Worcester County will spend $1.2 million to recycle materials it can sell for $150,000

A curbside recycling bin is a promise: sort this correctly and it becomes revenue instead of landfill.▸ For most of 2025, the commodity buyers on the other end of that promise mostly stopped showing up. Cardboard, mixed paper and plastic prices fell across the Northeast for two straight quarters, and one Maryland county's own line items show what that looks like once it reaches a government ledger.

The Northeast Recycling Council (NERC) has surveyed material recovery facilities (MRFs) across a 12-state region every quarter since 2019.▸ Its 28th quarterly report puts the blended value of a marketed ton of recyclables at $68.41 in the fourth quarter of 2025 — down 8.96% from the prior quarter — before it recovered to $83.71 in the first quarter of 2026, a 22.37% rebound that still trails what MRFs were earning two years earlier. The reason the average moves so much is that it hides an enormous spread by material.

Aluminum cans are worth more than 43 times as much per ton as mixed paper — but aluminum is barely 1% of what a MRF actually processes, while mixed paper and cardboard together make up roughly half of every ton collected.▸ A recycling program's finances ride overwhelmingly on the cheap, bulky materials, not the valuable rare ones — which is why a market slump in cardboard and paper does more damage to a municipal budget than any single commodity crash.

Worcester County, Maryland, is one of the twelve states in NERC's survey region, and its own public works department put a number on the gap.▸ At an April 14, 2026 budget work session, Public Works Director Dallas Baker and Enterprise Fund Controller Quinn Dittrich told commissioners the county expects $150,000 in recycling revenue in fiscal 2027 against more than $1.2 million in program costs — a gap of roughly $1.05 million that the county's general fund, not recycling revenue, has to cover.

"Plastic is kind of horrible," Baker said.▸ "For most of the year, plastic might not sell at all — like, you have to pay somebody to come take your plastic." Recycling Manager Bob Keenan put it more bluntly: "There is simply no market in it. There are warehouses and warehouses of plastic that [vendors] can't get anybody to buy." The county isn't collecting less because of it — residents recycled 12,236 tons curbside and another 24,707 tons commercially in 2025, almost 4,000,000 pounds more than in 2024. More material is moving through the system; it just earns less per ton than it used to, and every additional ton now costs more to move than it brings back.

The revenue side of a recycling program is volatile by the quarter.▸ The labor side is a fixed, dangerous cost every year. An estimated 99,757 people worked as refuse and recyclable material collectors nationally in 2024, earning an average of $43,633 annually — Census Bureau American Community Survey data, aggregated by DataUSA.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2024 Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries put the fatality rate for refuse and recyclable material collectors at 37.4 per 100,000 full-time-equivalent workers — more than eleven times the 3.3 rate across all U.S. occupations, and the fifth-highest of any civilian job that year, down from fourth-highest (41.4 per 100,000) in 2023.▸ Transportation incidents, not sorting-line injuries, are the leading cause: it is a job done largely on foot, next to moving trucks, in traffic. BLS's own pages returned an access error to automated research tools at the time of writing, so the rate above is cited via Waste Dive's published account of the BLS data rather than a direct BLS link. Squeezed program budgets don't show up as a line item marked "safety," but a program funding its shortfall out of the general fund every year has less room to invest in the trucks, routes and staffing that keep that fatality rate from climbing further.

Worcester County's figures are one county's FY2027 budget projections, not a national total — municipal recycling programs vary widely by contract structure, local commodity mix and whether collection is publicly or privately run. NERC's commodity survey covers a 12-state Northeast region and does not represent national pricing.