February 8, 2016 — Criticize recycling and you may as well be using a fume-spewing chainsaw to chop down ancient redwoods, as far as most environmentalists are concerned. But recent research into the environmental costs and benefits and some tough-to-ignore market realities have even the most ardent of recycling fans questioning the current system.
No one is saying that using old things to make new things is intrinsically a bad idea, but consensus is building around the idea that the system used today in the United States on balance benefits neither the economy nor the environment.
In general, local governments take responsibility for recycling. The practice can deliver profits to city and county budgets when commodity prices are high for recycled goods, but it turns recycling into an unwanted cost when commodity markets dip. And recycling is not cheap. According to Bucknell University economist Thomas Kinnaman, the energy, labor and machinery necessary to recycle materials is roughly double the amount needed to simply landfill those materials.
Right now, that equation is being further thrown off by fluctuations in the commodity market. For example, the prices for recycled plastic have dropped dramatically, which has some governments, many of which have been selling their plastic recyclables for the last several years, re-thinking their policies around the material now that they may have to pay for it to be recycled. It’s a decision being driven not by waste management goals or environmental concerns, but for economic reasons that could feasibly change in the next couple of years.
Not only that, but in some cases recycling isn’t even what’s best for the environment.
Research suggesting that the amount of energy, labor and machinery needed to recycle is double that required for landfilling is raising questions about a need to reconfigure how we handle materials at the end of their first life. Photo © iStockphoto.com/hroe
The solution, according to economists, activists and many in the design community, is to get smarter about both the design and disposal of materials, and shift responsibility away from local governments and into the hands of manufacturers.
Material World
Because most people dispose of used aluminum, paper, plastic and glass in the same way — throw them into a bin and forget about them — it’s easy to think that all recycled materials are created equal. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Each material has a unique value, determined by the rarity of the virgin resource and the price the recycled material fetches on the commodity market. The recycling process for each also requires a different amount of water and energy and comes with a unique (and sometimes hefty) carbon footprint.
All of this suggests it makes more sense to recycle some materials than others from an economic and environmental standpoint.
A recent study by Kinnaman provides research to back up that assertion. Using Japan as his test case — because the country makes available all of its municipal cost data for recycling — Kinnaman evaluated the cost of recycling each material, the energy and emissions involved in recycling, and various benefits (including simply feeling good about doing something believed to have an environmental or social benefit). He came to the controversial conclusion that an optimal recycling rate in most countries would probably be around 10 percent of goods.
Cardboard is among the materials for which recycling is most economically and environmentally beneficial. Photo © iStockphoto.com/ChrisSteer
But not just any 10 percent, Kinnaman cautions. To get the most benefit with the least cost, we should be recycling more of some items and less — or even none — of others. “Although the optimal overall recycling rate may be only 10%, the composition of that 10% should contain primarily aluminum, other metals and some forms of paper, notably cardboard and other source[s] of fiber,” he wrote in a follow-up piece in The Conversation. “Optimal recycling rates for these materials may be near 100% while optimal rates of recycling plastic and glass might be zero.”
Kinnaman’s assertions about plastic and glass have to do with the cost and resources required to recycle those materials versus the cost and availability of virgin materials. But he’s not without his critics, particularly on the plastics front, given that he describes the environmental impact of making virgin plastic as “minimal,” a conclusion based more on the emissions and energy required to recycle plastic than the fact that the stuff persists in the environment forever. Still, Kinnaman’s point — that we need to be choosier about what we recycle — has resonated with environmentalists and waste management experts alike.
The Commodities Conundrum
We may also need to find a way to decouple recycling from the commodities market. What’s happening with plastics right now is a good example of why. In the eastern U.S., to cite just one example, prices for recycled PET plastic fell from 20 cents a pound in 2014 to less than 10 cents a pound earlier this year, while recycled HDPE prices dipped from just under 40 cents a pound in 2014 to just over 30 cents per pound today. That’s thanks to a confluence of factors: Oil prices have dropped from US$120 in 2008 to less than US$35 a barrel today; growth in the Chinese recycled goods market dropped from its typical steady, double-digit annual growth to 7 percent in 2015; and the dollar is strong, which makes American recycled materials more expensive than their European or Canadian counterparts.
