Editor’s Note: End markets will be featured in sessions at the 2026 Plastics Recycling Conference, Feb. 23-25 in San Diego, California. Register now for the best rates.
Plastics recyclers are completing what often has been described as the worst year to date, amid cheap virgin and imported resin, and renewed criticism of the industry in well-publicized reports.
But in the end, “very simply, the issue is market demand,” said Steve Alexander, CEO of the Association of Plastic Recyclers, in a recent podcast. APR owns Resource Recycling, Inc., publisher of Plastics Recycling Update.
The closures of reclaimer rPlanet Earth in California and a PET wash line at Phoenix Technologies in Ohio weigh heavily on Alexander, who has helmed the organization for 20 years. “They’re closing because they don’t have any customers.”
To widen the market for recycled plastics, Alexander called for policy levers to incentivize consumer brands “to recognize the value of using more recycled material that is domestically produced.”
The key to making plastics recycling economically viable is to create demand, he said. “We don’t need government funding. We don’t need government grants, etc. If we have customers, we’ll invest in the plants.”
As such, APR’s primary focus for 2026 will be on how to incentivize the market to use domestically sourced recycled plastics.
“APR has solved every technical problem out there, relative to ‘can your package or product be recycled,'” he said, pointing to the globally recognized APR Design Guide.
Alexander used a favorite analogy: incentives for buying EVs, which proved their effectiveness particularly when the incentives expired, and sales plummeted.
Although EPR legislation helps incentivize collection of plastic packaging by way of producer funding, “without a market for that material, the only thing we’re going to end up with is a lot more material with nowhere for it to go.”
As one example, consumer brands have pulled back on ambitious voluntary PCR targets but still are using recycled resin, he said. They currently depend on cheaper imports, which Alexander said may not be certified as post-consumer material or may originate in countries that lack environmental and labor guardrails of the US.
“And it’s all about bringing manufacturing back to the United States, right? It’s all part and parcel of what this administration is doing,” he said, adding that the need to grow domestic manufacturing extends to Canada and Mexico. “We all know material flows back and forth, sometimes three, four times before it ends up in a final product.”
Does recycling really work?
Another issue that has frustrated plastic recyclers is public mistrust of the system, often spurred by critical and sometimes misleading reports, along with “tracker tests.”
For example, a recent report “somehow conflated the reduction in use of virgin plastic as something that doesn’t work,” Alexander said. “The one thing that we know which does work to create plastics being sustainable is the recycling component of it.
“So I’m a little confused at the narrative of saying recycling doesn’t work.”
However, consumers can still feel confident about their role in reducing their own carbon footprint – and in making recycling work – primarily by putting their plastic bottles and containers in the bins.
“The most iconic container that is recyclable, that consumers use, is a water bottle, and yet somehow we only collect three of 10 of them,” he said. “We can’t recycle what is not collected.”
“To say recycling doesn’t work is an erroneous statement. The fact of the matter is, it works.”
Another misconception is that North America faces a recycling capacity shortage. A report published in May 2025 indicated that North American recyclers could process 1.7 billion additional pounds/year of plastic – about one-third more than current 5 billion.
“To say recycling doesn’t work is an erroneous statement. The fact of the matter is, it works.”
Although the concept of recycling is often treated as a monolith whose success is evaluated with a binary rating system of working versus not working, five distinct elements are required for packaging to successfully complete the full recycling process, Alexander said.
First and foremost, a plastic product must be designed for recycling. “If it’s not designed to be recycled, it doesn’t matter what else you do with it.”
Then it must be collected and sorted for recycling. APR has a sortation protocol to help ensure material flows into the proper bale, he said. Following effective sortation, the material needs to be processed into resin pellets for use in new products. And all of these processes are working today, he said.
But ultimately the existence of end markets is the glue that holds together the rest of the recycling process. “The market monetizes the entire system. You don’t have customers, then you have no money to fund the system. So it’s as simple as that.”
How much plastic is really being recycled?
There’s also no shortage of plastic recycling rate estimates to choose from, which adds to consumer confusion.
“You know, the numbers are frustrating,” he said, noting that very low plastic recycling numbers usually include all plastics produced, many of which were never made to be recycled. “The plastic that people really talk about is plastic that’s in consumer packaging. That’s really where the issue is, and less than half of the plastics that are generated go into consumer packaging.”
“At least 70% of what you put in your bin ultimately ends up getting recycled,” with the rest largely having some sort of contamination – for example, a non-recyclable container mixed in with recyclable items.
Regardless of the figures used, recycling rates are “not great, as I’ve indicated,” and there is work to be done, such as improving consistency among collection programs.
For example, the thousands of US recycling programs vary widely in what materials they will accept. “You’re asking recyclers to create a business model where we’re never sure what material is being collected.”
At a minimum, APR encourages recycling programs to accept PET, HDPE and PP containers, he said. “If you do that, at least we know we’re getting the same volume and the same consistency, and you can build an infrastructure on it.”
