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Thesis: Recycling seems like an opaque object sitting in front of you. You can see it, feel it, but you don’t truly understand what it is, or if it even works. The current state of recycling isn’t adequate to handle the pure amount of waste being generated by humans across the globe. Changes must be made quickly in order to prevent torrential problems.

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Recycling

If you’re like me, your only familiarity with recycling is when you see the blue or other colored bins you use to separate your trash. Maybe you’ve seen recycling trucks drive by in your neighborhood, or maybe you’ve seen pictures of recycling or articles on your favorite news site.

Yet, if you’re like me, that’s about all you know.

So, let’s discover some more today.

What is recycling?

Recycling is the process of collecting and processing used materials and turning them into new products. The recyclability of a material depends on its ability to adequately reacquire the properties it had in its original state.

Recycling takes products previously considered “waste” and revitalizes them into new products all over again.

What materials can be recycled?

Materials include kinds of glass, paper, cardboard, metal, plastic, tires, textiles, batteries, electronics, and more.

Yet, there are many types of recycling.

For instance, composting–the biodegrade of food and garden waste, could be considered a form of recycling.

For instance, what I would call 1:1 recycling, is when a material is recycled and produces a fresh supply of the same material. An example could be metal cans being recycled repeatedly without losing their purity.

For instance, salvaging–taking materials from complex products and reusing them. An example could be lead from car batteries and golf from printed circuit boards.

Credit Adobe Stock

What are the steps of the recycling process?

Collection

Collection refers to getting recyclable materials into one main source. A number of systems have been put into place to collect recyclable materials. Three main categories are drop-off centers, buy-back centers, and curbside collections.

Drop-off centers are central locations that collect recyclable material. Waste producers drop off quantities of recyclable materials at these locations (similar to a local dump). Drop-off centers are the easiest type of collection, yet these centers suffer from low and unpredictable supply.

Buy-back centers buy cleaned, separated recyclable materials. This monetary incentive encourages a steady supply of recyclable material.

Curbside collection refers to consumers placing recyclable materials into containers which are then collected by a waste collection vehicle (similar to a garbage truck). There are a couple of different types of curbside collection: mixed waste and commingled recyclables.

Mixed waste collection refers to when recyclable material is mixed with other waste. The desired materials are sorted out and cleaned at a sorting facility. The benefit is that the city doesn’t need to pay for a separate collection (a collection specifically for recyclable materials) and no public education is needed.

Commingling recyclables refers to collecting recyclable materials separately from non-recyclable waste. However, all of the recyclable materials are still grouped together (e.g. paper, glass, and plastic). This method reduces the need for post-collection sorting but also increases the need for public education on what can and can’t be recycled.

Sorting

Once recyclable material is collected, it must be sorted in a recycling facility. At a buy-back center, for example, recyclable material is already decently sorted when collected, so extensive further sorting is not needed.

However, at a commingled plant, further sorting is extremely important. Initially, the combined piles are placed on a conveyor belt to be spread out in a single layer–easier to see what to remove. From there, large pieces of material that could cause jamming in the machine are removed.

Next, a combination of machines separates the materials by weight (metal and glass are heavier than plastic and paper). From here, further sorting is either done by hand or through robotics via machine learning. Some plants use spectroscopic scanners to detect light penetration, some use strong magnets, and others could use even more different methods to separate the materials.

Some commodities may require more processing for additional sorting and decontamination.

Remanufacturing

Once recyclable material is sorted into specific groups, each group is transported to a specific remanufacturing site (e.g., aluminum goes to an aluminum reprocessing plant).

Do recyclable materials collected actually get recycled?

This question was the spark of this article. You’ve probably seen a picture similar to this on the news or on social media:

Credit iStock

The rumors that I heard for some time were that the United States wasn’t actually recycling. Instead, we simply shipped all of our recycling to China where it was unclear what was happening to it.

So, let’s dive into what actually happens to our recycling. Does it get recycled?

Firstly, let’s start in 2017. At the end of 2017, China instated a waste import ban, preventing foreign inflows of waste products. The ban greatly affected recycling industries worldwide as China had been the world’s largest importer of waste plastics.

Here’s a quick history of the events leading up to that from Wikipedia:

Credit Collective Responsibility

To summarize, up until around the 2010s, China had been the main consumer of waste and recycling from the United States. This means that instead of recycling these products domestically, the United States sold our recyclable materials at a discount to China.

Since this change, has anything happened?

Plastics - Failing to Be Recycled

A 2020 report by Greenpeace, a popular environmental research nonprofit, states the following:

Most of the plastic items you are encouraged to wash, sort, and put in blue bins usually end up in landfills or incinerators, if not polluting the environment.

