The Collapse of the Recycling Industry
Why our current recycling system is and always has been, doomed to fail.
We all want to help save the planet. When asked how, the typical answer is to reduce, reuse, recycle. Unfortunately, recycling may not be the simple solution you might think.
Recycling in the US is an inherently flawed system that contributes significant waste to other nations. Managed by profit-driven companies and coupled with the system’s volatile standards and underinvestment, recycling as an industry is collapsing. Unless swift action is taken, recycling in the US as we know it today will not exist for long.
Though that may not be such a bad thing.
History of recycling in the US
To understand why our current recycling system is failing, we must know the circumstances and intentions behind its creation.
Recycling as a concept has existed in the US since colonial times. Because there was no mass manufacturing, items were created in the home and used for a variety of purposes whenever possible. A persistent example could be your grandma using the cookie tin as a sewing box.
It wasn’t until WWII and the invention of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) in 1941 that more everyday items started to become single-use. The culture in the US shifted from using and reusing as many items as possible, to buying single-use plastics for their convenience.
Thus, the recycling industry was formally born. Businesses quickly arose to meet the demands for reduced pollution in parks and cities. Environmental campaigns arose around the initiatives to “Keep America Beautiful” and “People start pollution. People can stop it.”
At face value, these campaigns for anti-litter practices seem well-intentioned. However, behind the green curtains were profit-driven industries looking to shift blame from their business practice to individual responsibility.
The Keep America Beautiful organization was founded by the American Can Co. and Owens-Illinois Glass Co. in 1953. These companies were responsible for the mounds of bottles and cans that littered the streets and parks throughout the United States.
Despite this responsibility, the campaigns launched by these corporations shifted all blame to individuals for their choice of littering. This was an intentional response to the rise of environmental protests which targeted mass manufacturers such as themselves for their negative impact on the environment.
Thus, the recycling industry was born not out of a desire to protect nature, rather it was created out of a desire to protect corporations. With these origins, recycling itself quickly became an industry to profit off of, and as with most for-profit industries, the environmental impacts were quickly disregarded.
Failures of today
With its tumultuous history, recycling doesn’t fare much better today. Its impacts have expanded to the global level, and the overall harm caused by this industry is astounding.
The first and most notable failure is the overall inadequacy of recycling in the US. Waste generation is on an exponential incline with 292.4 million tons produced in 2018 alone. Despite this constant increase, many of the laws and standards for recycling haven’t changed in the last 30 years. The result has been major inefficiencies, such as less than 8% of all discarded plastics being properly recycled.
Unlike many other nations, the United States has no national mandate for recycling. This is because the creation of the for-profit recycling industry marked the point in history where the onus of pollution fell on citizens, not corporations. Therefore, the profit-driven organizations running the recycling industry have no desire to change the system that directly benefits them for some environmental concerns.
An increase in waste production is an economic opportunity, not an environmental disaster for many of these companies.
The second major failure of the recycling industry today is the exportation of waste to developing nations. In the past, the United States exported a large amount of excess waste to China for processing.
However, in 2018 China responded to the excess waste piling up in their nation by implementing the National Sword Policy. The National Sword Policy introduced much stricter purity standards for waste imports, thereby resulting in the US searching for alternative nations to dump their garbage.
These alternative nations that end up receiving the United States’ trash often lack the infrastructure needed to deal with their own waste generation. The consequences of importing additional waste have accordingly been crippling to these states, with most of the imported plastic ending up in landfills due to mismanagement. Plastics that are unable to be exported out of the United States also end up in landfills or the ocean with no recycling processor to take them.
Can recycling be saved?
What can be done to reduce and prevent these impacts? Can recycling even be saved in the US? The answer lies in the current issues facing the recycling industry today.
One of the biggest reasons why recycling industries are unable to do better is a severe lack of investment. Federal funding for recycling is extremely low, and with no national mandate or regulation — the responsibility falls entirely on local governance.
The lack of investment harms not only current-day operations but also prevents research and development of new recycling technology. A boost in tech is necessary to match the ever-increasing production of waste. Older waste processing machines cannot handle the surplus.
If R&D for recycling increases, the ability to generate high-quality recycling materials will increase. This in turn will allow the US to export waste that meets the purity standards of states who have the ability and infrastructure to process it.
Investment is only part of the picture, however. Regulations and laws regarding recycling practices must also be updated. The United States as a whole must take greater responsibility for the excess waste we produce. That includes our corporations, not just individual citizens.
