Have We Hit Peak Recycling?

Recycling rates seem to have plateaued in the United States, which is bad news for the environment. Learn why this happened -- and what might be done to help fix it -- in this episode of BrainStuff. 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogue bomb here. In the nineteen seventies, Americans first
started embracing a new idea intended to help protect the
environment and reduce our squandering of natural resources. Instead of
just throwing their garbage away, people began separating materials such
as glass, metal, and paper that potentially could be processed

(00:25):
and reused, and started leaving them by the curbside in
bins to be collected and transported to recycling plants. Back then,
recycling seemed like a revolutionary step toward a less wasteful society.
But not quite half a century later, that revolution seems
to be stuck in neutral, which leaves us wondering whether
there is a peak recycling point and whether we may

(00:46):
have already reached it. Thanks to population growth, we continue
to generate an ever increasing amount of trash, two hundred
and sixty two million tons of it in the US
loan in the most recent year for which the Environmental
Protection Agency has data. That's up from two hundred and
eight million tons in nineteen ninety, and it works out

(01:06):
to about four point five pounds or around two kilograms
per American each day. Over thirty percent more trash than
Americans generated individually back in nineteen seventy. Of that mountain
of refuse, in fifteen, slightly more than a third was
either recycled sixty eight million tons or composted twenty three
million tons. That might seem pretty impressive, but it's not.

(01:30):
As of seventeen, the US ranked just twenty five among
the world's industrialized nations in recycling. Germany, in contrast, recycles
or composts about two thirds of its garbage, and ten
other countries in Europe and Asia achieve a fifty percent
rate or higher. Even more troublingly, U s recycling rates
have pretty much stalled in recent years. As a result,

(01:51):
we're still burying more than half of the trash we
generated landfills and burning the remainder. One challenge to recyclers
is that the waste stream has evolved. In prior times,
there were more glass bottles and aluminum cans, plus a
lot more discarded newspaper, which was heavy and accounted for
a lot of the volume. These days, in contrast, recyclers

(02:12):
have to deal with more plastic bottles and e commerce packaging,
as well as a new generation of complex materials that
are more difficult to process, metal cans made with blends
of metals that would have to be extracted from one another,
and cans and paper products that are coded in plastic.
Both the base and the coating are technically recyclable, but
separating them is tricky, and tricky means expensive. Also, although

(02:37):
what we're discarding has changed rapidly, it's not so easy
for recycling plants to adjust. These are costly facilities that
were built to handle the old mix of trash. New
equipment could cost millions. While the typical person who puts
bottles in cardboard packaging in the curbside been for pickup
may think of it as just another government service, recycling
actually is an industry that has to generate income to

(02:59):
be sustainable. Bowl sure, they're technically selling your stuff, but
they have to pay for drivers, trucks, insurance, the facility,
the equipment to sort it, and shipping to the processor
that will actually break it down and sell the material.
And it's a volatile market. Recently, the industry was thrown
into disarray by China's decision to stop importing twenty four

(03:19):
categories of recycled materials, including plastic and paper from the
US and other countries. The ban is causing materials to
pile up without buyers at sorting centers across the United States,
forcing many communities to either bury them in landfills or
burn them. Even where China is still willing to accept recyclables,
they insist on materials with extremely low contamination rates. That's

(03:42):
a big problem for the U S, where many communities,
in an effort to encourage recycling, no longer require residents
to separate and clean recyclable materials. As a result, about
of recyclables collected turn out to be contaminated and unusable.
A stuff like food waste stuck in con hainters can
be too difficult to clean, meaning that the recycling plant

(04:03):
may wind up sorting these containers out and throwing them away.
But there are potential solutions to the problems that are
hindering recycling. Makers of packaging could help, for example, by
thinking more about the reality that the stuff has to
go somewhere at the end of its brief useful life
and designing it to be more easily broken down and recycled,

(04:24):
and US manufacturers of products could strive harder to find
new and innovative uses for recycled materials that can be
reused multiple times, what the US Environmental Protection Agency calls
sustainable materials management that would improve the market for recyclables. Additionally,
nearly fifty years after the recycling movement began, there are

(04:44):
still places across the US, most notably Indianapolis, that still
haven't even started curbside recycling programs. That suggests there's still
potential for growth. Today's episode was written by Patrick J.
Keiger and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeartMedia and How
Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other topics,

(05:06):
visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.