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This article appeared in the August 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Through partnerships and collaborations, the plastics industry has the opportunity to amplify individual efforts and contributions, pool resources, leverage diverse expertise, channel creativity and drive innovation. All of these are critically important when looking to solve a complex issue such as mismanaged plastic waste and building a circular economy for plastic materials.

For many years, my career at Nova Chemicals has revolved around being a connector to create change, connecting through industry associations, coalitions, consortiums, initiatives, investments, with our customers and their customers, with nonprofits and with governments. I’ve seen firsthand that partnerships and collaborations can help accelerate progress by leveraging expertise and catalyzing investments and innovations to find solutions through private and private/public models. There are three ways partnerships and collaborations can make a difference: investing in recycling infrastructure, encouraging innovation and circular design, and impacting public policy.

Driving Investment

According to The Recycling Partnership, the U.S. alone needs $17 billion investment over five years to deliver the full benefits of recycling to the public, and the estimated return on that investment could be $20 billion over 10 years. Collective investment is an excellent way to deploy catalytic financing into sustainable technologies.

One investment collaboration is the Closed Loop Circular Plastics Fund within Closed Loop Partners’ Infrastructure Group. Established in 2021 by Nova Chemicals, LyondellBasell and Dow with Closed Loop Partners, the fund’s mission is to advance the recovery and recycling of polyethylene and polypropylene in the U.S. and Canada to meet growing demand for high-quality, recycled content in products and packaging from consumer brands. The strategy seeks to deploy $55 million and to recycle over 500 million pounds of plastic over the fund’s lifespan.

Since its launch, the strategy has made several catalytic debt and equity investments to both private companies and public organizations, financing post-pilot scale projects that advance collection infrastructure, sortation capabilities, enabling technologies and re-manufacturing of PE and PP. One investment has been in Greyparrot, a leading artificial intelligence waste analytics platform that improves transparency and automation for plastics sortation in recycling facilities. Supported by funding, Greyparrot has grown to now identify over 25 billion waste objects each year, with 100-plus of its Greyparrot Analyzer Units spread across 20 countries, and is working with three of the top eight global waste management companies to improve recycling efficiency and increase resource recovery.

There are several other investment funds focusing on eliminating plastic waste and building a plastic circular economy, including Infinity Recycling, Circulate Capital and The Alliance to End Plastic Waste and Lombard Odier Investment Managers’ circular plastic fund. Recently the U.S. State Department announced the launch of the End Plastic Pollution International Collaborative, an international public-private partnership created to catalyze governments, NGOs and businesses to support innovative solutions to the plastic pollution crisis. All of these are great examples of how we can work together to invest in solutions.

Inspiring Innovation and Circular Design

Designing for circularity has benefited greatly from cross-sector collaborations. The Association of Plastic Recyclers developed the APR Design Guide, a comprehensive design guidance and testing protocol that measure package design against industry-accepted criteria. And the Canada Plastic Pact led a collaborative effort to develop the Golden Design Rules, a guidance and standards framework for Canadian companies to adjust their plastic packaging designs and contribute to a circular plastics economy. Harmonized approaches like these strive to provide alignment and a common framework, ensuring consistency, reducing confusion and improving widespread acceptance while still allowing for flexibility, creativity and innovation.

Recently in Canada, Nova Chemicals launched a Centre of Excellence for Plastics Circularity, a hub for knowledge exchange and technology development for plastics circularity through a new network of industry peers and research institutions. The first call for expression of interest received nearly 50 proposal submissions from Canadian universities and research organizations.

Sharing progress is essential in building momentum and showcasing the innovative solutions that are underway. According to the Global Partners for Plastics Circularity, there are 116 recycling infrastructure projects planned, operational or under construction representing a $18 billion financial investment that plastic makers and the plastics value chain are making around the globe to create a more circular future. The Alliance to End Plastic Waste participated in the fourth session of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental
Negotiating Committee in Ottawa in May, hosting a Solutions Fair that showcased over 40 different solutions to make change and create a plastics circular economy. All happening now. All over the world. And they created a short video to highlight this circularity in action.

Partnerships to Impact Policy

Cross-sector partnerships also can play a crucial role in driving effective policy. Industry and trade associations, coalitions and initiatives can bridge gaps, foster dialogue and enable collective decision-making that finds creative solutions and shared goals by leveraging diverse knowledge and expertise. This can result in sustainable change at scale.

Guiding principles and model legislation are some of the ways these groups can help influence policy decisions and solutions that can transform post-consumer plastics into an ongoing resource. America’s plastic makers have proposed a national and comprehensive strategy toward a plastics circular economy, Five Actions for Sustainable Change, which highlights five critical public policies and actions that can help us achieve success. Innovations and new end market developments are other ways collaborations can stimulate business economics and create the necessary supply and demand for used plastics.