Changing technologies can also play a role in determining what does or does not make sense from a recycling standpoint. “The price drop has come at a time when a lot of cities have severe budget constraints anyway, so some communities are beginning to look more skeptically at recycling,” says Jerry Powell, a 46-year veteran of the recycling industry and longtime editor of the recycling industry trade publication Resource Recycling. “But three years ago, when we had record-high prices, they were expanding their recycling efforts.”
Powell adds that changing technologies can also play a role in determining what does or does not make sense from a recycling standpoint. Recycled plastic, for example, was largely used in carpeting 15 years ago, but these days more of it is making its way back into beverage bottles.
“Nestlé has really led the way on this — they knew they needed more recycled material and so they have invested in processing infrastructure and agreed to pay slightly more for recycled plastic,” Powell says. “Fifteen years ago there was zero recycled plastic going toward making new bottles. Now more is going into bottles because the technology has improved, we’re collecting more plastic, and consumers are more aware and are asking for more recycled content.”
If Not Recycling, Then What?
That type of “closed loop” thinking is where solutions to today’s recycling woes tend to be focused. Extended producer responsibility, or EPR, laws for packaging would require manufacturers to take back the plastic, cardboard and form-fitting foam their products come in, ideally with the purpose of recycling and reusing it in future packaging. Such policies essentially assign manufacturers the task of collecting and processing the recyclable packaging materials they produce. Companies can set up any sort of recycling system they want — they can continue to fund curbside pickup and pay a recycler to process the material, or they can switch to some sort of drop-off method and opt to do the recycling in-house — the only stipulation being that they have some sort of a take-back and recycling program in place.
Although recycling may not be an optimal fate for plastics, neither is landfilling. As a result governments and businesses are looking into options such as reducing use and returning used materials to the source. Photo © iStockphoto.com/SergeyZavalnyuk
EPR not only lets local governments off the hook for paying for recycling, but also effectively divorces recyclable materials from the commodities market: Companies could opt to sell the recycled material they collect and generate, but they would also have another use for the materials (producing more packaging for their own stuff) should the commodities market crash.
Currently, several European countries — including Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom and Ireland — have EPR laws, as do Australia and Japan. In Canada, the province of British Columbia has province-wide EPR laws, while Ontario EPR laws cover about 50 percent of disposable goods.
Germany’s EPR laws for packaging have been in place the longest (since 1991) and offer the clearest picture of the impact these laws have on waste management. According to an in-depth case study of Germany’s EPR system conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the country’s EPR laws were credited with reducing the total volume of packaging produced in the country by more than 1 million metric tons (1.1 million tons) from 1992 to 1998 alone, representing a per capita reduction of 15 kilograms (33 pounds).
“Significant design changes were made to reduce the amount of material used in packaging,” the report notes. “Container shapes and sizes were altered to reduce volume, and thin-walled films and containers were introduced.”
The overall market showed a noticeable shift away from plastics as well, with a reduction in total volume from 40 to 27 percent. Germany is one of the European Union’s top recyclers, with 62 percent of all packaging being recycled.
Efforts to pass EPR laws for packaging in 2013 in Minnesota, North Carolina and Rhode Island met with opposition from the consumer packaged goods industry. But, according to Matt Prindiville, executive director of the nonprofit UPSTREAM (formerly the Product Policy Institute), which has long led the charge for packaging EPR laws in the U.S., the current commodities crash in recycling is making EPR more attractive to local governments.
“This is not a tax on your products, it’s about figuring out how to get stuff back and do something with it.” – Matt Prindiville“The conditions for recycling in the U.S. have only gotten worse,” Prindiville says. “Commodity markets have collapsed, and the revenue cities were used to getting to offset the cost of covering recycling have dried up. That’s driving the conditions for EPR.”
The goal with EPR is to balance the needs of all stakeholders, from companies to recyclers to citizens. If implemented correctly, Prindiville says, it should actually benefit companies, not threaten them. “This is not a tax on your products, it’s about figuring out how to get stuff back and do something with it, and you figure out the financing yourself,” he says. “It is a market-based system.”
Burning — and Better
Meanwhile, according to a 2012 report from the nonprofit As You Sow foundation, some US$11.4 billion worth of valuable PET, aluminum and other potentially useful packaging materials are being landfilled each year. A more recent report, published this year by the World Economic Forum and Ellen MacArthur Foundation, finds that 95 percent of the value of plastic packaging material alone, worth US$80–120 billion annually, is lost to the economy.
