02/03/2024
Recycling in the U.S. Is Broken. How Do We Fix It?
Columbia Climate School - by Renee Cho|March 13, 2020
Excerpted:
What actually gets recycled?
According to the EPA, of the 267.8 million tons of municipal solid waste generated by Americans in 2017, only 94.2 million tons were recycled or composted.
Sixty-six percent of discarded paper and cardboard was recycled, 27 percent of glass, and 8 percent of plastics were recycled. Glass and metal can be recycled indefinitely; paper can be recycled five to seven times before it’s too degraded to be made into “new” paper; plastic can only be recycled once or twice—and usually not into a food container—since the polymers break down in the recycling process.
Why recycling isn’t working in the U.S.
Many recyclables become contaminated when items are placed in the wrong bin, or when a dirty food container gets into the recycling bin. Contamination can prevent large batches of material from being recycled. Other materials can’t be processed in certain facilities.
Moreover, many items that are collected, such as plastic straws and bags, eating utensils, yogurt and takeout containers often cannot be recycled. They usually end up being incinerated, deposited in landfills or washed into the ocean. While incineration is sometimes used to produce energy, waste-to-energy plants have been associated with toxic emissions in the past.
tractor in landfill
Landfills emit carbon dioxide, methane, volatile organic compounds and other hazardous pollutants into the air. And our oceans are drowning in plastic waste.
China’s ban
For decades, China handled the recycling of almost half of the world’s discarded materials, because its manufacturing sector was booming and needed these materials to feed it. In 2016, the U.S. exported 16 million tons of plastic, paper and metals to China. In actuality, 30 percent of these mixed recyclables were ultimately contaminated by non-recyclable material, were never recycled, and ended up polluting China’s countryside and oceans. An estimated 1.3 to 1.5 million metric tons of plastic found its way into the ocean off China’s coast each year.
In 2018, China’s National Sword policy banned the import of most plastics and other materials that were not up to new, more stringent purity standards. The U.S. then sent its plastic waste to other countries, shipping 68,000 containers to Vietnam, Malaysia, and Thailand in 2018. When these countries later instituted bans on imported plastic waste, the U.S. diverted its waste to Cambodia, Bangladesh, Ghana, Laos, Ethiopia, Kenya and Senegal — countries with cheap labor and lax environmental rules. The U.S. still ships over 1 million metric tons a year of plastic waste abroad, often to countries already overwhelmed by it. Experts estimate that 20 to 70 percent of plastic intended for recycling overseas is unusable and is ultimately discarded. One study found that the plastic waste exported to Southeast Asia resulted in contaminated water, crop death, respiratory illnesses due to toxic fumes from incineration, and organized crime.
What you can do-
“It will only ever make economic sense to recycle a small subset of materials, which means we will have to look beyond recycling alone to solve for our broader waste,” said Kersten-Johnson. “We need to tap into new business models that allow us to reduce our consumption in the first place, and re-use materials where we can. This can include things like rental or service models. But while we work to scale these types of solutions, we can’t take our eyes off recycling.”
* Learn which recycling symbols correspond to which types of plastic so you know what is recyclable
* Understand what items and materials your community recycles
* Keep a recycling bin handy
* Rinse out bottles, cans and food containers before recycling
* Buy recycled products or items incorporating recycled material
* Buy and store products in jars, not plastic containers
* Buy the biggest size possible and apportion it out at home
* Shop farmers’ markets and bulk food aisles
* Store produce in reusable produce bags
* Don’t buy single-use items
* Urge your representatives to introduce waste-reducing legislation
Here are more tips from the Natural Resources Defense Council .
China’s decision to stop accepting the world’s contaminated materials may ultimately prove to be a boon to the U.S. recycling industry. In a CNBC report, Ron Gonen, CEO of Closed Loop Partners, said, “Long term, it’s going to be a major benefit because it’s going to force the industry to be much much more efficient, and produce a much higher quality product that will actually be able to be used in domestic manufacturing supply chains.” According to the report, the U.S. has invested over $4.4 billion in new and retooled facilities that recover materials; these improvements include advanced technologies such as robotics and optical sorting to deal with the material from mixed streams. Gonen said, “It’s forcing everybody to focus on efficiency, product design, and reuse of material.”
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/03/13/fix-recycling-america/ #:~:text=Recycling%20in%20the%20U.S.%20is%20broken.%20In%201960%2C,will%20explain%20why%2C%20and%20talk%20about%20potential%20solutions.
In this episode of Tekniq, we will observe the process of wast and manipulation of metal through incineration as well as the production of ship propellers.
