Recycling isn’t working — here’s why

Blog originally published on April 5, 2019

Ever since China stopped accepting most foreign recyclables in 2017, our trash has nowhere to go. The global recycling market is crumbling, the cost of recycling is skyrocketing, fewer materials are accepted, and cities are forced to suspend their recycling programs or find stopgap solutions like incinerators and landfills in order to cut costs.

In chaos there is opportunity: could it be time to rethink our relationship to waste? For too long we’ve been sending our trash through the backdoor to foreign countries. For too long this has been an excuse for us to consume even more. This crisis was long overdue. We must face our waste head-on and radically rethink our current manufacturing practices.

Why? Because the recycling industry as we know it is flawed, confusing, volatile, and it places too much responsibility on the consumer. When we do recycle correctly, we’re told “it doesn’t matter” and “it all ends up in the same place anyway.” Below are the historical, psychological and economic factors that make recycling so difficult to get right, and the reasons why it is vital for us not to give up on it.

Problem #1: We never really had to care.

In the Middle Ages, it was common practice to toss trash out the window onto the streets. It wasn’t until diseases started spreading in European countries that waste management systems were considered by urban planners and city officials. As soon as waste collection was introduced, it gave way to this “out-of-sight-out-of-mind” mentality. Trash cans and toilets have become fixtures in our lives that we all take for granted.

Our ways of life are set up to ensure we give as little thought as possible on how we dispose of our waste. As soon as our product has fulfilled its use, it becomes worthless, repulsive even. Taking 10 extra seconds to think about what bin to toss it in is inconvenient and sometimes stressful: we want it off our hands immediately. If you can identify with that feeling, it’s not your fault. We’ve been conditioned this way. When single-use products were introduced in the 1930s, we were told to consume, consume, consume, and throw away as much as we pleased. It was a time when garbage was a sign of glamor, convenience, elegance and affordability. Who wouldn’t buy into that?

Our blindness to where our waste ends up makes us undisciplined, unaware, and confused about how to recycle. We let too many variables affect whether we recycle or not: understanding how to recycle, individual perceptions about the importance of recycling, the particular placement of a recycling bin, personal connection to a product (ie. whether a name is on it), how distorted the packaging is, and even mood and weather.

Problem #2: We don’t have clear instructions.

Marketers are skilled at understanding what motivates us to buy a product (shelf placement, colors, typography, branding), yet little thought is given to extending a product’s lifetime or researching what encourages positive recycling behaviors. For example, studies show that people are less likely to recycle a product that’s been distorted or crumpled, even if they know it’s recyclable. Companies should make simpler products less prone to distortion, but instead, they’re manufacturing products with a complex mix of materials that make it confusing for consumers to dispose of and impossible for recycling facilities to separate.

Multinational corporations have the responsibility and resources to encourage recycling through strategic design and messaging. As it stands, our packaging rarely contains instructions that explicitly direct recycling behavior. The Universal Recycling Symbol, for instance, is an internal code for the plastics industry that isn’t intended for consumer use. It is untrademarked, unregulated, and no authority controls how it is used. It means a product was made from recycled materials, not that it’s recyclable.

Finally, public education campaigns are so focused on getting us to recycle that they’re forgetting to educate us on what not to recycle. To some, plastic is plastic, and they are ready to toss anything from Ziploc bags, to saran wrap, to electronics in the blue bin. Even if it’s done with good intentions (called “aspirational recycling”), it is causing more harm than good. And when people discover that they’ve been doing it wrong all along, it’s deceiving and discouraging, often creating apathy in people who lose faith in the practice altogether.

Problem #3: We can’t keep up.

While simpler recycling instructions may encourage participation, increased participation is only beneficial if the recyclables are making it back into the chain of production. Technically, virtually every manufactured product can be recycled. But in order for that to happen, there has to be a demand for products from end-market manufacturers who use them as raw material, which in turn determines what can and cannot be accepted in the blue bin.

Because the recycling industry is not standardized and is under no federal guidance, information indicating what’s accepted or not and instructions on how to sort waste are unclear, hard to find, inconsistent from one community to the next, and change according to the market. How are we expected to keep up if different haulers, recycling centers, municipalities, and markets all have their stipulations on what can and can’t be accepted in the blue bin?

This is an extremely flawed system that affects individual recyclers all the way to manufacturers. Basically, if recycling is an unprofitable venture, it stops. Money is all it comes down to. And with the China ban, recycling is becoming increasingly costly and unprofitable. Therefore, so long as this system is in place, we should be buying products made out of recycled materials in order to further stimulate the market for those recyclables and encourage domestic manufacturers to fill the void that we let foreign powers create.

Problem #4: We’re not incentivized.

How is recycling expected to win if it is pinned against profit? City officials and manufacturers get to make decisions on the availability of recycling programs based on money; it should come as no surprise that consumers are doing the same when it comes to participation.

Back then, people recycled to save money and resources, or even to serve their country, without paying too much attention to the environment. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, residents of Tokyo voluntarily cut energy use by 20% (even through summer heat). During the Great Depression, families carried their lunch in old biscuit containers and used flour sacks to make clothing. During World War II, Americans were encouraged to collect paper, scrap metal, and even cooking waste for the war effort.

Today, the focus is on the environment. Yet the goal of “saving the planet” in the long-run is too abstract and distant for people to be investing taxpayer money and time dedicated to waste collection services. Naturally, we do not face waste and climate change with the same level of urgency as we do with war and famine. Climate change lacks salience, information about it is constantly evolving and is sometimes contradictory. For now, recycling is only a moral obligation, a voluntary act, a service of goodwill to our environment, not an imperative.

Problem #5: We’re disillusioned.

And then we read things like this: “Recycling plastic is to saving the Earth what hammering a nail is to halting a falling skyscraper. You struggle to find a place to do it and feel pleased when you succeed. But your effort is wholly inadequate and distracts from the real problem of why the building is collapsing in the first place.”

This is an excerpt from an article titled “More Recycling Won’t Solve Plastic Pollution.” Yet in a world of reductionist, clickbait headlines, people only get half the story. We register “the myth of the recycling solution,” “recycling is broken,” “the answer isn’t recycling,” so we stop recycling, and even perpetuate the idea that it is useless, that our efforts don’t matter — even though these are all titles to articles that do not in fact discredit recycling, but rather point to corporate production and plastic production as a more urgent problems.

Yes, recycling gives people the moral license to produce and consume more. Yes, plastic production is the real enemy. Until our manufacturers and our public authorities start having a serious conversation about where our waste is going and how to reduce plastic pollution, we cannot afford to stop recycling. I for one am thankful that China is leaving our trash out on our front steps and is giving us the opportunity to have this conversation once and for all. Better now than later, right?