...While the city may have had the best of intentions in suspending parts of the recycling program, the experiment did not produce the savings predicted. All those items that could have been recycled were trucked to increasingly expensive landfills, part of the city's 12,000 tons of daily residential and institutional trash. And what wasn't factored into the cost-benefit analysis was the psychological effect on New Yorkers, who had just started internalizing the recycling routine. In 1989, fewer than 1 percent of city residents sorted their newspapers, cans and cartons. By 2002, about 20 percent had the habit. Recycling takes effort, but residents were coming around to seeing it like daily exercise: not always enjoyable, but good for them...