That’s a big statement to make. But, they back it up, explaining with the following:

Since China enacted policies limiting plastic waste imports, there have been significant changes in plastics acceptance policies of U.S. material recovery facilities due to declines in the demand for and value of collected plastic material. Post-consumer “mixed” plastics (plastics #3-7 and non-bottle plastics #1 and #2) have been most affected because China was the primary destination for those types of collected plastic wastes and there is minimal demand, value or reprocessing capacity for them in the U.S. Some material recovery facilities (MRFs) still accept mixed plastics but dispose of it or continue to export it outside of North America.

Put another way, it’s estimated that as of 2015, around 9% of plastic waste generated historically had been recycled, 12% had been burned, and the other 79% was accumulating in landfills or was across the natural environment.

There is nuance in this answer, however.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) states that 60% of plastic collected for recycling in 2019 was actually recycled. However, only 15% of all plastic waste was collected for recycling in the first place. Quick math says that around 9% of total plastic waste was recycled.

Credit Surfrider Foundation

Okay, so it seems as though most plastics aren’t being recycled. But what about metal, glass, or paper?

Metal

Unlike most plastics, metal can be recycled multiple times without losing any of its innate integrity. This is why steel is one of the most recycled materials in the world.

One report estimates that around 60% of steel is recycled, but only around 40% of steel produced is created through recycling due to more steel being produced than is being scrapped.

Another report estimates that around 69% of steel is recycled.

Credit Statista

Here’s yet another data point from Statista about the recycling rates of metal.

Overall, metal is recycled significantly more than plastics. Why? Don’t worry we’ll dive into that later (it relates to basic supply and demand economics).

Glass

Similar to metal, glass is able to be recycled many times while maintaining its purity.

One report estimates that around 31% of glass food and beverage packaging containers were recycled in 2018.

Credit Our World In Data

Even though the United States is at 31%, we are still significantly behind our European competitors. Why? Don’t worry we’re getting to that shortly.

Paper

The Environmental Protection Agency cites that in 2018, paper and cardboard were the largest portion of consumer waste.

In total, around 68% of paper was recycled in 2018. Breaking this down further, newspapers had a recycling rate of 65%, paper containers and packaging had a recycling rate of 21%, and cardboard had a recycling rate of 97%.

Credit EPA

Overall, paper has a quite good rate of recycling.

Where does most waste come from? Similarly, where does most recyclable material come from?

The numbers are difficult to find, but it’s estimated that businesses produce more waste than households do.

The EPA estimates that households produced 292.4 million tons of waste in 2018, and industrial producers produced 7,600 million tons of waste.

While we know statistics on consumer recycling, it’s widely unknown how much industrial waste is being recycled.

What are the benefits of recycling?

Recycling provides many environmental, economic, and environmental awareness benefits.

Environmental

Recycling reduces the need to extract more raw resources for new products. When we recycle, we reduce our disruptions to nature. We cut down fewer trees, prevent harm to animals, maintain the purity of rivers, etc. Some of the world’s natural resources are in short supply, and recycling can help conserve these natural resources.

In addition, the EPA cites that recycling and composting saved around 3% of the CO2 emissions emitted in 2018.

Furthermore, recycling reduces electricity needs. For instance, it’s estimated that with the amount of energy needed to make one new aluminum can, you could make 20 recycled cans. Each of these recycled cans would take around 95% less energy.

It’s estimated that recycling one ton of paper could save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, 3 cubic yards of landfill space, and around 7,000 gallons of water. Continued, it’s estimated recycling steel reduces energy usage by 60% and recycling plastic reduces energy usage by 70%.

Recycling diverts waste away from landfills and incinerators, which reduces the harmful effects of pollution, chemicals, and emissions.

Economic

The EPA, in their 2020 Recycling Economic Information Study, estimates that in the United States, recycling accounted for 681,000 jobs, $37.8B in wages, and $5.5B in tax revenues. In terms of recycling material, for every 1,000 tons of material recycled, there are 1.17 jobs, $6,523 in wages, and $942 in tax revenue.

The Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries estimated that in 2021, the contribution of recycling to the United States economy was around $120B.

In addition, recycling increases economic security by tapping a domestic source of materials instead of needing to rely on foreign imports.

Environmental Awareness

Recycling is quite good at raising the level of overall environmental consciousness. People may start out by recycling and graduate to other forms of environmentally friendly activities such as installing solar panels or composting.

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All of the benefits of recycling come from the process taken, which some call the production-waste recycling loop.

Credit Wikipedia

Here’s a chart from Wikipedia. As you can see, recycled elements are integral in every step of the recycling process.

Yet recycling isn’t without issues.

Credit WIRED

What are some of the issues with recycling?

The current system still faces many challenges including consumer awareness, infrastructure, glass-specific, environmental, and degradation.

