Commentary: Seattle says recycling rate hit 50%; but how much became new products?

   Mayor Greg Nickels today announced that Seattle set a city record for recycling last year -- 50 percent of residential, commercial and self-haul waste was "recycled instead of going to the landfill," a news release states. It's the fifth straight year of increased recycling for Seattleites.

   But as an earlier PostGlobe story asked, how much of it ends up getting recycled into new products instead of going to a landfill elsewhere due to issues such as contamination or being not actually recyclable, after all? (People actually have thrown things like garden hoses and bowling balls into recycling bins.)

   The point is this: There's a difference between collecting 50 percent of stuff for recycling (or composting) and the important action several steps down the line of seeing them transformed into new products. Dragging bins to the curb and having them sent to a first-line recycling facility is more properly termed "collection," not recycling, critics say.

   "People seem to think that if they collect the materials, they’ve recycled," says Susan Kinsella, executive director of Conservatree, who co-authored a report called Single Stream Best Practices Manual and Implementation Guide. "But they’re not recycled until a product gets made."