Photo by Chelsea Pujols / SOC Images.
Most recycling in the U.S. including in Hudson County—operates on a single-stream system: everything goes into the same bin, gets picked up by the same truck, and travels together to a sorting facility. That’s where the real work begins.
Inside, the materials are pulled apart by design, rotating discs fan out and lift paper from the stream. Magnets sweep steel cans off the line, a roundup of plastics make their way through.
More than 1,500 tons of waste are generated by residents everyday in Hudson County, according to a report by the Hudson County Improvement Authority (HCIA). That equals to 125 fully loaded garbage trucks.
For the last seven months, Slice of Culture has been investigating the reality of recycling in Hudson County; are the three R’s (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle) being implemented and utilized throughout communities and local governments? In part one, we explored the lack of recycling education.
In the second part, we’re digging deep into the inner workings of the recycling and solid waste landscape throughout the county, looking into the papertrail of county and municipal contracts, along with breaking down waste generated throughout Hudson County.
Slice of Culture filed a series of OPRA requests throughout 12 municipalities in Hudson County requesting a decade of tonnage report data from the years 2015 through 2025. The paper trail for trash follows three New Jersey Waste Management facilities in Elizabeth and Fairview.
As we dive into the numbers in this investigation, you should know that just like DNA, recycling items have an identifier known as the Resin Identification Code (RICs), which determines the type of plastic used based on the structure and chemical make up of the item. The scale is from 1 through 7, each under a different classification of types of plastics.
Hudson County Recycling Habits → What That Translates To
When comparing state figures, New Jersey law requires counties and municipalities to recycle at least 50% of municipal household waste and 60% of total solid waste.
Other states like California, Connecticut and Oregon have taken on recycling recovery efforts, New Jersey is unique when it comes to pledging to its own recycling targets, which was the first state to establish the nation’s first mandatory statewide recycling law in 1987.
Despite the requirement, county data reviewed by Slice of Culture shows in 2022 that Hudson County recycled only about 27% of municipal solid waste, falling below the state’s own benchmark. The total municipal waste generated in Hudson County in 2022 was 1,012,382 tons, with a total recyclable of 442,189 tons.
“I hear all the time the markets [recycling market] are not what they used to be…without the market being strong, it’s very costly for these municipalities,” said Norman Guerra, the CEO of the Hudson County Improvement Authority (HCIA) in a conference interview with Slice of Culture.
He added that expenses can stack up from multiple trucks collecting solid waste. In 2025, HCIA’s total project revenue was over $101.3 million, according to the certification of the budget report. He said, approximately 1,200 to 1,400 tons are shipped out of the state of New Jersey, six days a week.
Type 13 is bulky waste. Type 13C is construction and demolition waste. Type 27 is particular soils, grits and things of that nature. And Type 25 is animal waste. All of it has to move through the HCIA system.
“What you see most often is the small company that’s clearing out a basement,” he added.”He [solid waste contractor] doesn’t have a DEP representative on-site. He doesn’t understand what the solid waste regulations are.”
He noted that solid waste collection goes through a “procurement process,” or a transferring out of municipal solid waste, in which the Hudson County Division of Planning updates a report called the Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS), a report assessing economic development and resiliency in the region.
Where Do Solid Waste and Recyclable Items Go?
All waste generated in Hudson County is divided into categories.
Household trash and animal waste are delivered to the Advanced Enterprises Recycling Transfer Station in Newark. Bulky items, construction and demolition debris and certain soils must go to one of three Waste Management of New Jersey facilities, according to the state’s Department of Environmental Protection County Plan summary report.
County officials say the vast majority of licensed solid waste haulers—both commercial and municipal—know the rules and follow them. The bigger challenge is smaller operators who fall through the cracks.
Hudson County Commissioner Bill O’Dea (D-2) emphasized the need to educate “smaller haulers” when it comes to issued permits for recycling, adding that illegal dumping has become a “chronic problem.”
“They need to go through a course on recycling prior to getting a license,” said O’Dea, who told Slice of Culture in an interview that the issue in compliance stems from a lack of education and proper signage of recycling rules and regulations.
There’s no publicly available county-level data specifically tracking curbside recycling theft arrests or incidents in Hudson County. It tends to be treated as a low-priority infraction rather than a serious crime–so it often goes unreported and unprosecuted, added O’Dea.
“Bad Actors” In Recycling Contracts
Slice of Culture reviewed documents pertaining to the Hudson County Improvement Authority in the Open Public Records Act (OPRA) issuing waste flow violations to solid waste haulers.
According to the documents, the highest single penalty in waste flow violations amounted to $13,500, with a cost of $6,400 on average fees.
Nearly every high-penalty case when it comes to recycling operations and construction firms alike showed $0 in collections, noted Slice of Culture.
