Municipal recycling programs have a way of weakening and disappearing during times like these. As a result, local recycling advocates had better stay particularly engaged with municipalities, lest they find out decisions have been made that could unwind years of progress.

As Hugh Morley explains very well in yesterday's Record, prices for recyclable materials have plunged. I fully expect haulers to want increasingly to void or renegotiate pickup agreements with municipalities. Haulers will be responding to the low prices they're getting for the recyclable paper, glass, plastic and metal, and they'll want to pay municipalities much less to collect the stuff, and in some cases they'll try telling municipalities to pay them to pick it up.

And this is how years of progress on local recycling efforts can be quickly undone as a result of temporary acute economic pressure. Even worse, once local recycling programs weaken or are put on hold, they take a long time to restart, even after prices for recyclable materials recover. All the while, landfills will be filling up faster, and corporations will be using more oil, metals, trees, energy and other newly-minted raw materials -- the seeds of global warming -- to create products from scratch, rather than from recycled materials.

With the economic pressure on recycling programs increasing, it's especially crucial that recycling advocates inside and outside municipal government keep close tabs on hauling agreements. It's one thing to turn back the clock after every other option has been exhausted, but it's another thing entirely to see recycling programs weakened before communities have a full opportunity to weigh-in on how to sustain their hard-won recycling programs.

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