In 1993, more than 428,000 tons of municipal solid waste was recycled in Maine. But beyond dropping off recyclable goods at a local recycling center, few people know what happens to their bottles, cans, newspapers and empty milk jugs.

Processing recyclable materials so they can be reused is, in some respects, comparable to alchemy, an ancient science devoted to turning metal into gold. Today, recyclers are turning trash into treasure.

Prices for recyclable materials have risen steadily, said Kathy Guerin, marketing director for the Maine Resource Recovery Association Marketing Cooperative.

Corrugated cardboard, which brought $8 to $12 a ton in 1993, is now worth more than $170 a ton. Newspaper, which last June commanded $40 a ton, is worth more than $100 a ton. In December, HDPE plastic, the kind most commonly found in milk jugs, was worth $500 a ton; it now sells for $700 a ton. Furthermore, the price is increasing at a rate of about $100 a ton per month.

Shoe and food boxes, which make up a relatively new recyclable market item called box board, are worth about $45 a ton.

In 1993, according to the Municipal Recycling Progress Report published by the Maine Waste Management Agency, 12,000 tons of tin and steel cans were recycled in Maine. An additional 40,170 tons of paper and corrugated cardboard, 4,500 tons of glass and 1,471 tons of plastic also were recycled. The figures are the latest available.

“Recycling has finally come into its own with regards to supply and demand,” said Guerin. “Recycling does pay; trash never will.”

Like the cooperative, which markets recycled items for more than 150 Maine towns, there are numerous companies in Maine that take recycled goods from towns and prepare them for other companies that will use them for new products.

The process usually begins at a local recycling center where a municipality, district or private company, like Andino Solid Waste Management Inc. in Houlton, collects recycled goods to be shipped to a processor.

Andino operates the only private recycling center north of Bangor, with a facility located in Monticello.

“It’s been very successful,” said Woodie Dunphy, sales and operations manager for the year-old company. “People are becoming so concerned with the great cost in waste management that they see that the more they take out of the waste stream, the cheaper it’s going to be for them.”

Other companies, such as Industrial Metals in Bangor and Maine Recycling Corp. in Lisbon Falls, process recycled goods they get from firms such as Andino and ship them to other companies out of state for further processing and to make new products.

Cans make up the largest portion of recycled goods coming into Industrial Metals, according to Brian McAvoy, who founded the company with his brother in 1986.

The company takes the cans, as well as other metals such as aluminum, copper and steel, sorts them and compacts them into brickettes that measure 2 by 3 feet and weigh 750 pounds.

Last year, McAvoy said, his company shipped about 100 million tons of metal to smelters that melted down the brickettes for use in new products.

The price for the recycled metal is about $18 to $19 a ton, which McAvoy said is “a fairly decent price.” A few years ago the average was $8 to $10 a ton, he said.

Maine Recycling, which was founded in 1977, handles a wide variety of recycled goods. Last year, the company processed “millions of pounds of glass,” according to company Vice President Leo Madden. Most of the company’s glass business is a direct result of Maine’s bottle deposit law.

MRC sorts the glass by color, cleans it to remove any contaminants and metals, crushes it and sends it to large glass companies out of state.

Clear glass nets a price in the $20 a ton range, while the price paid for brown glass is in the upper teens, McAvoy said. Green glass, which usually comes from beer bottles imported from Canada and Europe, fetches only $2 to $4 a ton because it is not used domestically and must be shipped out of the country.

Though it nets the largest price, there are no facilities in Maine that process plastic for recycling. Plastic from Maine is merely compacted and shipped to companies such as Enviroplastics in Massachusetts and Wellman Plastics in North Carolina to be cleaned, ground up and made into pellets before being shipped to companies that use the pellets to make such things as plastic fabric, car floor mats and audio cassettes.

Plastics pose more of a problem for collectors and shippers because of costs involved. For that reason they are not widely recycled in Maine.

According to Dunphy, a 50-cubic-yard container recently picked up by Andino’s from a town it serves produced only one bale of HDPE plastic that weighed just over a half ton. In such cases, shipping and handling can eat up most of the profits.

“If the money (for paper goods) stays up, a private company can make a profit by offsetting the price of handling plastic that takes up the space but has very little weight,” he said.

Paper is by far the most commonly recycled item in Maine and much of that goes to Great Northern Paper Co. in East Millinocket, the site of a $60 million recycling plant. The company collects about 140,000 tons of wastepaper a year from throughout New England for use in its papermaking process.

The company not only takes newspaper, but also buys mixed bales of magazines, catalogs, phone books and junk mail, a combination known as a Maine Pack, according to Geoffrey Hill, of the MWMA Office of Waste Reduction and Recycling.

“What has happened is that the public mandates at the federal and state level have spurred the supply and collection of (recyclable) materials,” he said. “The industry has responded and seen that (recycling) is a serious thing. They’ve retooled and retrofitted old plants to take recycled materials. Great Northern-Bowater is a good example of that.”

Guerin said, however, that a comapny’s demand for recyclables often outstrips supply.

“They’re desperate,” she said. “That’s what’s driving the price up. It isn’t so much a problem on the demand end as it is on the supply end.”

“What we’re lacking is educational programs,” echoed Dunphy. “People don’t know a lot about recycling programs, what they can recycle, and how they can prepare things for recycling. I think that is the challenge ahead.”

While cans, paper and plastic get most of the attention, there are also other areas of recycling going on that people hear little about. One of those is industrial oil.

Last year, the Clean Oil Technology Division of Machias-based R.H. Foster Inc. recycled 400,000 gallons of used industrial oil, a 40 percent increase from 1993.

Using high tech equipment in three mobile units, the company is able to clean water-contaminated oil at an industrial site while a machine is running, thus avoiding a costly shutdown for the owner.

“The alternative is for a company to shut down a piece of machinery and lose tens of thousands of dollars in production for 40 gallons of oil,” said Pat Duffy, president of COT. “The difference between the cost savings, and production and disposal is canceled out by shut-down time.”

If a COT customer decides not to keep the oil that has been cleaned, COT takes it to a processing plant in Scarborough where it is blended and used as a base stock for bar-chain oil for chain saws and low-grade hydraulic oil.

In either case, the oil is reused and does not have to be disposed of as a hazardous waste, which is the only other alternative, Duffy said.