Commentary: In 1950, Dick Scudder was working at the Newark Evening News when he was approached by a man who claimed to have invented a process to remove the ink from newspapers, making the paper recyclable.
That original process destroyed too much of the paper, but Scudder kept working on it, first out of his kitchen and later at Syracuse University and the Herty Laboratory in Savannah, Georgia.
By 1961 he was ready to put the process into commercial use, opening the Garden State Paper Company. I got to meet Scudder years later when he was a partner with Dean Singleton in the Media News Group, which owned the Sun-News when I came to work here in 2002.
I mention this today to make the point that the technology to recycle newspapers has been in place for more than 50 years. And yet, we may soon all be throwing our newspapers in the trash again.
And our cereal boxes, hard plastics and a whole lot of other things.