Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

Antonio Valladarez, a sanitation helper with Roanoke's solid waste management recycling program, picks up paper recycling Thursday morning. Roanoke now sends all of its recycling to Montgomery County on a trial basis.

Justin Cook | The Roanoke Times

Dewayne Dameron (left), a recycling sorting technician, and Billy Wirt, a recycling supervisor, sort aluminum at the Montgomery Regional Solid Waste Authority in Christiansburg.

When you finish reading this story and drop the newspaper into the recycling bin, the paper enters the global marketplace.

The newsprint might be baled and sent to a processing plant in China. There, the paper fiber could be turned into packaging, and that could return to the United States with a flat-screen TV inside it. You buy the TV, throw the package in the recycling and the process starts over again.

But in a recession, there is less demand for the TV. That means less demand for the packaging. And suddenly the price of recycled paper drops -- more than 90 percent for mixed paper this fall -- cutting into profits for recycling operations.

Which helps to explain why it might take an extra day or so for your recycling bin to get emptied in Roanoke this spring. With a squeeze on the business, the city has sent its recycling on a road trip.

Cycle Systems, the Roanoke facility that handled the city's recycling program for more than a decade, ended its contract with the city at the beginning of April.

"It just got to be a negative profit situation," said Richard Lerner, the company's vice president of commercial. "The value of the raw materials has dropped a bunch."

Not just for paper, but also for metals such as aluminum. In September, a pound of aluminum was worth about 80 cents, Lerner said. Now, it is valued in the 30- to 40-cent range. Cycle Systems laid off 35 employees at locations across the state last fall, pointing to decreased demand for recycled metals from automakers and steel manufacturers.

The Roanoke city recycling program has been picked up by the Montgomery Regional Solid Waste Authority, a nonprofit Christiansburg facility that will run things on a three-month trial. The city is pursuing a multiyear recycling contract that it hopes to have in place by July 1 -- and the Montgomery authority could be locked into the longer-term deal.

Using the Christiansburg facility adds more than two hours of driving time as the trucks rumble back and forth from Roanoke on U.S. 460.

The delay translates to city curbs. Collection for recycling may run as much as a day late, the city advised. As usual, bins still should be at the curb by 7 a.m. on collection day.

"It's not going to affect the citizens at all," said Skip Decker, the city's solid waste manager.

But sending Roanoke recyclables to Christiansburg raises the cost of running the program. Transportation and "tipping fees" for the three-month interim will add $80,000, Decker said.

The city had budgeted $565,000 -- about $6 a resident -- to run its recycling program this fiscal year, Decker said. The past two years, revenue from recycled goods has topped $100,000.

"Recycling is never meant to make money," Decker said. "It is the environmentally correct thing to do."

Ed Skernolis, who leads the National Recycling Coalition in Washington, D.C., said he has heard of several localities that are renegotiating their contracts with recycling facilities because of the changing economics of the industry.

"These things are commodities in the same way oil is a commodity," Skernolis said of the resources inside a recycling bin. And with the market down, a lot of materials recovery facilities are taking a hit.

So how can the Christiansburg facility recycle in a recession?

Jim Ketterer, director of recycling services for the Montgomery Regional Solid Waste Authority, said the nonprofit enterprise was a diverse operation that already sorts a large volume of recyclables for several Montgomery County localities. Also, the facility markets its recovered materials directly to buyers.

Incidentally, buyers are in the region and not in China. "So the city's mixed paper that they're bringing us is actually ending up at a paper mill in Lynchburg," Ketterer said.