A Hollow Award

Southampton Town will receive an award from Gov. George E. Pataki on Tuesday for the supposed success of its recycling program. In announcing the award, Supervisor Vincent Cannuscio praised his town's "overall recycling rate" of 49.74 percent. Unfortunately, this figure is highly misleading.

Southampton's pay-per-bag trash disposal program was implemented in January 1995. It provides a financial incentive for individuals and business owners to reduce the amount of garbage they create and to recycle as much as they can. The hitch is that Southampton's transfer stations do not accept trash from carters, who instead truck what they collect elsewhere.

Since town officials don't keep figures on how much garbage is leaving town, there is no way to quantify it. However, it generally is understood in the industry that carters and those who haul their debris by themselves split the waste stream in half.

That leaves us with the proposition that Southampton actually is recycling only half of half of its solid waste. Furthermore, knowing it is traditionally true that those who carry their own debris to the transfer stations are relatively enthusiastic about recycling, why isn't the touted recycling rate much higher?

While Southampton is to be commended for its pay-per-bag program, it has abdicated the major part of its responsibility. The award it is about to receive is hollow.

Before we scold Southampton too harshly, however, we should note that East Hampton Town seems to be following suit. It has eliminated low-grade plastics from its list of mandatory recyclable materials because they are of little value in the current market and it has opted out of the international market (by not baling any recyclables, except newspaper).

While it is true that the market for recyclable materials has all but disappeared, making dumping at landfills elsewhere and incineration the cheapest methods of disposal, at least for the time being, there are more environmentally sound ways to go.

Private carters, with lots of customers, the ability to take garbage long distances, and the efficiencies of scale, are in a position to charge low prices and take over. But, while the economic argument is seductive and may help municipalities get out of the mess created by their past dependency on landfills, privatization is not the answer to long-term environmental protection.

In the meantime, we wish whoever selected Southampton for the Governor's recycling award had looked at the larger picture.