Consumer Awareness

Many people are still confused about what items can be recycled, where they can be recycled, and how they can be recycled. What makes it complicated is that each locality will have different requirements for what can and can’t be recycled and how. This often leads to recyclables being trashed and trashed being recycled.

Infrastructure

The United States recycling infrastructure has not kept pace with the increases in waste production.

Glass-Specific

In a single-stream recycling system (where all types of recycled material are collected together), glass can contaminate other recyclable materials like paper and cardboard. To explain further, the standard compactor truck that picks up recycling bins can compact waste with enough force to crush a car. So, glass breaks during compaction and becomes lodged in cardboard, paper, and plastic. This eliminates the value of the glass and the other materials.

Most manufacturers require recyclable glass to be sorted by color. When broken, glass is difficult to sort. When recyclers find it too difficult or expensive to separate out the glass, they send the entire stream to the landfill.

Broken glass is a safety hazard, but can also damage sorting machines at recycling facilities.

Environmental

The Boise State University College of Business and Economics writes the following:

Recycling can also have negative environmental impacts. For example, the process of recycling paper requires the use of chemicals and large amounts of water and energy. Similarly, recycling plastic can release harmful pollutants into the air and water. While recycling is still better for the environment than simply throwing materials in the trash, it is not a perfect solution and can still contribute to pollution.

Quality Degradation

While metal and glass can be recycled indefinitely, plastic and paper do not have similar properties.

Plastic, when recycled, most of the time is downcycled. This means that superior plastic becomes reused as inferior plastic and so on. Plastic can only be reused 1-5 times. For example, if you recycle a plastic water bottle, it won’t end up as a new plastic bottle but may end up as a plastic park bench or other piece of plastic.

Paper, when recycled, also loses quality over time. Paper can be reused 5-7 times. Nice white printer paper may become newspaper then an egg carton, etc.

Credit Restaurant Business Magazine

What are the costs of recycling? Are some materials too expensive to be recycled?

For many years, recycling was cheap. The United States was simply sending our recycling to China, by the millions of tons. Yet, the 2018 Chinese ban on the importation of recycled materials caused the price of scrap materials to plummet as countries were left with materials they could not process themselves, having relied on China instead of building domestic recycling facilities.

In 2017 the year before the ban was in place, China imported around $5.6B in recyclables from the United States. Then after the 2018 ban, recycling prices dropped significantly. Bloomberg estimated that the average price of cardboard dropped 85% from 2017 to 2019.

The Atlantic reported that the small town of Franklin, New Hampshire used to sell their recycling for $6 per ton to China. Post the ban, the town had to pay $125 per ton to dispose of the recyclables. It was estimated that it would have cost $68 per ton to simply incinerate the materials.

The United States still has a decent amount of landfill space left, but it’s becoming increasingly expensive to ship waste hundreds of miles to those landfills. Some estimate these costs rose $8 a ton from 2017 to 2018.

Let’s break this down even further.

Plastic

For plastic recycling, this restructuring in the recycling market has been horrible. Plastic has a low recyclable value, which, combined with the high costs of recycling means that recycling plastic is estimated to cost more than manufacturing brand new plastic.

Yet, there has been a growing demand recently for recycled plastics from companies’ sustainability efforts. This new demand for recycled plastic has the potential to make it cost-effective in the future.

Paper

Some estimate that manufacturing brand-new paper can be easier and cheaper than using recycled paper, yet recycled paper can be cost-effective as it uses significantly less energy.

Metal

Metal is absolutely cost-effective to recycle. Aluminum is one of the most highly recycled materials in the world, and the market continues to grow. Recycling steel is estimated to be around 75% more energy-efficient that producing brand new steel. The demand for recycled steel currently far exceeds the supply, pushing the price way up.

Glass

Glass is heavy and expensive to transport. Compactor trucks can become burdened by the weight of too much glass, forcing multiple trips.

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When the economics don’t add up in a recycling program, there are really only 2 options:

A) Continue to run the program, but require tax/state subsidies to continue.

B) Shut down the program.

Overall, the Manhattan Institute concludes:

“The financial case for recycling that seemed strong not long ago has evaporated.”

Credit Saint Louis City Recycles

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Recycle is only a third of the infamous catchphrase “reduce, reuse, recycle”. Reduce refers to simply creating less waste. Reuse refers to taking old, used, or unwanted items you might otherwise throw away and finding a new use for them.

Yet, there’s a reason recycling is last.

A study published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology explains that recycling only reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 2-3% whereas reducing consumption reduces emissions by up to 20%.

As outlined, recycling isn’t the best solution, meaning that reducing and reusing should be the priority.

I think this quote sums it up nicely:

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

- Albert Einstein

Let’s start thinking differently, especially about recycling.

Anywho, that’s all for today.

-Drew Jackson

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