- Lorenzo Construction amassed 11 separate violations, each carrying a $13,500 summons, a total of $148,500 in original penalties. Faztec Industries Recycling showed $0 assessed on the penalty of a $13,500 case. In the report, Total Waste Technologies Inc. is the only recycling company where the full $13,500 was assessed and collected.
- A & A Recycling LLC carried out eight violations each carrying $13,500 in penalty costs, with a total of $108,000.
Karolina Frazee, deputy director of solid waste enforcement for the HCIA, told Slice of Culture that A & A Recycling LLC failed to provide “scale receipts,” which is documentation showing where waste was being disposed of. Frazee indicated that without these receipts, the violations were unverifiable, and Slice of Culture through the seven-month investigation was able to flag the violations.
Yet despite the scale of the infractions, records reviewed by Slice of Culture reveal a pattern: across the majority of cited companies, enforcement stopped at the paperwork.
Slice of Culture reached out to A & A Recycling LLC for comment on the penalties, but none have been provided since the time of this writing.
This raises questions across the municipalities: Are municipalities regularly directing their contractors to recycling facilities? Is there a clear pathway of communication related to recycling practices? Are private demolition contractors reporting their recycling activity back to the town?
“The nature of the waste is so different in your household than it is in an office building,” said Amanda Nesheiwat, the HCIA’s director of sustainability and community outreach, in a conference call with Slice of Culture.
“There is definitely more contamination in single stream recycling,” referring to the mix of materials that are non-recyclable versus recyclable items, which she added, contributes to an added expenditure as to the state’s cost of removal when it ends up in a landfill.
However, the tradeoffs are real.
On a national front, contamination rates in single-stream systems run about 10% higher than in dual-stream counterparts, and revenues for contaminated materials can be up to 70% lower for certain high-volume recyclables, according to a curbside program report by Recycling Partnership, a nonprofit organization advocating for curbside recycling.
“Hudson County’s recycling landscape makes it particularly vulnerable to those dynamics,” said Ashwani Vasishth, a retired professor of Sustainability at Ramapo College of New Jersey, in an interview with Slice of Culture on the matter referring to the recycling practices established.
He added that multi-family homes, which make up 86% of Hudson County, and “apartment dwellers” recycle far less than their single-family counterparts,” which Slice of Culture reported in Act I.
“Curbside recycling pick up does create real problems,” he added, in which materials entering a single stream channel become contaminated or mixed in with non-recyclable items.
Dense urban housing, multi-unit buildings and limited recycling pathways can make following through with the practice more challenging than in suburban counties. The lower recycling rates cause more waste generated in landfills or incinerators, increasing disposal costs and environmental impacts.
A modernized recycling system could generate nearly 200,000 jobs, reintroduce $8.8 billion in recovered materials into the American economy and save taxpayers $11 billion over the next decade.
Recycling-based manufacturing produces roughly 25 jobs per 10,000 tons of material processed, compared to just one job generated by the equivalent volume sent to a landfill.
The broader structural problem had been decades in the making, experts told Slice of Culture. For years, waste service providers and local governments had negotiated long-term contracts— often spanning 10 to 15 years built on the assumption that cheap exports to China would continue indefinitely.
Providers were forced into costly renegotiations, and some walked away from agreements altogether, leaving municipalities scrambling.
In the void, illegal dumping rates climbed.
What Do Tonnage Report Reveals of the Municipalities?
The municipalities tell their own tale when it comes to recycling.
Hoboken
In Hoboken, construction and development activity tells a revealing story. Sites with chemical discharge spiked to 397 tons in 2021, and by 2024, total tonnage had climbed to 38,586, as reviewed by Slice of Culture in documents requesting tonnage report.
Oil-contaminated soil disposals—reported under Hoboken’s recycling figures—showed a similarly sharp rise over the same period.
Jersey City
Jersey City collected over 438,000 tons in disposal and recycling items, and, of those, recycled 166,394 or 38% of the municipal waste items, according to the state municipal rate table. Jersey City, the state’s second-most populous city, saw a significant population growth, rising from 247,597 in 2010 to 292,449, an increase of 18.1%, according to the U.S. Census data.
North Bergen
In North Bergen, even as trash output surged, recycling cratered in its volume.
In New Jersey, municipalities are required under New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection regulations to report annually the tonnage of materials collected.
When it comes to education as reported in Act I, of a three part series at Slice of Culture, an element of care keeps the ball rolling in the community to recycling, municipalities are claiming just that.
“The Department of Public Works has expanded outreach not only in schools but also within multifamily and high-rise residential buildings,” according to a city spokesperson in Jersey City who emailed Slice of Culture a response.
“Specifically, they are visiting these locations regularly and providing guidance and training to superintendents/building managers on proper source separation and recycling practices.”
In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, 382,547 tons were generated by the city, a 127% increase from 2019 which carried out 168,538 tons. The most significant outlier of waste generated by the municipality was in 2016, resulting in 445,668 tons.
