Trash Talking U.S. Recycling
Recycling in the U.S. is broken. Only 25% of everything you put in your recycling bin actually gets recycled. If it’s plastic, the number is even less at 9%. Every day the average American generates about 4 pounds of waste, and that number is increasing. Over the course of a year, that’s almost a ton per person. So every year in the US alone we’re looking at around 230 million tons of garbage. Where does all of that stuff go? It either ends up in a landfill, incinerator, ocean or a new product. For the last twenty five years or so, if your plastic water bottle was becoming a new product you could bet that it was happening in China.
In 2018, China implemented its National Sword policy, banning the import of recyclables with greater than 0.5% contamination. To give you some context, recyclables are 20% to 40% contaminated when they enter the waste stream (depends on the municipality). According to waste management companies 0.5% contamination is unobtainable. After the implementation of the National Sword Policy, towns in the US that were once selling their mixed recyclables for $6 a ton now have to choose between recycling at a cost of $125 per ton, or incinerating at a cost of $68 per ton. Let’s dive into why that is.
When you toss a water bottle into your recycling bin, the waste hauler picks it up and brings it, along with everything else you and your neighbors have thrown away, to something called a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). Most MRFs are designed to sort through everything you’ve thrown in a recycling bin. The average MRF processes 220 tons of waste every day, at a cost of about $60 to $80 per ton. That’s at least $13,200 a day, and with 260 work days in a year that’s $3,432,000. There are almost two thousand MRFs in the United States alone, so I’d guestimate we’re spending north of $6 billion a year on SORTING everyone’s recyclables this way (there’s another 6,000 MRFs in Europe and 1,000 MRFs in Asia). Waste management companies were historically able to sell some of this waste to China to offset the cost of sorting, but after the National Sword Policy, the price for mixed plastics and many other recyclables collapsed.
Using MRFs about 25% of what you’re putting in your recycling bin gets sorted into a compactor (in the US), then crushed into a cube and sold to a manufacturer (I’m still trying to pin down this number but I think it’s about $20 billion a year in revenue for all US waste management companies combined). As I mentioned above, the rest of it is landfilled, incinerated, or dumped in the ocean. Why does this happen? There’s a few reasons:
Adam Smith and his pesky invisible hands. It costs $60 to $80 per ton to sort recyclables at an MRF. While this cost has been exceedingly stable over the course of the past twenty years, the output of an MRF is effectively a commodity, and therefore subject to commodity pricing. So if the price of virgin material (like plastic or paper) becomes cheaper than the price of recycled material, almost everyone buys the virgin material.
People aren’t very good at sorting out stuff that can’t be recycled. Despite numerous educational efforts from waste haulers and municipalities, we’re still putting that pizza box or plastic bag in our recycling bin, and that lone pizza box or plastic bag ruins the entire cube of pulp down the line or shuts down the MRF for a half an hour.
A lot of the recycling gets contaminated. We throw out that old plastic takeout box and it’s still got pad thai in it. When the plastic box gets remelted into more plastic boxes, the pad thai causes that plastic to be weaker and potentially unusable. Even worse, the lid of the container is made from PET, but the body is made out of PP. This kind of contamination leads to lower demand for post-consumer material because the quality is highly unreliable.
MRFs aren’t very good at sorting either. The way current collection systems work mixes all recyclables in a big soup, and if you've ever made soup it's much harder to take stuff out than put stuff in. Whatever paper you put in your recycling bin gets soggy from that olive oil bottle you threw out. Plastic bags get stuck in the machinery of an MRF and shut down the entire operation for an extended period of time until the bag can be retrieved. In any case, the recovered materials are really a collaboratively created resource, and a few bad eggs can really soil the entire recycling process.
A recycling bin that can identify and sort materials by type and degree of contamination has the potential to solve all of the problems above. Keeping post-consumer goods sorted properly from start to finish will drastically reduce the price of using recycled material. Preventing contaminated material from entering the recyclables stream will increase the value of what is collected and remains uncontaminated. And collecting data on recyclables at this scale will provide better tools to address the cultural, economic, and legislative barriers to living in a society without waste.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/business/local-recycling-costs.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html