If you want to read more, there are several other long-term roadmaps and frameworks to take us from a linear take-make-waste/dispose economy towards a circular economy for plastics:

• America’s Plastic Makers developed a Roadmap to Reuse.
• The Ellen MacArthur Foundation Plastic Pacts Network has a common vision with localized targets.
• The Recycling Partnership’s 2024 State of Recycling Report shows what will have the largest impact.
• The Alliance to End Plastic Waste partnered with Roland Berger on The Plastic Waste Management Framework, offering insights into policies and levers that can be adopted to improve plastics circularity.

What do all of these have in common? They each show the complexity of the situation and the interconnectivity of the players, policies, innovations, infrastructure and supply-demand balance needed to make it all work. There are actions that individual entities can take to move the needle, but at the very heart of the solution is a need for partnerships and collaborations to accomplish this overwhelming but achievable task.

There are many ways partnerships and collaborations are helping us to get closer to a future with zero plastic waste. In my experience, the greatest ideas start with simple conversations. I am excited for the future because I see firsthand that there is a focus, intensity and passion that drives us all towards a common deliverable. It will take time, but I am confident that this collective impact will create lasting change.

Julianne Trichtinger is manager of industry affairs within the government relations team at Nova Chemicals. She works closely with key industry associations and strategic partnerships as an advisor to senior executives and is responsible for monitoring and providing insights into public policy, advocacy priorities and key activities that impact our business and industry, particularly as it relates to a plastics circular economy.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not imply endorsement by Resource Recycling, Inc. If you have a subject you wish to cover in an op-ed, please send a short proposal to [email protected] for consideration.

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This article appeared in the August 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series exploring the concept of circularity. Part 2 is expected to be published in September’s issue.

Circularity has become the predominant but still vague goal for reducing packaging’s impact on the environment, without any direct conversation on what the word means or its limitations. The vagueness actually acts like a protective shield that prevents acknowledging the reality of material utilization and loss, including the unavoidable and overwhelming dependence on virgin feedstocks to make new packaging and its environmental implications. Let’s take a deeper look at circularity and related, overused metaphors in the recycling industry.

Our respective careers allowed us to gain a wide view of the recycling supply chain — the processes from material manufacturer to package manufacturer to brands and finally to retail channels; then to consuming and discarding containers by the public; to separating and prepping those materials at households for collection; then at MRFs and deposit centers for purification into raw materials; and finally to re-manufacturing into products or disposal at landfills. Material captured and cycled back in this process is a complicated journey rarely seen in its totality but is often idealized using the term circularity.

The targeted materials for residential commingled recycling have fundamentally changed with time. For the first time since modern, municipally-funded residential recycling programs began nearly 60 years ago, in a trend starting and accelerating in this century, more packaging than free fiber is now present in commingled materials. Newspapers, mail, printed and mixed writing papers have all declined to a minor fraction of the stream and are still receding from the dual impacts of computer and smartphone technologies. Some outcomes of this change were unexpected and expensive, and mostly borne by local taxpayers.

Until the last 15 or so years, MRFs were still being built around paper processing because that was the primary recycling output. Now they are going through massive re-tooling to capture more packaging and smaller-format materials. China’s market disruptions were caused in part because of an unacceptable amount of post-consumer packaging in bales, creating challenges for processing and price volatility. At the same time, paper packaging such as OCC, boxboard, fiberboard and paperboard became a universal addition to single stream for their value. Recently three-dimensional small- and medium-format fiber packaging, which is gaining prevalence in the stream, is demanding a processing response for proper capture. Sophisticated optical sorters and air-density separators, rather than the older and larger cascading screens, now focus on all sizes of paper packaging. In the current round of the estimated $2 billion to $3 billion in investments in new and retrofitted MRFs that started in the last three years, some facilities have eliminated paper screens altogether. This proves again that owning and operating MRFs is not for the faint of heart.

Similarly, plastic packaging proliferated in the marketplace due to its lower weight, high utility and usually lower cost. Though the pandemic temporarily slowed the amount of plastic in weight consumed by households, and despite some stiff regulations to reduce its use, plastic packaging is returning to pre-pandemic growth levels. The massive availability of cheap virgin petro-feedstocks certainly is an enabler of this process. In addition, this
increasing fraction of potentially recyclable material has become more customized in its various applications. And the fastest growing elements of this stream, film and flexible packaging, pose massive challenges to a recycling system that has not yet finished its last round of transformation. Will that force yet another mass transformation in MRF processing, and how will that be financed?

Plastics especially enjoy a flexibility (pun intended) that makes them more attractive than other more uniform and energy-trapping materials that are ideal for recycling and perhaps more naturally circular. The time from initial design of a new plastic package until it hits the retail environment can be as short as 16 weeks, as Polytainers reported earlier this year, for instance. Additionally, modern household plastic and multi-material packaging are made with an amazing array of increasing chemical, color and shape combinations, regularly achieving reductions in weight per unit. Today, each package’s physical characteristics are curated to provide the lowest cost, be attractive to buyers and provide specific functions, from food preservation to superior display capabilities in retail environments to ease of use.

