Wow, times are tough. Even for WOW.

Western Oregon Waste, the garbage hauler and recycler for almost all of Clatsop County, is getting a lot less bang per ton of recycled materials now than it did a year ago. Like the rest of the economy, the market for metal, plastic, cardboard, paper and especially glass, has taken a nose dive.

“It’s definitely affecting our revenue stream,” said Laura Leebrick, WOW’s governmental and corporate affairs manager.

In the past, she said, the revenue from selling recycled materials helped offset the cost of collecting it. These days, it’s getting closer to the cost of collecting garbage, and that could eventually spark an overall increase in the rates customers pay.

“We need to support the development of regional markets,” Leebrick said. Most of the markets for recyclables are in Asia, which has been hard hit by the global economic slump. “China’s the engine,” said Jeff Murray, of Far West Fibers Inc., which has plants in Hillsboro and Portland and does business with WOW. His company sorts and sells nearly half the commingled curbside recyclables in the state.

China’s mills were going full-steam, Murray said, putting out a lot of paper, cardboard, plastic and packaging until last October. “Then a number of plants shut down for the Olympics and didn’t come back up. They had overproduced a phenomenal amount of paper,” Murray said. As a result, from Oct. 1 to Nov. 1, the average value of recyclables dropped by 65 percent, he said, and some went to negative value.

Meanwhile, domestic mills began taking downtime, which reduced the local market for brown fiber (cardboard) and Far West Fiber had to start taking all the other types of recyclables from haulers. Recyclables are basically a raw material for manufacturing, Murray said, and as long as the economy is going down there’s not as much demand.

At the moment, materials are generally moving, Murray said, but Far West Fiber has already started laying off or not replacing employees.

“We fell off a cliff in October. We’re sitting on a ledge and we’re not sure how solid that ledge is,” Murray said. But he remains committed to recycling, which he explained has far less impact on the environment and is much less expensive than using virgin materials. It’s the difference between reusing aluminum cans or mining ore and refining it, for example. “This is not a reflection of recycling itself,” Murray said. “It’s the economy.”

It’s also the law. In Oregon, cities with a population of more than 4,000 are required by law to implement waste reduction programs, according to Leslie Kochan, waste reduction specialist for the state Department of Environmental Quality. She said she works with local governments to help them meet the requirement.

Clatsop County regularly recycles more than the 25 percent of its waste stream that is mandated for each county by state and federal law and Kochan gives a lot of credit to WOW for that. “WOW has really taken on the responsibility of providing education and promotion” of recycling, she said.

DEQ identifies “principal recyclable materials” for each county, and for Clatsop, one of them is glass. But when WOW replaced its 14-gallon plastic bins with red-lidded, 44-inch tall, 90-gallon gray recycling carts last fall in Astoria, Warrenton, Gearhart, Seaside and Cannon Beach, glass was no longer on the menu for residential curbside pickup. It’s especially difficult to handle and expensive to transport and there’s not much of a market for it. Customers can put their bottles in their garbage cans, but if they want to recycle their glass they must take it to recycling depots.

In Astoria, the only option has been to haul it to the recycling depot at the transfer station on Williamsport Road. Now there’s another option.

As of today, glass recycling carts have been placed at the Sunset Empire Transit Center at Ninth Street and Marine Drive in downtown Astoria. SETD director Cindy Howe offered to be WOW’s first “Community Recycling Partner,” Leebrick said. The cart lids, fabricated by WOW’s shop at their Warrenton facility, are designed with a seven-inch bottle drop slot and added locks in an effort to minimize illegal dumping of trash and vandalism.

“Hopefully, this will serve as an inspiration to other businesses to the same kind of set up for public use,” Leebrick wrote in an e-mail announcing the new service. The Astoria Co-Op has already expressed interest.

Other recycling depots are located in Seaside at Alder Mill Road and Avenue S, in Cannon Beach at the end of East Second Street, in Gearhart behind city hall and in Warrenton at the north end of the public works maintenance yard. The Gearhart and Warrenton drop-off locations accept only glass.

The big gray carts were not very popular with some residents when they were introduced about five months ago. They’re not pretty and they can be hard to maneuver, especially up and down stairs. And they’re emptied every two weeks instead of weekly, like the old plastic bins.

“I usually describe it as a deal with the devil,” said Matt Stern, recycling director for WOW. “We recycle 50 percent more with 50 percent less truck trips.”

However, the carts are proving to be an extremely efficient way to handle recyclables. In the first month the new carts were in use, the volume of recyclable material collected curbside increased by 21 percent over the same month in 2007. Since then, the overall participation rate has risen to 95 percent. That’s up from 40 to 50 percent participation when people put their recyclables by the curb in small box-like 14-gallon bins which were emptied every week.

And unlike the plastic bins, and their predecessors, bins made of wood and painted pastel blue and yellow, what goes into the big carts doesn’t have to be sorted by type – paper, cans or plastic. If the customer didn’t do it, the driver used to stand out in front of people’s houses and sort recyclables.

Thanks to new technology, materials can now be “commingled” in recycling trucks, eliminating the need for sorting. And the big carts accept a greater variety of materials. “The industry evolved to allow materials to be mixed together and the equipment evolved, too,” Stern said. WOW’s recycling trucks collect an average of 10 tons of recyclables on pick-up days, for a total of around 200 tons from Cannon Beach to Astoria per month.

Stern said people are divided into three groups:

Those who would recycle if they had to jump through fire to do it;

Those who walk around dropping fast food containers on the sidewalk and wouldn’t recycle no matter what;

Those who will recycle if it’s easy and convenient.

Although Oregon is one of the most progressive recycling states in the country – the Legislature passed the Opportunity to Recycle Act in the late 1980s – there’s still plenty of room to increase participation, mainly through education and outreach.