You know the economy's trashed when people toss out less waste.

And they've been doing just that, said James Warner, executive director of the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority.

The amount of refuse entering the authority transfer station at 1299 Harrisburg Pike was down 10 percent in January and February, Warner said.

The figure includes garbage from households, municipalities and businesses.

The pattern has accelerated the last two quarters, Warner said, but it started in early 2008.

Waste volumes that year were down 5 percent from 2007, according to Warner.

The double-digit downturn now affecting the entire industry is directly related to the economy being in the dumps, Warner said.

People are consuming less. And so less packaging material is getting pitched. Fewer restaurant scraps. Less contruction and demolition debris.

That's a good thing, right?

Well, yes and no.

Society endlessly exhorts itself to reduce, reuse, recycle, a green mantra backed by the National Solid Wastes Management Association in Washington, D.C., according to spokesman Thomas Metzger.

But diminishing waste means less work for haulers, landfill operators and recyclers.

Ginger Good, office manager of Good's Disposal Service in Akron, estimated that drivers have picked up 5 percent less trash than normal over the last three months.

"People are really struggling," she said, and some commercial accounts, primarily car- and construction-related businesses, have scaled back service or closed their doors.

No drivers have been laid off, added Good, but weekly hours have been "slightly" pared back.

"Other people are seeing the same as us," she said.

The trend has caused LCSWMA to cut electricity production at its Conoy Township waste-to-energy plant about 10 percent in January, Warner said. But it hasn't sparked any job losses or noticeable declines in recycling, he added.

Warner said the authority remains in "very stable" financial shape, with a revenue dip of only 1 percent.

That's a relatively small loss for a $55 million operation, said Warner, who predicted that LCSWMA will end the year with a surplus.

Helping to offset the trash flow slump is income from investments, sales of carbon credits and reclaimed metal, and revenue from new waste sources, he added.

"There's always going to be a healthy amount of waste."

Bottom of the can
It's clear that junk is not going to vanish from the system — or the landscape — any time soon.

In the northeast part of the county covered by Good's Disposal Service, Ginger Good said, residential customers are keeping their service.

So are Lancaster inhabitants.

City code requires it, Mayor Rick Gray said. People pay $200 per property unit per year — $160 if they're seniors — to dispose of up to six bags of garbage a week.

Meanwhile, Lititz environmentalist Bill Knapp noted in a Feb. 21 note to a reporter that many people are apparently also continuing to jettison stuff out the window.

He picked up about 400 bags of litter in 2008. "This year," he wrote, "I've already gotten more than 100 bags and I feel like I'm barely making a dent."

Metzger could cite no hard figures for trash volume fluctuation, saying government calculations for 2008 will not be available until later this year.

But garbage reduction news has been trickling in from all over.

Last week, flat-lining prices for used plastic bottles, newsprint and other recyclables led Mountain Home, Ark., to end its curbside pickup program.

In January, operators of Puente Hills, one of the largest landfills in the country, reported a 30 percent decline in trash deliveries from Los Angeles, Calif.-area neighborhoods.

"Every waste business is seeing it," Warner said.

This year, he added, the authority received about 4,800 tons less refuse than projected in January and February.

Construction demolition debris is down about 1,500 tons so far in 2009.

The Harrisburg Pike trash processing complex, opened in 2007, receives 500,000 to 600,000 tons of waste a year, roughly a ton for every resident.

Much of the refuse is burned in the Conoy Township incinerator to make electricity for the PJM Interconnect grid.

"We throttled back the boilers" to compensate, said Warner, who noted that the plant can produce enough juice to power one in six homes in the county.

That result: a $100,000 decline in revenue from electricity.

Such losses are not as bad as they sound, said Warner, who noted that most tipping fee losses this year stem from delays in the controversial project to clean up the former Lancaster Brickyard off Harrisburg Pike and turn it into a Norfolk Southern rail yard.

Debris from that enterprise should start coming in this month, Warner said. And winter, a traditionally slow season for the trash business, is winding down.

LCSWMA may defer some expenditures and otherwise tweak its budget to make up for shortfalls, Warner said.

But, he added, the "recession resistant" authority is still exploring the possibilities of building a wind farm at its Frey Farm Landfill on Turkey Hill, Manor Township, and adding a fourth boiler to the incinerator.

It's also pursuing new revenue sources.

It began taking cleaned-up incinerator ash from Harrisburg last fall, Warner said, and it bid last week to take sludge from the City of Lancaster.

"It's a waste stream we haven't pursued before," he said. "We're doing well, considering the circumstances."