The relationship between packages and consumers has continued to evolve as well. From a brand and packaging manufacturer point of view, it is easy to see the attractiveness of plastic packaging. Trending industry research has found techniques now common in modern package design that drive new purchases and repurchases at high levels. For instance, super lightweight packages, sometimes twice to three times the size of the delivered material, can extend the field of vision reception for better notice by passing eyes. In this and many other examples, packages catch the eye and present a retentive positive image. Consumer preferences to buy based on these types of packaging may hold sway, regardless of factors like brand loyalty or product satisfaction and overwhelming the rationality of caveat emptor. Packages have now become almost as important as the products they hold and are held up as part of the experience of buying goods or brand names. This increasingly important influence of home product package design has led to rapid shelf turnover and further customization as packages compete for demand.

These trends put more pressure on the entire material supply chain to respond, all the way to residential recycling programs and MRFs, who feel constant pressure to expand material acceptance, typically without any funding to facilitate acceptance or cover marginal costs for new packages. The most important implication is that packaging design innovates at a pace that outstrips the pace of recycling innovation and leaves little room or time to adequately explore trade-offs like package durability, such as for reuse, or like recyclability and yield — thus leaving open massive questions around how to get to circularity.

A brief history of circularity

The aspirations of circularity and the circular economy seem deployed in an uncountable number of published documents throughout most business ventures, often using complex language, ardent claims and untenable goals and focusing on recycled content and recycling levels. For simplicity, we use the terms circularity and circular economy interchangeably, noting the first is an encompassing principle and the second is an applied principle leading to a yet-to-be-realized economic system.

Circularity is metaphor for the endless cycling of the physical materials in packages after primary use with small to zero waste, by either reducing the need, reusing or recycling the material, or any combination, while conserving the most energy possible, with the fewest emissions, then bringing the material back to its cardinal intended use in packaging. Complete circularity is venerated as “closing the loop” — a closed system of material containment in a cycle.

The circular economy is a proposed economic system model, touted as regenerative and restorative and designed after stable natural systems, that uses circularity as its principle. The economic model provides wider umbrella strategies, inputs, outputs, feedback loops and methods to reduce, reuse and recycle materials endlessly to zero waste while conserving as much energy as possible. It’s meant to replace the still dominant and growing world linear take-make-waste model of extracting resources, producing virgin packages and disposing discarded package resources after use. It finally portends a perfect utility with the platonic justice of the multiple cycles used, each functioning as intended.

Circles, cycles and circularity have deep metaphorical attractions. Scholars have noted that cycles “are among the oldest ways of grasping human existence,” as a University of Cambridge Alumni Magazine article by Victoria James put it in 2022. To illustrate, in most major religions, the circle of life concept helps navigate emotional and perplexing processes in a closed cycle metaphor; human life and death are presented as part of a comforting cycle ending in either spiritual or physical rebirth, instead of the linear progression of birth to a physical death. For popular culture, a popular myth shared is that everything happens in cycles, which helps build hope or anxiety that the next point in time is predictably better or worse than the last. Sometimes a cycle concept is fully virtuous, where each point or condition along the circumference is a good result that gives rise to another that builds upon the first and so forth. Other times it is the opposite, or vicious.

These metaphorical cycles are what sociologists call umbrella concepts, used to enhance understanding of overarching concepts, feedback loops and actors relative to their impact on each other in a system over time. Psychologists have shown that this cycle thinking is valuable for assessing complex environmental, social, emotional and economic outcomes, and using them helps increase predictability when a predicate condition occurs. Cycles are useful in the sciences as well — for example, in the carbon cycle, the chemical process that was the gateway to higher life forms on Earth. In his classic “From Circular Economy to Circular Society,” M. Friant summarizes some of science’s most used cycle metaphors:

1. Biogeochemical cycles of Earth.
2. Ecosystem cycles.
3. Resource cycles of materials and energy.
4. Political cycles of power.
5. Economic cycles of money and wealth.
6. Knowledge cycles of technology, information, and education.
7. Social cycles of care.

The concept of circularity for materials is a virtuous cycle. Like all beguiling metaphors, circularity can gloss over nuances and stark realities, including the powerful force of entropy, which is rampant in waste materials management, and external but ignored inputs (Is the carbon cycle possible without the sun?). In the world of materials, tools like life cycle assessments can help us pick apart nuances and apply analytics to the question, but they don’t change the overarching realities and their profound implications.

