These are the good times for recyclers — and they could be better if we’d sort our at-home recyclable materials into more homogenous groupings to cut front-level costs..

Back in 2019, metals like aluminum were the only reliable moneymakers. Now, the market has lifted prospects for glass and paper.

The two biggest economic worries in the U.S. right now are burgeoning inflation and supply chain issues. A plausible narrative for both is that the rolling COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted our ability to efficiently move products to markets as loose money policies have ignited inflation.

These both sound bad. But good or bad sometimes depends on who you are. A disrupted supply chain for one business is an opportunity for another. And high prices? For recycling commodities, for example, it’s the best market in the past 10 years.

What does this mean? Recycled materials in the big four categories of paper, metal, glass and plastic all have secondary markets. The business goal of a recycling provider is to sort, package and sell as cleanly as possible these four types of materials to the end user.

And the business is booming.

“Cardboard and paper prices are both on the rise. Plastic prices have skyrocketed compared to what they were, let’s say, five years ago,” Josephine Valencia, deputy director at the San Antonio Solid Waste Department, told me.

Her explanation of the boom points to the same trends most other industries are worried about.

“In the past two years, and this is just my guess, it’s COVID-related supply shortages. There’s a shortage of just about everything these days,” Valencia said. “That has really driven up the price of certain (recycled) commodities.”

Meaning that if you’re in the recycling business, these are the best of times.

If your personal subscription to the “Resource Recycling” online newsletter has recently lapsed, allow me to quote a few price changes for you:

  Baled steel cans have risen to $250 per ton from $78 last year;

  Baled aluminum cans jumped to 77 cents a pound from 45 cents last year;

  On the paper side, corrugated containers trade for $171 per ton, up from $60 last year. Another paper product, sorted residential paper, sells for $117 per ton, compared with $38 per ton a year ago.

As the band Chic sang back in 1979, These. Are. The. Good Times.

If you were hoping to have a disco-era earworm — one dating back to the last time we saw high inflation — stuck in your head for the rest of the day, you’re welcome.

When last I checked in with the recycling markets in 2019, a few trends were made clear to me.

On ExpressNews.com: The recycling market is terrible! Sort your plastics carefully

First, glass is infinitely recyclable but generally a money loser for recyclers unless it can be sorted by color and delivered to a nearby glass recycling operation. Second, paper and cardboard were in a multi-year decline because of the lack of demand for newsprint (RIP, print newspaper industry!) and the awkward adjustment to a world in which ubiquitous Amazon cardboard didn’t fit traditional cardboard-sorting machines. Third, plastic prices were in free fall because China had begun refusing most deliveries. Fourth, metal was the only reliable moneymaker.

But high prices in 2021 have swung recycling programs from losses back to a moneymaker. Things are a lot better now in San Antonio, for example, says Valencia.

I’m going to simplify the math a bit, but here’s the basic deal in my city: San Antonio pays about $50 a ton to deliver collected recyclables to its provider, Republic Services. Republic sorts and processes the stuff then sells it in the secondary commodities market and agrees to share half of the resulting revenue with the city. If sales generate $120 per ton, the city makes $60 and can count a “profit” of $10 per ton. That’s approximately the economics — admittedly simplified — right now.

In a bad year like 2019, the revenue share didn’t quite cover the upfront $50 cost to deliver so the city had a “loss.” A bunch of other factors make my explanation overly simple — they average out prices; contaminated commodities change the final revenue-sharing formula; losses can be carried forward — but Valencia endorsed my explanation as basically correct.

On ExpressNews.com: Awash in dirty plastic: We’ve got a big problem in our recycling market

A factor that tempers the celebration of 2021 recycling profit is that — as with any business — the city’s costs are also affected by inflation. In the past year, the cost of purchasing new plastic household recycling carts has increased from roughly $50 to $75 apiece, for example. That’s because they are made of plastic and plastic prices are way up. With a million carts in circulation, that price increase affects the annual budget in a real way.

And just as the price of new and used cars has increased, so too has the price of garbage trucks. In the past year, they’ve gone from $365,000 to $425,000 per truck, Valencia told me. Because, of course, trucks are made of steel and plastic, both of which cost more now than last year.

“On the one side I can say I’m excited as the city recycling revenues have gone up so we’re making money,” she said. “But on the other side, at the end of the day, we’re not sitting on a windfall because even though our revenues went up all our expenses went up as well.”

Like any volatile financial market, hindsight is 20/20 and past performance is no guarantee of future results, including for recycled commodities. We don’t know what happens next.

By the way, the multigenerational fix recycling experts hope for remains the same: Wean us off the big blue unsorted cart of mixed commodity waste. We should all be sorting the waste streams in our households into many different smaller homogenous-material barrels. Civilized countries (and by “civilized” I explicitly exclude both the United States and the Republic of Texas) have figured out how to do this basic sorting at home. Done that way, everyone would recycle more stuff and recycling would make more money.

Taylor is a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News and author of “The Financial Rules for New College Graduates.”

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Michael Taylor is the author of The Financial Rules for New College Graduates: Invest Before Paying Off Debt and Other Tips Your Professor Didn't Teach You. Through his "Smart Money" column, and blog www.bankers-anonymous.com, he pursues the mission of making complex financial topics simple.