Bob Doctor estimates remediation costs for these leaking pits will cost Wyoming between $500,000 to $2.5 million per site.

   Which brings us back to why recycling now pays. Anything that can find a second use won't go in the ground. Landfills divert the big stuff: concrete, grass clippings, brush, tires, appliances - like old washers. Open market recycling takes care of the rest.

   Landfills are being centralized. That's another good thing for recycling. The more material you have in one place to recycle, the better price you'll get.

   For example, one aluminum can, by its lonesome, is currently worth a little over a penny. But when joined by 27,200 of its closest relatives into an 800-pound bale, a can is worth about 2.2 cents. When baled and made into a truckload of 1.3 million cans, a can has nearly tripled in value.

    Wyomingites toss about 1.1 tons of garbage per person per year, or six or seven pounds per day. One third of our waste stream, as they call it, is paper.

    And it does go a long way to get reused. Aluminum cans typically go east to Anheuser-Busch's Metal Container Corporation; cardboard and paper travel to plants in Montana, Oregon, and Washington, sometimes China; steel cans and small scrap end up at the Nucor Steel plant in Plymouth, Utah.

   But we're alleviating some of the petro-wisdom worry by using material locally. Heartland Biocomposites of Torrington grinds up old milk jugs and water bottles (#2 High Density Polyethylene) plastic. Heartland mixes it with wheat straw to make composite lumber like fence posts and decking.

   Even glass now has a local use. Contractors in Campbell County, which imports most of its gravel from South Dakota or Johnson County, use crushed glass (called cullet) as filler around landscaping, septic drain fields, retaining wall backfill, and drain pipe bedding.

   Two Wyoming companies shred old tires for drain fields and leach field filler.

   Wyoming even has an e-waste company, Tatooine Electronic Systems of Cheyenne, that takes in printers, PCs, TVs, and monitors, breaks them down on-site, and sells the scrap.

   And anyway, it turns out that my tuna can that got me thinking about this in the first place had a long journey just to get to Sheridan.

   It probably came from American Samoa, or the Philippines, or over 5,000 miles. That makes the 600 miles it needs to go get smelted in Utah look almost reasonable.

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