We could not leave this section without also addressing the word recycle, summarized by Merriam-Webster as to process materials or substances in order to regain material for human use. Unlike circularity, this definition conveys no inherent aspiration, and it does not promise endless cycling; rather, it is just the harvesting of some materials from waste to be used again. One can sense that inevitable material loss is just an accepted fact — we’ll grab what we can and plug it back into productive use. Luckily for us recyclers, though in circularity purgatory, recycling does provide a carbon-positive pathway away from current waste models.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

From the waste hierarchy to circularity for packages

Last century, both the European Union and the U.S. EPA formalized policies around a waste hierarchy, the conceptual predecessor to circularity. This linear hierarchy aspired to minimize energy use and emissions, reduce landfilling and combustion and maximize resource conservation. This model has been productive, allowing waste planners to envision a world where the prioritization takes place and steadily moves materials waste management to preferred methods through policy, programs and investment. It has also been effective for communicating the most virtuous set of choices, and it allows a quick summary of current choices using the common strategies of modern waste management.

However, after over 35 years, the hierarchy has proved inadequate to move actors or address system complexities for inverting the triangle in the U.S. Its limited success, and perhaps its linearity, drove us to consider other conceptualizations and to try to accommodate a dynamic, expanding economy and the compelling urge for profitability and return on investment. The hierarchy in its simplest form seems to unquestionably accept unrestrained material extraction and consumption. The hierarchy then presents no answer to environmental crises in our aquatic and terrestrial systems, including the plastic waste crisis, atmospheric heating and its consequences, extreme losses in biodiversity, issues like PFAS and landfills as methane super-emitters.

Inevitably, this led waste practitioners to search for a more inspirational model that almost by its very nature would mitigate the damage of material consumption — hence, circularity. Famous studies by Will McDonough in 2002 and McKinsey & Company for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in 2013 were examples of the evolution of a new conceptual approach, introducing a paradigm for stakeholders along the entire value chain to consider. They argued compellingly that the cradle-to-grave model of human consumption is unsustainable. The linear take-make-waste system must give way to an alternative model where resource use is carefully designed, energy is conserved, and materials are endlessly cycled through an economy by reuse or recycling. McKinsey proposed a new economic model that mimics natural models of circularity, which is restorative and regenerative, rather than net-consumptive and hyper-productive. It is summarized neatly in the Palladian symmetry of the famous Butterfly Diagram. McKinsey and the foundation gave us the inspiring view that circularity would bring greater resiliency and security in an economy that will continue to grow because of the cycling of materials, much like natural forest grows and regenerates through natural cycles. It begs the question, though, whether economic expansion that humans value so much is possible under such a seemingly closed system.

Now, like the hierarchy, it’s time to question circularity before it becomes a hollow simplification that leads us to further inaction in the face of environmental crises. How exactly does this idealized view allow us to grapple with the physical nature of packaging and its rapid pace of innovation? How does it address, plan for and recognize the actual physical barriers for package capture from waste generation to MRF, loss in yield after capture from MRF to secondary processor to end market, and the inherent costs for providing enough of the stuff needed to fully cycle a package back to its original intended use?

In short, let’s really dig into packaging circularity’s limitations and the implications therein. Also, practical recycling might just be a long-term answer for some packages short of perfect circularity. Circularity promises big things, but to paraphrase Jimmy Buffet, God’s honest truth is it’s not that simple. If there are limits to packaging circularity, what are our options for addressing them? In Part 2, we will discuss how packaging is transformed in the recycling system, lay out some best practices to mitigate barriers and unstick recovery rates, and explore complementary strategies that could push beyond the boundaries of circularity. Circularity is a hopeful, essential and deeply inspiring concept. Let’s not make it a seat of self-congratulatory laurels to sit on while true growth in material recovery requires urgent action.

Michael Timpane has been a partner and vice president with RRS since 2015 and specializes in the recycling supply chain. He has worked for each of the largest post-consumer recycling companies in their time – Reynolds Aluminum, BFI, and WM – for over a decade each in his half-century career.

Scott Mouw is senior advisor for strategy and research with The Recycling Partnership. He comes from a background of public recycling, including directing the state of North Carolina’s recycling program.

Frantic00/Shutterstock.

This article appeared in the August 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

Despite lagging federal data on recycling, collections genuinely appear to have hit a ceiling across the U.S., several leaders in the recycling industry said in recent months.

When George Smilow, chief operating officer at New York-based PQ Recycling, started his career back in the 1970s, “I believe there were about 50 to 60 PET reclaimers in North America, and the return rate was 30%,” he said during Resource Recycling’s Plastics Recycling Conference in March. “Today there are about half, and the return rate is about 27%.”

AMP founder and CEO Matanya Horowitz echoed the sentiment during a July webinar on the company’s advancements in integrating AI into MRFs to capture material more efficiently.

“Despite all the innovations and technology, despite all the investment, despite all the effort of operators and different stakeholders in the industry, recycling rates have been stagnant for about 15 years here in the United States,” AMP founder and CEO Matanya Horowitz said during a July webinar on the company’s advancements in AI and robotics, for example.

