To fix recycling, we have to know it inside and out, to know when it works and when it doesn’t. While the raw materials in producing recycled materials are always free, the cost of separating and cleaning materials can often make recycling unprofitable. By looking at moments in history, we can see how the determinants of recycling, supply of raw materials, cost of labor, demand for post-consumer goods, and complexity of materials recycled, caused various forms of recycling to work, fail, and come back to life. Recycling works best when post-consumer material is easy and cost effective to separate, making it cheaper to recover than new material.

The invention of the printing press in the late fifteenth century made paper the most valuable resource in the world. Because of the press, paper was the vehicle for ideas to be spread at a rate far faster than ever before. Colonial America was a prime example of such a place. The colonies were home to hundreds of daily newspapers and pamphlets, with each paper circulating to thousands upon thousands of readers. What may surprise you is that paper used to be made of rags (not trees), and that made rags one the most valuable resources in the world. 

The problem for American publishers was that Colonial America did not have the infrastructure to produce enough rags for its population. Rags were made from cloth fibers, but also had the important quality of being recyclable. Thus, Massachusetts’ house of representatives passed an ordinance in February of 1776 requiring a person in each town to “[save] even the smallest Quantities of Rags, proper for making Paper which will be a further Evidence of their Disposition to promote the Public Good.” Yes, rag collector was a job, and the demand for paper was so great that colonial paper mills began importing used rags from Europe to supplement the lack of rags in the colonies. Colonial Newspapers would print messages pleading with their readers to return rags to supplement their supplies. Allegedly, paper mills in the US at one point imported rags from mummies in Egypt so they could reuse the wrappings as paper. Giving the bandages that embalmed pharaohs and nobles in the afterlife, an afterlife. What this rags-to-riches story can tell us is a lack of supply in a very important material is highly conducive to recycling.

One hundred years later, steel had taken the place of paper in transforming American society. Mass production of steel enabled denser urban areas through skyscrapers, and freight and mobility through vehicles and rail for trains. The invention of the automobile and the mobility it enabled paved the American continent with highways and bridges, and raised suburbs around cities. None of these transformations could be accomplished without steel, and that made steel an extremely precious resource, which meant that it was often meticulously picked from American scrapyards and recycled. In the mid 20th century, scrap traders would employ dozens of laborers to pick apart the automobiles sitting in junkyards and separate the steel from the leather seats, the glass, plastic, nickel, copper, and other materials. The demand for steel, and resulting high steel prices, made it extremely economical to recycle.

But in the 1960s and 1970s, global steel markets became flooded with Japanese steel and the price of US labor rose and rose, meaning scrappers could no longer recycle objects like cars at a profit. Consequently, when Americans no longer needed their old cars, there was no one around to buy and recycle them. Without a place to deposit their clunkers, Americans were burning them, or abandoning them on highways, in swamps, open fields, and in some cases even pushing them over cliffs. The problem became so vast that by 1970 there were 20 million abandoned cars in the US. Rising labor prices and a surge in supply made extracting steel from cars uneconomical, and the infrastructure of recycling failed. The problem with abandoned cars persisted until a key innovation reduced the cost of extracting that steel (China’s economic expansion and demand for steel helped too). The revolutionary invention? A car shredder that was cheap enough for small scrapyards to buy. While industrial shredders were costly and expensive to maintain, these smaller shredders allowed smaller scrap players all over the country to scale the cost of material recovery. As a result, the cars sitting on our highways and rusting in our swamps could be transformed into new cars once again. You might be surprised to learn that these days more than 80% of the steel produced in the United States is from scrap metal, much of which is produced by car shredders.

Plastics were another invention that fundamentally changed the economic realities of the world. The first plastic, “Bakelite,” was invented in 1907. Bakelite began appearing in radios, cars, washing machines and even combs, it demonstrated the diverse range of functions synthetic molecules could serve, but Bakelite was an immutable molecule. Once bakelite was shaped into a comb, you could not melt it down and turn it into insulation in your radio. But all that changed with the invention of thermoplastics (polystyrene, nylon, polyethylene etc.). Thermoplastics can be remolded with a little heat, in fact the melting point of polypropylene is 320 degrees Farenheit (a temperature you can achieve with your oven at home), that property made thermoplastics particularly useful and cheap to manufacturers. The flexibility of these thermoplastics, along with the invention of injection molding, meant that household objects like combs, photo frames, toothbrushes, tupperware, and stockings could be produced in far greater quantities than ever before. Suddenly, Americans had access to millions of different functions at a cost lower than ever, and the results were staggering. The production of plastics worldwide went from 2 million tons in 1950, to 381 million tons in 2015. Plastic was the material of the American dream.