From nearly 4,000 tons in 2019, it dropped to 2,439 tons in 2021, which translates to a 39% drop. This year alone, over 26,800 tons of Solid Waste was generated, with recycling items being over 3,900 tons, according to tonnage report data provided by the city to Slice of Culture, among all 12 municipalities.
In the town of Harrison, between 2015 and 2024, the town’s annual trash tonnage grew by 45% — from 5,821 tons to 8,473 tons. Over that same stretch, total recycling inched up by just 39%, from about 1,444 to 2,003 tons.
Bayonne
In Bayonne, there’s a path to understanding the town’s recycling.
Initially, when Slice of Culture requested the city’s tonnage reports from 2015 through 2025, the city responded back with the rate cost of each month redacted. Then, at the request of the publication, the city provided the unredacted files.
In 2024, the city’s recycling rate, according to records, was at 16.2%, while in 2019, Bayonne’s rate was just 7.1%. For every ton of waste the city generated, it recycled less than a tenth. The city was generating between 2,700 and 3,000 tons every year from 2020 to 2024 before dipping to 2,287 in 2025.
When Slice of Culture first reported that Bayonne’s 2024 solid waste tonnage had fallen to 27,576 tons—the lowest figure in six years of records—the number was incomplete. Joe Ryan, the city’s public information director, later told Slice of Culture that the original figure was missing a month of data. The revised 2024 total is 29,917 tons.
“Now that the missing month of data has been added to the 2024 figure, the revised total is 29,917,” Ryan wrote in an email, following the line of inquiry of the publication.
Over five years of Hudson County commissioner meeting agendas and contract documents, requested and reviewed by Slice of Culture, a batch of construction firms repeatedly appear. Smith-Sondy Asphalt Construction Co., Persistent Construction Inc., Murray Paving & Concrete and MAST Construction Services have each secured recurring work through the county’s Department of Roads and Public Property—road resurfacing, park infrastructure and renovations at the county-owned Meadowview Campus, among other projects.
“Repeat contractors are not, by themselves, unusual in public infrastructure,” noted Hudson County Commissioner Bill O’Dea to Slice of Culture.
Counties tend to return to firms with demonstrated performance records, established bonding capacity, and familiarity with local permitting. The competitive bidding process, when followed, is designed to keep that repetition accountable.
But the records reviewed by Slice of Culture reveal a pattern of change orders. In construction, they are routine: unforeseen site conditions, material price swings and design revisions can all legitimately push a contract past its original terms.
An additional resolution presented in the Feb.12, county agenda calls for amending a previous contract with the legal firm Law offices of Stephen Natoli. The firm would focus on alleged violations committed under the county’s Environmental Health Act and Solid Waste Management Act.
West New York
For West New York, the data takes on its own bleak report.
Each year is a detailed line-item breakdown by material type and end market vendor. A key caveat in the report shows Rosemarie Avallone, the town’s Sustainability Coordinator, flags that data for 2020 and 2021 is missing entirely.
Figures rest almost entirely on one entry: a category logged as “Other Material Not Listed,” routed through a company called Darling Ingredients, based in Newark, in the data compiled and reviewed by Slice of Culture.
That single line item accounts for 12,615 tons in 2022, 17,895 tons in 2023 and 19,239 tons in 2024-—representing roughly 68%, 87% and 88% of the town’s total reported recycling tonnage in each of those years respectively.
In 2024, the remaining materials total roughly 2,800 tons: corrugated cardboard, mixed paper, glass, plastics, aluminum and steel containers, most of it processed through Galaxy Recycling in Jersey City or Waste Management. That figure is broadly in line with what a dense, transit-oriented town of West New York’s size might generate.
Notably, the primary residential recycling vendor throughout all four years is Galaxy, located at 3 New York Avenue in Jersey City. Commercial streams run primarily through Waste Management and IWS.
On paper, the infrastructure exists.
The infrastructure is there in apartment trash rooms, in hallways with no signage, in schools that sorted its bottles and cans out, but oftentimes only for people to watch them remain uncollected.
“It wasn’t like this before,” said Tina Nalls, the founder of Community Treasures, a nonprofit organization that aids in distributing clothing and essential needs back to the community. “We used to have people that would walk up and down the block letting us know what was going on,” referring to individuals picking up the trash in the streets of Jersey City, she added.
“Now I don’t see them anymore.”
This is an active investigation in efforts to bridge the gap of information missing in our communities.
Act III will look into what some of the responses have been from the community on the survey put out by Slice of Culture in the seven-month investigation into the affairs of recycling in Hudson County.
We need your help! Let us know about your thoughts and experiences on recycling here.
Know more things we should include? Email Chelsea Pujols at [email protected] or Jordan Coll at [email protected]!