“It’s unfortunate when you have broader macro trends that should be supportive of the recycling industry,” such as broad interest in society’s natural resource usage, Horowitz added.

The current stagnation followed a multi-decade runup in the U.S. recycling rate, which slowed to a halt around 2010. The nation has struggled to hit 35% since then. U.S. EPA data for 2015 show a 34.7% recycling and composting rate, nearly the same as 2014, which clocked in at 34.6%. In 2017, the rate broke 35%, but just barely. Then in 2018, the rate dropped to 32%, though the drop was partially due to a change in how the rate was calculated.

The agency hasn’t updated its once-annual U.S. Facts and Figures diversion report in nearly four years. An emailed statement said one of the biggest challenges is that data collected from states and territories isn’t standardized: “If EPA had a magic wand, we would use it to collect a uniform and comprehensive waste dataset from every state and territory.”

Looking at other data, The Recycling Partnership estimated that the recycling rate of residential recyclables is 21%, which it noted is lower than past estimates due to the inclusion of film and flexibles.

Plastic specifically also saw a decline in recycling in 2022 compared to the year before, according to the 2022 U.S. Post-consumer Plastic Recycling Data Dashboard, which was prepared by Stina Inc. and released by the Recycled Materials Association, the U.S. Plastics Pact and the Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR owns the publisher of this magazine). About 5 billion pounds of post-consumer plastic were recovered in 2022, a drop of 71 million pounds, or about 1.4%, from 2021. In 2021, that dashboard showed an increase of 285 million pounds over the prior year.

Single-stream sets the stage for volume growth

Setting aside the data disparities and measurement methodologies, a straightforward narrative helps explain the last three decades in recycling diversion trends, said Brent Bell, vice president of recycling for WM, the nation’s largest hauler. The rapid growth in recycling collection and diversion rate during the 1990s and 2000s ties to both the start-up of many curbside recycling programs and a nationwide shift from dual-stream and towards single-stream. The ease of all-in-one-cart recycling meant residents could simply send more materials into the recycling stream.

“That’s when you saw more single-stream programs start to take off, and along with that, throughout that time, people got rid of their little 18-gallon toters that were basically just designed to collect newspaper and have a few bottles and cans on top of it, to the actual 64- plus, 96-gallon carts,” Bell said. “I think that’s when you saw the big convenience factor get pushed in with single-stream, saying, ‘Hey, put it all into one bin: Bottles, cans, paper, cardboard, we’ll collect it all.’”

When the municipalities WM serviced would convert from dual- to single-stream recycling, Bell said the company saw an average 40% increase in the materials it collected in those programs.

Additionally, recycling programs were adding in materials that carried a lot of weight: Glass was a huge portion of the recycling stream in the 1990s. Far more beverages were bottled in glass rather than plastic, more cosmetic products came in glass packaging, and glass was one of the largest material streams WM’s recycling operations handled. WM itself actually operated glass recycling plants in that era, Bell noted.

As these changes unfolded, the national recycling and composting rate grew from 16% in 1990, when 33.2 million tons were recycled or composted, up to 28.5% in 2000, when 69.5 million tons were recycled or composted, according to EPA figures. Diversion further increased to 31.4% in 2005 and 34% in 2010.

Material trends converge, plateauing growth

Then the increase stalled. By 2015, although recycling volume had ticked up to 91 million tons, the rate sat at 34.7%, and there was little change until 2018, when volume was flat but the rate declined due to a change in data methodology. What happened?

Bell says there were several concurrent trends that played into that stagnation. One component was the decline of a huge portion of the recycling stream, newsprint, as consumers increasingly turned to online news, which temporarily reduced the volume of fiber coming into the recycling stream. Newspaper recycling fell by half from 9.36 million tons in 2005 down to 4.79 million tons by 2015.

“We were all sitting there like, ‘Wow, what’s going to replace newspaper?’” Bell recalled. At the time, e-commerce was on the rise, and recycling stakeholders wondered if fiber recycling was on a permanent downward slide as the world went digital.

Of course, e-commerce required packaging, and a new trend for fiber recycling was born. Corrugated boxes drove up the percentage of OCC in the recycling stream, providing a replacement for the loss of newspaper. Corrugated box recycling increased from 22.1 million tons in 2005 up to 28.9 million tons in 2015, more than making up for the newspaper decrease during that period.

Separately, Bell pointed to the emergence of lightweighting across packaging streams.

“Whether it’s your aluminum can, your plastic bottle, even your cardboard, we saw this massive lightweighting come into place,” Bell said. WM calculated that with PET bottles, the company had to collect 1 million bottles to get the same weight of material it used to get by collecting 600,000 bottles pre-lightweighting.

Finally, the decade between 2010 and 2020 brought a massive recycling industry disruption — one that was arguably directly connected to the factors that brought such a rise in recycling tonnage and rate. Unpacking this disruption, its cause and its effect on recycling volumes requires a brief reminder of the recycling markets of the 2000s and early 2010s.