But the flexibility and cost effectiveness of plastics gave rise to an environmentally dangerous set of consumer behaviors: the single-use plastic. There was a time when producers followed what was called the milk-man model. For those of you unfamiliar, there was once a time when people were once employed to go house to house, refilling glass jugs of milk each week (kind of like Blue Apron for milk for you millenials). While environmentally sustainable, this model imposed considerable costs on manufacturers. For companies like Coca Cola, the glass bottle often cost more than the liquid that went inside it! The bottles were so scarce and expensive to manufacturers that they used to conduct household raids to recover them from housewives using them for home storage. Plastic brought down the cost of packaging to a point where it liberated manufacturers from these concerns. Americans were liberated too, no longer saving beverage containers for storing ketchup or medicines, and instead tossing empty bottles out the windows of their cars. There’s a lesson here about the effect of abundance on the psyche: if something comes easily, it’s just as easy to let it go. Because the cost of plastic is low, and the cost to recycle it from our waste stream is high, it is often more economical for our plastics to be landfilled or incinerated. But in industrial cases, where no sorting or cleaning is required, scrap plastic can actually serve as an additional revenue stream to manufacturers. 

While post-consumer plastic is usually cheaper than virgin plastics, plastics are unique in that they are much more difficult to clean and separate than magnetic metals like steel. While many manufacturers are perfectly happy to accept cheaper commodities, the contamination in post-consumer plastics often results in resins that do not meet the standards of most manufacturers. China was willing to accept America’s contaminated plastics because freight and labor costs were cheap enough where plastics could be cleaned and sorted at a profit. But in 2018, the Chinese government decided to ban the import of plastics with contamination greater than 0.5%, leaving American plastics without a place they could be recycled. Thus, it is now plastic that we are burning or dumping in swamps, and one of the best ways to solve this problem is to ensure that post-consumer plastic is as clean and uncontaminated as the new stuff.

Turning towards the future, e-waste is likely going to create the greatest global waste crisis yet. A circuit board contains fiberglass epoxy resins, copper, tin, nickel, and gold, and they aren’t very easy to separate. That means its not economical in many cases to stirp circuit boards with manual labor, and consequently many e-waste recyclers simply burn the material to recover precious metals. Global e-waste generation amounts to 45 million tons per year, only 20% of that gets reused or recycled. To make matters worse, our consumption of electronic devices is projected to double in the next 5 years from 19 billion today to 34 billion in 2025. Recyclers already face these problems at a smaller scale, stickers placed on plastic boxes for produce or salads char and contaminate the plastic during the recycling process. Because bottle caps and the lids of plastic containers are often made from a different plastic than the body, having caps and lids on is considered a form of contamination. With electronics, the materials are much more difficult to separate, and thus the cost of recycling is much higher. Someday we may start seeing electronics abandoned in our swamps and open fields just like the automobiles of the 1970s.

Recycling, like any business, only works well when the cost of extracting recycled materials is lower than the price of the commodity you are extracting. While commodity pricing is something difficult to anticipate, technological advancement is a very effective lever for reducing costs. Recycling isn’t perfect, it is the third most environmentally responsible thing you can do (after reducing and reusing) but it’s still worth doing. Environmental impacts and impending apocalypse aside, there is a logical economic argument for reusing and recycling as much material as possible. Scarcity is a reality of human existence, and to give billions more people the same quality of life we are accustomed to in the United States, we either need a lot more resources or to be better at using those resources. I think the second problem is much easier to solve, and I’d rather be fixing that than mining for metals on asteroids.

Sources

Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter

Plastic: A Toxic Love Story by Susan Freinkel

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/04/business/plastic-recycling-bottle-bills.html

https://www.goingzerowaste.com/blog/how-to-recycle-paper-the-right-way

https://techjury.net/stats-about/internet-of-things-statistics/