STEVE INSKEEP, Host:
When money stops moving in the economy, so do goods. And for the huge ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach, that means a lot of things are piling up. Things like luxury cars, recycled paper, even huge container ships off the coast of California. Rob Schmitz of member station KQUED reports on how those ports cope with the clutter.
ROB SCHMITZ: At an enormous warehouse south of Los Angeles, a forklift outfitted with a huge scooping attachment digs into a 20-foot-high mountain of white paper. Alan Company owns this warehouse. It's one of the largest recycled paper companies in the country. Bill Woodhouse is the manager here.
SCHMITZ: Everybody's got their recycling can out in from of their home and those cans end up coming to a sort center and then it gets sorted at a sort center and then baled, and then it can easily find its way into a warehouse like this.
SCHMITZ: Once that cardboard box you threw into the recycling bin the other day arrives here, it's put into a container and shipped to places like China.
SCHMITZ: China starts the cycle all over again. They'll make a new product out of it, and it finds its way back into the United States. And the cycle will then start again.
SCHMITZ: But these days, Americans just aren't doing what they do best - consuming. And that's interrupting the cycle Woodhouse just talked about. Its stopping point is inside this warehouse, where 8,500 tons of paper and cardboard are stacked up to the three-story-high ceiling, crammed by forklifts into every available inch of this 120,000 square foot space. It's the same story at the Port of Long Beach. Port spokesman Art Wong seems oblivious to semi trucks barreling by him on an overpass which offers a birds-eye view of the busiest port in the country. Directly below us is the biggest traffic jam in Los Angeles. For the last few months, several thousand Toyotas and Mercedes have been parked here with nowhere to go, and no-one to buy them. Dealerships don't have room for them, so they're stuck here.
SCHMITZ: Manufacturers like these automakers haven't been able to slow down manufacturing nearly as fast as we've slowed down consumption.
SCHMITZ: Just looking across the port from this perch, you can almost feel an economy that has come to a standstill. Past the sea of cars, empty containers are stacked on top of each other. At the docks, enormous freight ships sit idle. Wong says shipping companies have abandoned their bigger ships here in favor of smaller ones that carry less freight. Wong says last year when the housing market collapsed, so did the volume of imports coming through the port. But now he's noticing a more troubling trend.
SCHMITZ: One of the more ominous signs of this recent downturn has been the drop-off in exports. Empty boxes are now starting to stack up again because we're not sending things overseas. And this has been very, very recent. In just the last couple months.
SCHMITZ: This standstill has meant things like toys, clothes, furniture, recycled plastic, you name it, it's all stuck here. And those recyclables, plastic and paper, have plummeted in value.
SCHMITZ: It's now costing more to sort the paper than the paper is worth itself.
SCHMITZ: That's Kara Boughton, with recycled paper giant Alan Company. In October, the company was selling its cardboard for $250 a ton. Boughton says it now sells for $50 a ton if it sells at all. And until that happens, it'll sit here in this port city alongside a variety of merchandise, piling up. For NPR News, I'm Rob Schmitz in Los Angeles.