Market upheaval spurs upstream quality focus

The rapid growth of U.S. recycling tonnages required buyers for those collected materials, and for years, the Chinese market was far and away the primary buyer for the paper and plastic streams.

In 2013, for example, the U.S. recycled 43.4 million short tons of paper and paperboard, according to the EPA figures. And that year, 14.7 million tons of that material was exported to China, or 34% of all fiber recovered in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau, which maintains export figures.

The plastics recycling sector was also reliant on China: In 2013, the U.S. collected 5.98 billion pounds of scrap plastic, and the country exported 2.22 billion pounds to China — 37% of all U.S.-generated scrap plastic.
That heavy reliance on a single export market meant any changes in that market would have an outsized impact on U.S. recycling. Beginning in 2013, such changes began to emerge as China announced its Green Fence operation, which was marked by heightened inspections of inbound loads of scrap materials. The effort was a response to high levels of contaminants discovered in imported loads of recyclables, and the government began enforcing previously lax regulations banning contaminated loads.

Four years later, China ramped up its focus on rejecting contaminated loads with the National Sword campaign, and it ultimately stopped allowing imports of virtually all scrap plastic and mixed paper. The Chinese government’s decision was tied to an unintended consequence of single-stream recycling: With greater convenience often comes greater contamination.

“We had contamination levels above 25%,” Bell recalls. “We had to go and really come out with education programs, try to make sure people are recycling the right items, that they’re cleaning up their stream, not putting a bunch of stuff in there.”

The Chinese government regulations forced a shift in thinking in U.S. recycling programs, marked by a need to focus on quality of recyclables, not just quantity of material collected.

“The industry kind of said, ‘Hey, let’s hold on with the growth, let’s clean this up first, and then let’s go back to how we can get more material in the bin, once it’s cleaner.’” Bell said.

Source: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Pushing beyond 34%

The EPA said in an emailed statement that it aims to update its “Facts & Figures about Materials, Waste and Recycling” report late this year, and is “in the process of revising our measurement methodology to improve future data and will publish an analysis of our findings.”

“One of the biggest challenges in producing national estimates is states have different reporting requirements and measurement practices,” the agency noted. “More consistent measurement methodologies are necessary to improve recycling system performance across the country. These more standardized metrics can then be used to create effective national goals and track progress.”

The extended producer responsibility laws for packaging that have passed in five states will certainly help with that. The EPA noted that the reporting requirements in those laws “should help improve the accuracy of the national recycling rate as EPA develops an approach that uses more of the states’ data.”

In the past, the EPA largely used data reported by industry, but that is also not uniform, and made it difficult to answer other questions, such as how much contamination is present in collected recycling.

“Given that the methodology varied by waste type depending on the data available, it is unclear how much ‘contamination’ was factored into past recycling rates,” the EPA said. “We are working to improve our measurement, including supporting state efforts to improve their measurement capabilities. One of the goals of our improved methodology is to account for contamination.”

In the absence of recent EPA diversion data, it’s difficult to say where the country sits now in terms of annual diversion. But even without the current numbers, several avenues to pursue additional diversion are clear.
States with deposit programs consistently have some of the highest recycling rates in the country for bottles and cans, according to the “50 States of Recycling” report from Eunomia and Ball Corporation and other data sources. A recent MIT study projected that a nationwide 10-cent deposit on PET beverage containers could more than triple their recycling rate.

There’s untapped potential in the multifamily recycling sector, as only 37% of U.S. multi-family households have recycling access, The Recycling Partnership reported early this year. Public space and commercial recycling availability lags behind household recycling access.

And there is broad room for improvement in certain material streams outside of the blue bin. In 2019, the U.S. generated 66.22 million tons of food waste, for example, and 74% of that material was either landfilled or disposed of via controlled combustion. There is a huge opportunity to increase the composting rate, which sat at 5% in 2019.

“Convenience, access and behavior changes are probably on the top of that list,” Bell said. “And then making sure that the brands are using material that can be recycled.”

WM itself has made technological inroads in food waste recovery. Bell pointed to the company’s San Leandro, California, “organics MRF,” a facility that separates garbage from the recycling stream and separates out organics for anaerobic digestion.

“If you’re trying to get off of that 30% recycling rate plateau, we absolutely have to go after organics and other types of material that’s currently destined for the landfill,” Bell said. “So I kind of look at it from a broader perspective, not to get too stuck on the EPA’s percentages — even though we look at them all — but to say, hey, what’s the best way to unlock more material that could be going to the landfill? And organics is the next big portion of that.”

Kandi Potter, a resident of Webb City, Missouri, drops off recycling at the city of Joplin’s nearby recycling center in July 2024. Joplin is among several local governments and other organizations receiving education and outreach grants from the U.S. EPA. Dan Holtmeyer/Resource Recycling

This article appeared in the August 2024 issue of Resource Recycling. Subscribe today for access to all print content.

