Marissa Heffernan started working for Resource Recycling in January 2022 after spending several years as a reporter at a daily newspaper in Southwest Washington. She can be contacted at [email protected].
A new effort from industry group The Recycling Partnership aims to assess and change behavior. | Air Images/Shutterstock
Recycling doesn’t work unless people can put material into the stream, so The Recycling Partnership is expanding its efforts to both understand and change consumer behavior at the bin.
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Research from the Association of Plastic Recyclers shows a 28% recycling rate for PET and HDPE bottles in 2020. | Frank Fiedler/Shutterstock
The Association of Plastic Recyclers released a report noting 21% of HDPE, PET and PP packaging is recycled in the U.S.
Nearly 40% of surveyed CFOs and CEOs said that sustainability initiatives would be the first cut in tight financial times. | Jirapong Manustrong/Shutterstock
A survey of CEOs and chief financial officers suggested that when businesses are considering cuts amid current economic headwinds, sustainability initiatives are among the first to go.
Legislators recently spoke about their challenges and successes with EPR legislation. | Banlai/Shutterstock
Four state-level elected officials who have worked on extended producer responsibility bills for packaging recently discussed how they became champions of recycling policy and offered tips to help advance legislation.
For the second year in a row, Recycle BC observed “significant growth” in collected metrics tons, with a 17% increase over the past two years. | Stephen Griffith/Shutterstock
British Columbia’s paper and plastic packaging collection rates rebounded in 2021 after pandemic-related challenges, reaching a record-high recovery rate of just over 94%.
The industry-supported bills would establish a grant program and mandate better reporting. | Orhan Cam/Shutterstock
The U.S. Senate unanimously passed two bills that would improve rural recycling and composting accessibility as well as boost data collection, sending the legislation to the House for a vote.
Novolex reported an increase in weight of post-consumer recycled plastic used in the company’s products for 2021, though the number did not rise as a percentage of total resin used. | a_v_d/Shutterstock
Bag manufacturer Novolex increased the amount of PCR it bought in 2021, but PCR remained just 4% of overall plastic feedstock purchased.
Polypropylene rigid containers have been upgraded to “widely recycled” under the How2Recycle labeling protocol. | Colleen Michaels/Shutterstock
Two years after downgrading rigid polypropylene containers to “check locally,” a label system has returned the material to its previous status, determining at least 60% of the country has access to PP collection.
North American consumers will no longer see Sprite in green PET bottles as The Coca-Cola Co. works to increase bottle-to-bottle recycling. | Adnan Zain Kautsar/Shutterstock
To make recycling its bottles easier, Coca-Cola announced it will switch all of its green PET to clear PET in coming months.
Using 2014 data from the U.S. EPA, researchers examined GHG benefits of recycling. | Lawrence Glass/Shutterstock
A new life cycle assessment quantifies the impacts of different curbside collection scenarios, concluding that a typical single-stream recycling program reduces overall emissions by almost 40% when compared with simply landfilling the material.