While Kinnaman makes the case that landfilling those materials doesn’t cost as much as once thought, it’s hard not to see those materials as wasted if they’re just sitting in a hole in the ground. Plus, the MacArthur Foundation report points out that plastic packaging generates negative externalities for companies, such as potential reputational and regulatory risks, valued conservatively by the United Nations Environment Programme at US$40 billion.
“Given projected growth in consumption, in a business-as-usual scenario, by 2050 oceans are expected to contain more plastics than fish (by weight), and the entire plastics industry will consume 20% of total oil production, and 15% of the annual carbon budget,” the news release accompanying the MacArthur Foundation report states.
That’s precisely why some countries — Sweden, for example — have come back around to the idea of incinerating garbage now that technology has evolved to reduce emissions from incinerators. Thirty-two garbage incinerators in Sweden now produce heat for 810,000 households and electricity for 250,000 homes.
It’s when companies also see the value in these materials that things will really change.The U.S. plastics industry has been pushing for a similar strategy for dealing with plastic waste — particularly the latest class of thinner, lightweight plastics that don’t fit into existing recycling streams — but critics note that burning plastic still emits toxic chemicals. Instead, Prindiville says he’d like to see the U.S. work toward building a circular economy, as many European countries are trying to do. “Forward-looking CEOs are really drilling down and questioning what is the role of these materials? What’s the role of packaging? And how do we ensure a cradle-to-cradle loop instead of wasting resources?” he says.
Bridgett Luther, founder of the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, says that while legislation might help, it’s when companies also see the value in these materials that things will really change. Toward that end, some companies have already created their own take-back programs, motivated by innovation and market forces rather than regulation. Luther points to the carpet industry as an example, with companies such as Shaw Floors and Interface routinely taking their carpet back to recycle it into new carpet. In the beverage industry, Coca-Cola made a commitment to use 25 percent recycled plastic in its bottles by 2015, a number it had to downgrade due to high cost and short supply of recycled material. Walmart is in a similar situation, currently struggling to find the supply to meet its goal of using 3 billion pounds (1 billion kilograms) of recycled plastic in packaging by 2020.
“That material is as good as virgin,” Luther says. “There’s a lot of interesting innovation that could happen and could happen very quickly if groups of industry got together and said, ‘We’re going to come up with our own take-back program.’”
The ultimate solution, according to Prindiville, the MacArthur Foundation team and Luther, is better design of products and packaging further upstream to plan better for end of life and avoid the waste issue altogether. “You can regulate all day long but it’s easier to incentivize,” Luther says. “And much more interesting.” 
Ensia shares solutions-focused stories free of charge through our online magazine and partner media. That means audiences around the world have ready access to stories that can — and do — help them shape a better future. If you value our work, please show your support today.
Yes, I'll support Ensia!
But this article's conclusions are negated by its failure to discuss the economic distortions caused by federal policies that subsidize virgin resource extraction. The author should take a look at petroleum and timber depletion allowances in the tax code and at the Mining Act of 1872, which basically gives away minerals found on federal lands, then see how the story changes.
So far as market conditions being a factor--recyclables are commodities whose prices fluctuate in response to economic forces. No one should be making policy decisions on whether or not to recycle something based solely on today's market prices, whether high or low. Much more important issues are at stake.
I find it unprofessional that Ensia would publish this article with some very blatant misinformation. You don’t have to look harder than the first paragraph which states, when speaking about current recycling in the US “…even the most ardent of recycling fans questioning the current system.” The link, as an example of the “ardent recycling fan,” takes you to a recent John Tierney New York Times op-ed titled, "The Reign of Recycling" where Tierney shares his view, "The recycling movement is floundering, and its survival depends on continual subsidies, sermons and policing." This is building off his 1996 article "Recycling is Garbage," calling recycling "a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources," setting an all-time record for hate mail at the New York Times Magazine. Well maybe you can’t blame Tierney he has been waiting almost 20 years for some evidence that he was right way back in 1996. Supposedly, the other ardent fan of recycling Tierney quotes in his recent article, the CEO of Waste Management (WMX), has finally given Tierney what he would call “proof.” Tierney was probably doing back flips and the author of this article just copied his moves. She also basically rewrites Tierney’s article, apparently having done little research of her own to see if any of their claims are actually true.