As executive director of the Tahoma Indian Center, a nonprofit serving Indigenous people in Tacoma, Washington, Colette August generally hasn’t had a positive impression of working with the city government. Some of its initiatives have been difficult for the nonprofit to participate in, she said, and city employees generally don’t take the time to visit the center, to speak with the people seeking its help with food or housing or other needs, and to understand the distinctions among the region’s tribes.

She has had a different experience, however, with Preston Peck, a senior sustainability analyst for the city. Peck oversees a community ambassador program that leans on trusted individuals among diverse communities to spread the word about the city’s utilities. Over the last two years or so, he has come to the Tahoma center and forged meaningful connections that have culminated in a $2 million, federally funded partnership, which includes the center and four other community-based organizations, to grow public understanding of recycling. It’s part of a nationwide, multicultural collaboration to reach groups that have long been neglected by messaging efforts or dismissed by the industry.

“They are people who will help break down those barriers, and they truly care about making sure our community is being served, is being heard,” August said of Peck and his colleagues. “One of the reasons for me to say yes is for me to have someone willing to listen to the concerns that we have.”

That’s precisely the purpose of the U.S. EPA Recycling Education and Outreach grants benefiting Tacoma and other locations across the country. The agency late last year announced 25 projects would receive a total of $33 million, which came from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and put particular emphasis on underserved populations disproportionately burdened by environmental problems. Even more money went toward infrastructure and heavy equipment needs.

“These grants reflect the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to tackling environmental justice and the climate crisis,” the agency wrote in a press release at the time, calling the program the largest investment in recycling in 30 years. “These recycling grants will help tackle consumer confusion and outdated recycling infrastructure, the largest barriers to proper recycling.”

Diverse communities, diverse approaches

The multiyear projects, many of which are still in the early stages of hiring managers and putting out preliminary bids, vary widely in dollar amount, geographic area and tactics, according to factsheets provided by the EPA and several participants. Tacoma, for example, will grow the community ambassador program while also using artificial intelligence on collection trucks to flag contamination and send direct feedback in the mail, Peck said.

Projects range in size from a $370,000 plan to build household and neighborhood composting programs in Pittsburgh to $2 million ad campaigns in the Chicago area, Virginia and eastern Oklahoma, among others. Recipients stretch from Maine, where the nonprofit recycling processor Ecomaine is working to reach multifamily residents, to the Big Island, where Recycle Hawai’i plans to train several cohorts of educators who will carry out their own education initiatives.

“This is an area where there is room for significant improvement, there’s a high ceiling that hasn’t been hit,” said Jamie Garvin, director of communications and public affairs for Ecomaine, referring to multifamily recycling. Multifamily properties tend to skew toward low-income, more diverse groups, he added, and the project will create toolkits for property managers and residents to help increase recycling participation from both directions.

“Even well-intentioned residents that might be motivated to do recycling don’t have the same access” compared to single-family neighborhoods, Garvin said. “That’s where we see opportunity to sort of level the field.”

Across the board, the projects aim to build existing initiatives to new heights, such as supporting New York City’s expansion of its curbside composting collection or building new exhibits at EdVenture Children’s Museum in South Carolina — featuring dinosaurs made of recycled materials, of course. The Oregon Community Warehouse, a Portland nonprofit that collects donated furniture and other home goods for refugees, formerly homeless families and others in need, is receiving $1.6 million as it expands to a third “furniture bank” location, said Phil Gerigscott, the group’s communications manager.

“We know there’s more than enough furniture in our community, it’s just a lack of awareness that we exist,” he said.

Past outreach was almost entirely word-of-mouth because of limited resources, so the money will help bring in a few more staff members and contractors, update the center’s website and develop culturally specific ads to reach potential donors in multiple languages, Gerigscott said. After English, Portland’s most common tongues include Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, Ukrainian, Korean and Arabic.

“We’re breaking down our constituent groups and figuring out who we’re already reaching and who we’re not reaching,” he said. “Even if they have heard of us, what are some potential barriers that are keeping them from donating?”

Gerigscott’s comments highlighted common threads throughout the 25 projects, including meeting residents of all backgrounds where they are, incorporating their particular backgrounds and replacing program administrators’ assumptions or ignorance with real knowledge.

Project leaders spoke of holding in-language gatherings at convenient and familiar locations rather than at City Hall, providing culturally appropriate meals so families can attend, and generally setting the scene for candid dialog. They also often used the term transcreation, in contrast to translation. Rather than converting a flier word-for-word from English to Spanish, transcreation would take a collaborative approach that might adapt the flier into an ad on a popular Spanish-speaking radio station, for example, or create a new flier with phrasing, images and other details that are familiar to the intended audience.

