Why Your Municipality Has Stopped Recycling and Now What Can You Do: PART 1

Currently, the finger is being pointed at China as the reason why many US municipalities are no longer recycling. While it is true that China no longer takes our recycling, believing there is no market for recyclables because China is not involved is just casting blame on a scapegoat rather than acknowledging bad decision making here at home.

About a decade ago, recycling infrastructure in the USA was evolving locally and expanding out to regional levels. As recycling grew, large, national waste haulers and landfill operators began to recognize the opportunity (or perhaps the threat) that recycling could bring to their bottom lines.These large, public waste companies used their well-funded coffers to get involved and lead the US recycling effort. They put their money behind and strongly, marketed a not yet well tested idea: single stream recycling.

With single stream recycling, recyclables do not need to be separated by type and in some very aggressive operations, even garbage can be mixed with recyclables. The idea is to save money on the front end by collecting everything together and to use technology to separate recyclables and even garbage in downstream operations called, MRFs (Materials Recovery Facility).Sounds like magic, doesn’t it?

Well, the only real magic was the national waste haulers (often MRF and landfill owners too) convinced communities to abandon their local recycling practices and to adopt single stream recycling. Under the single stream “spell” the local collection of recyclables and garbage was often turned over directly to the national waste haulers, a.k.a. landfill operators. As more communities hopped on the single stream “truck”, recycling infrastructure for separated materials at the local and regional levels collapsed and the national haulers controlled the recyclables supply chain all the way to China or sometimes, directly to their landfills.

Although lots of investment went behind single stream technology, overtime it failed. There were just too many contaminates with single stream collected recyclables to make good, recycled materials from them. While China did have a demand for recyclable materials, overtime the good quality recyclables once shipped to China, became “garbage” and the Chinese rightfully put an end to these imports. Now with no Chinese market and a much smaller, weakened USA recycling infrastructure, some communities are finding that a broken recycling supply chain is making it too expensive to recycle and they are abandoning recycling. Of course, from a financial perspective, these communities have very short term thinking because as the demand for landfills increase, so will the tipping fees (the fees paid to dispose of their garbage in landfills).

In the long term, we must reestablish our local and regional recycling infrastructures by focusing on the most financially, lucrative recyclables and separating the collection at the household level. I do not buy into the argument touted by some large waste haulers/landfill operators, that households are not “smart” enough to properly separate recyclables. If this were the case, the once developing recycling infrastructure based on separated recyclables never would have gotten off the ground.

Separating recyclables is simply getting back to basics. Like the saying, “Keep it Simple, Stupid”. No need for expensive, complicated downstream separation equipment. Do it yourself, at home!! For many communities to resume recycling with separation at the household level, this will take strong commitment, funding, and time.

So, what can we do in the interim if our municipality stops recycling?

To help keep recycling going please read: Why Your Municipality Has Stopped Recycling and Now What Can You Do:PART 2

Happy Recycling


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