By John DeFore

San Francisco residents recycle almost 70 percent of their total waste. Houston? Just over two and a half percent.

That’s according to an article in the trade journal Waste News that labels Houston the worst recycler among the nation’s thirty most populous cities. The ranking has sparked newspaper coverage lately, with accounts seeking both to establish blame for the startlingly low rate and to assess possibilities for improvement.

Along with common-sense factors like cheap landfill space and urban sprawl that makes collection expensive, the New York Times (with a helpful quote from mayor Bill White) blames an “independent streak that rebels against mandates or anything that seems trendy or hyped up.”

If a widespread Texan rebelliousness among the populace is the culprit, though, how to account for the reported 25,000 Houstonians who have been waiting for the recycling bins they’ve requested, some for as long as ten years? Anecdotes cited by the paper, like that of a restaurateur who tried to haul her own recycling and was turned away, point less to public sentiment than to bureaucratic ills. (Also other Texas cities tend to belie that theory with Austin and Dallas recycling at rates of 27.3 and 11.5 percent, respectively.)

Houston is shooting for improvement, though, as the emphasis of a piece in the hometown Houston Chronicle makes clear. Here, readers hear of new initiatives like an upcoming tree waste program that “could keep 90,000 tons out of the landfills each year” and learn that thousands of homes will soon be added to the curbside recycling program (though dozens of neighborhoods will remain unserved). The Chronicle story emphasizes the hands-on satisfactions of recycling — the newsprint you hold in your hands “could contain your gas bill, a celebrity mag and a sushi menu,” the first paragraph marvels — which may bolster the impression out-of-staters seem to have: that despite some nice steps (like the fact that the city’s program accepts a wider variety of plastics than many others), many Houston citizens don’t quite get the notion of recycling yet.

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