“A lot of times we talk at people,” rather than talking to or with them, said Will DiCostanzo, waste diversion coordinator for the city of Lincoln, Nebraska. The city’s focusing its $1.7 million grant on low-income and minority residents, including the city’s refugee population, as well as University of Nebraska-Lincoln students.

“You could always think of income as a barrier, because you have to pay for recycling here, which is a very obvious barrier that we have. But is it the only one?” DiCostanzo mused. “What do we need to know before we then create education that will motivate people to do the right thing with their waste?” The project aims to answer those questions.

A widespread need

The need for multi-channel, multicultural education reaches far beyond the 25 grant recipients, and it’s only growing clearer as the U.S. becomes more diverse and the country’s recycling activity stagnates.

In surveys across the country, Black and Latino respondents are more likely than their white counterparts to cite lack of access, lack of knowledge, perceived costs and social pressures as barriers that keep them from recycling, for example, according to The Recycling Partnership’s Equitable Outreach Guide. Asian, Pacific Islander and Indigenous respondents felt the same obstacles, though somewhat less intensely.

“If residents haven’t been given what they need to be successful, then it’s unrealistic to expect low contamination and high recycling,” said Michelle Metzler, TRP’s director of community programs. “That’s up to us as industry leaders and program administrators.”

Amelia Kovacs, sustainability programs manager with Walking Mountains Science Center in Eagle County, Colorado, said the nonprofit’s $570,000 grant will help recruit and train recycling advocates among the local Latino community.

While Spanish-speaking residents have often been left out of environmental initiatives in the area and live farther away from services, their obstacles go even deeper than language and proximity, Kovacs said. Many of them immigrated from Latin American countries that don’t widely collect recycling.

“Therefore, many community members do not understand the need to recycle, and more do not know how or where to do it,” she wrote in an email. “This project will amplify current recycling programs ensuring everyone in Eagle County understands where, why, and how to recycle and has equitable access to do so.”

On the other hand, TRP’s surveys have also found widespread interest in the topic, though specific motivations can vary.

“Across demographics and across ethnic groups, recycling is really seen as a common social good,” Metzler said. “It may be less challenging than it’s perceived to get people on board.”

Even when a recycling program’s leaders understand the need for tailored outreach, addressing it takes staff and money and time, she added, which makes grants like the EPA’s essential for the many local governments that lack the needed resources.

That was certainly true for Joplin, Missouri, Assistant City Manager Tony Robyn said. Boosting the city’s recycling programs had been a topic of discussion ever since the city began rebuilding from a devastating EF5 tornado that struck in 2011. Now the city finally has $1.7 million to make it happen. The plan includes a multimedia advertising campaign with a particular focus on partnering with schools and residents of disadvantaged census tracts. Its goal is to increase participation in Joplin’s opt-in curbside program, which services around 1,650 households out of more than 20,000, based on U.S. Census and city data.

“We really saw this grant as an opportunity to build that program out and do some unique and cool partnerships,” Robyn said.

The potential impact was immediately clear one recent morning at Joplin’s recycling drop-off center, where resident George Haubein said he had learned about the curbside option for the very first time.

“I’m gonna sign up,” he said, adding that he stores his recyclables in his garage, and it was his second trip of the day to bring them all in.

Kandi Potter, a resident of nearby Webb City who comes to Joplin’s center because it accepts more materials than a drop-off closer to home, said her whole family takes part in recycling, but many locals might not see recycling as worth their time.

“It depends on the person,” she said.

Joplin resident George Haubein drops off recycling at the city’s collection center in July 2024. Dan Holtmeyer/Resource Recycling

At the other end of the spectrum from Joplin is Seattle, which wasn’t among the outreach and education grant recipients but has spent years working to better communicate with a wide variety of residents about its recycling services. Informational materials are available in more than a dozen languages, and residents receive transcreated guidelines once a year in the mail, said Becca Fong, Seattle Public Utilities’ residential compost and recycling program manager.

It wasn’t always this way, Fong said: “We used to do a lot of translating. But we also found that doesn’t necessarily lead to culturally resonant materials.”

That inspired her and her colleagues to start visiting community centers, gathering focus groups and simply sitting down with people going about their days to talk recycling. Now the city has a compendium of recycling terms in multiple languages, images of culturally relevant products and lasting relationships that can be called upon as recycling programs grow and change in the city and across the state.

“We took a big step back and looked at more than just the words,” Fong said. The learning process continues with regular feedback sessions and check-ins with the public as well.

“You can design the most beautiful program … but getting that feedback from customers is what has made us more successful over the years,” she said. “That partnership piece, that is never done.”

While Seattle and many of the EPA grant recipients are particularly populous and diverse places, their efforts to reach multiple audiences — simultaneously teaching and learning from residents, speaking in terms they understand, touching upon the priorities and beliefs they care about — are examples that any community can follow, Metzler with TRP said.

“That two-way street is needed, and it looks different in every community,” she said. “The most important part is starting somewhere, and this is all a journey.”