I would have thought that Ensia would have done a little fact checking or perhaps this is just another Op-Ed? WMX receives the vast majority of their profits from the business of wasting. Their calculation of benefit of recycling to their company runs parallel or competes with their waste disposal model and never includes any measures around health impacts that wasting creates and the resulting costs of those impacts. As Tierney states in his article, (and I mention it here because Ensia and this Author apparently believe what he says) “cities have been burying garbage for thousands of years, and it’s still the easiest and cheapest solution for trash
The author then goes on to use the same studies by Thomas Kinnaman, an economist professor from a very small Baptist College in Pennsylvania, that Tierney used. Not surprisingly, Kinnaman uses his own previous studies to support his data in his more recent study. The data he uses isn’t even from the US it is self-admittedly from Japan – because supposedly the US does not have adequate data. Even he admits that his “… provocative results certainly require confirmation from future independent and objective research before broad policy goals can be adjusted.” But the author in the Ensia article fails to include that information and the editor of Ensia failed to do their work to confirm from independent and objective research if this article was worthy of publishing.
The real point should be that current plastics recycling is a failure economically, socially and environmentally and therefore fossil-based plastic should be eliminated from the marketplace.
The major benefit of recycling to this county is the extension of landfill life. I hate to consider what will happen when these two fill up. Mecklenburg county, which contains Charlotte, had such trouble sighting a landfill in the northern part of the county, it exports trash to one of our landfills here, in Cabarrus.
I've been considering the problem for some time, and have some ideas.
1) Limit packaging of dry products to wood pulp based materials, aluminum, and polyethylene films.
2) Limit liquid, and wet food packaging to aluminum containers, and standard size, and shape, glass bottles, and jars, which are designed to make cleaning, and reuse easily automated. I would use the classic wide mouthed, square bodied quart, and half gallon "Mason" jar design as two of the standards, although I might make them one, and two liter.
These reusable bottles would carry deposits mandated by law to encourage returns, and intentional breakage.
Product differentiation would be done by paper labeling, and the labels would be attached by adhesives designed to release in hot water, during the bottle washing process. Any business that sold products in these containers would be required to accept any used containers up to 200% of the previous months sales, by weight of containers.
These recommendations are based on the high value, and ease of reuse of aluminum, the history of reuse of glass containers, and the cost savings made possible by automation of cleaning them, and the biodegradability, and possibility of using wood pulp based materials as fuel.
I would also require trash removal services, both municipal, and private enterprise to bill their clients on the basis of weight of trash disposed. I would guarantee the right to compost, and grow fruits and vegetables on their property as a way of diverting food scraps from the waste stream.
Recycling is a hell of a lot cheaper that landfills. San Francisco very economically sends part of its garbage to WMX and puts the remainder on trains to be buried 200 miles away. Yes, it makes great economic sense. /s
Incineration is used on what can't be recycled but pollutes the air with dioxins, etc. A solution in Europe and Japan for the non-recyclables only is pyrolysis where the molecules are broken down at 1,500+ degrees into a synthetic gas that is then run through a turbine to generate electricity.
Our city recycling center works just fine even in this lousy commodity market and our garbage rates are a lot less that WMX or Republic. But, getting garbage rates higher for WMX is likely the purpose for this article.
The only things ALL the people should have to recycle is the biomass in that future. Also right now, like NOT throwing away the leaves and pine needles!
We still should recycle all the energy intensive stuff like aluminum cans because we're still using "dirty" electricity (otherwise, it wouldn't matter much since aluminum is common).
By plasma incineration, I mean far less (or no) smoke into the air and to have filters condensing the vapor from elements heated to many thousands of degrees.
It is absurd to think that the end user (and even the manufactures) could even come close to like 90% turn around of most garbage.
Only a centralized plasma incinerator placed as needed could recycle 99.9%.
Laws could then state "Throw all toxins in trash, do not leave in yard" (including all those disgusting old cadmium solar light AA batteries). I wonder how many don't get "properly thrown away" over the course of decades? Billions?
In the meantime, it would be nice to have a waste collection system that minimizes the toxins and the plastics that are definitely getting into every nick and cranny of the biosphere.