Not All Recycling is Created Equal

What happens to stuff after you throw it in the bin?

Photo by Jon Moore on Unsplash

Recycling feels good, doesn’t it? Those of us who carry a gnawing sense of environmental guilt can at least point to the fact that we sort out our plastics, paper, metal, and glass and put them in the green bin rather than the brown one. I always feel pleased with myself on trash day when my recycling bin is more full than my trash bin.

But, as we’ve seen in recent years, recycling is not an environmental panacea. This truth started to become more obvious when, in 2018, China decided to stop accepting our unrecyclable material.

Before 2018, here’s how the system worked:

• People in the United States tossed much of their plastic trash into the recycling bin. They felt virtuous for doing so, even though they often put dirty or unrecyclable items in the bin.
• Western garbage collectors sold most of the plastic they collected (95% of plastic collected in Europe and 70% of plastic collected in America) to Chinese processors. Since they passed on a large majority of what they collected, they got to tell their customers that these items had been “recycled.”
• In China, mountains of contaminated or hard-to-recycle plastics piled up. Much of what Westerners thought was being recycled…