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Category: Resource Recycling Magazine

First-person Perspective: Video monitoring is a catalyst for efficiency

Published: October 15, 2024
Updated:

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Putida Supakarn/Shutterstock.

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

Recycling facilities are the unsung heroes of our waste management system. These complex operations process vast quantities of materials, facing immense pressure to optimize efficiency while maintaining environmental and safety standards. Video monitoring technology has emerged as a powerful tool to address these challenges.

The Power of Sight

At the heart of successful recycling lies visibility. Video surveillance provides a comprehensive view of operations, from incoming materials to the final sorted products. By strategically placing cameras throughout the facility, managers gain real-time insights into every stage of the process.

  • Identifying Bottlenecks: Video analysis helps pinpoint areas where materials accumulate or processes slow down. This knowledge empowers facility managers to make data-driven decisions to streamline operations.
  • Enhancing Quality Control: Cameras enable real-time monitoring of material quality, ensuring only pure materials proceed to the next stage. This reduces contamination and improves overall product quality.
  • Prioritizing Worker Safety: Recycling facilities are inherently hazardous. Video surveillance acts as a vigilant eye, detecting unsafe practices and enabling prompt intervention. Additionally, footage can be used for safety training, fostering a culture of prevention.

Compliance and Cost Savings

Regulatory compliance is a top priority for recycling facilities. Video evidence can be invaluable in demonstrating adherence to environmental and safety standards. Beyond compliance, surveillance systems contribute to cost-reduction.

  • Preventing Downtime: By monitoring equipment performance, potential issues can be identified early, minimizing downtime and associated costs.
  • Optimizing Resource Allocation: Video analysis can reveal inefficiencies in labor and energy usage, leading to optimized resource allocation.

Choosing the Right Equipment

The harsh conditions of a recycling facility demand specialized equipment. Ruggedized cameras designed for industrial environments are essential for reliable performance. While the initial investment in robust cameras might be higher, the long-term benefits in terms of durability and reduced maintenance costs often outweigh the upfront expense.

Investing in video surveillance is not just about security; it’s about transforming recycling operations. By harnessing the power of visual data, facilities can enhance efficiency, improve safety, and contribute to a more sustainable future.

Heidi Schmidt has worked in the video technology space for almost 20 years, building expertise in CCTV, industrial video applications, new product development, video network solutions, and more. As global sales manager at Opticom Tech, she helps customers implement robust video monitoring solutions for unique and harsh industrial environments and can be reached at [email protected] or 269-719-5889.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author 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.

First-person Perspective: The case for national data reporting

Published: October 15, 2024
Updated:

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Joyseulay/Shutterstock.

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

With negative mainstream media coverage eroding public trust in recycling, now is the time to make changes. An important piece of those improvements is accurate, standardized data collection.

The State of Recycling

In recent years, recycling has been hit with a wave of negative press, casting a shadow over the industry’s future. The most troubling aspect is that some critics advocate for dismantling the system rather than offering solutions to overcome known challenges and create a system that works for everyone. No matter how you cut it, recycling is an important service that plays a key role in reducing waste, lowering greenhouse gas emissions and protecting virgin resources. It also creates thousands of jobs and generates billions in revenue each year, thereby contributing to a strong economy.

Fortunately, the majority of Americans still believe in recycling. According to The Recycling Partnership’s Recycling Confidence Index, nearly 80% of people believe that recycling has a positive impact on waste reduction and is worth the effort. Despite that, less than half of those surveyed were confident their recyclables are being transformed into new products.

The data appears to validate this attitude, too. According to The Recycling Partnership’s State of Recycling report, only 21% of residential recyclables are being recycled and 76% of recyclables are lost at the household level.
This presents an opportunity to rebuild public trust in recycling through investment, policy and education. To transition to a circular economy, we must invest in the future by modernizing recycling systems and rigorously measuring efficiency at every stage.

The good news is that recycling is finally undergoing a much-needed revitalization. The U.S. EPA has committed $275 million in Solid Waste Infrastructure for Recycling grants and $75 million in Consumer Recycling Education and Outreach grants. The funding is already helping states and communities invest in infrastructure, research and data collection.

Another great sign of recycling revitalization is the emergence of extended producer responsibility programs for packaging. California, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota and Oregon have all adopted printed paper and packaging EPR legislation. Although these programs are at different stages of implementation, The Recycling Partnership estimates that EPR in these states will lead to a 35% increase in materials recycled and a 24% boost in the national recycling rate.

Why Accurate Data is Essential

The importance of reliable, high-quality data cannot be overstated. It gives policymakers, investors and program managers the information they need to make informed decisions about where investments will have the greatest impact and direct resources to where they are needed most. What’s more, robust data systems promote accountability and transparency, ensuring that all stakeholders — from producers to consumers — are contributing to waste-reduction efforts and sharing the responsibility of managing waste.

Eunomia’s groundbreaking report, The 50 States of Recycling, demonstrates the power of large-scale data analysis in its state-by-state assessment of recycling rates for containers and packaging. It emphasizes the importance of quality data, writing that “reliable and verifiable data is critical to making effective policy and programming
decisions,” and observes that “states that have more comprehensive and current data, along with a state managed reporting system, achieve higher recycling rates.”

Beyond its practical applications, data also plays a crucial role in restoring public trust in the recycling system. When the public sees evidence that recycling programs are effective and that their efforts are making a difference, they are more likely to participate actively.

National Data Reporting as the North Star

As one would expect, in states that require regular reporting, local governments and waste management districts tend to collect data that aligns with the state reporting obligations. It’s the most efficient way to measure local program performance while streamlining state-mandated reporting requirements. If a national data reporting standard were to be introduced today, it stands to reason that states would also be motivated to adapt their reporting programs to align with the national standard, thereby simplifying their reporting responsibilities.

The lack of uniformity in how states and local governments measure waste diversion reflects the country’s unique tapestry of political boundaries, jurisdictions and authorities, state regulations, local ordinances, service models, funding mechanisms, population density, wealth distribution, access to recycling and more. What’s more, there seems to be an exception to every rule. Consequently, the dream of having an end-to-end reporting system that neatly rolls up data by jurisdiction, sector or industry can sometimes feel out of reach. But the dream lives on! Imagine a national data tracking system that collects standardized data from key players across all sectors and aggregates the results into insightful summaries that can be shared with all relevant stakeholders.

Many attempts at data standardization have been made over the years, and we’re no strangers to the game, either. Working in concert with The Recycling Partnership and BioCycle, we deliver the Municipal Measurement Program, a program designed to standardize municipal residential collection program data. It was created to facilitate peer-to-peer and national benchmark comparisons.

Another example worthy of mention is the EPA’s State Measurement Program, which was designed to encourage collaboration among state agencies and facilitate data-sharing. The program is no longer in operation, but it was on the right track.

Establishing a national data standard and reporting framework would act as a rallying call for all stakeholders to harmonize language and align methodologies to establish consistent measurement across the entire system.

The Path Forward

In addition to maintaining funding for infrastructure upgrades, program support and research, the EPA needs to continue collaborating with industry stakeholders to make sustained progress toward achieving all five strategic objectives outlined in its National Recycling Strategy.

One of the five strategic objectives, standardize measurement and increase data collection, will create a more resilient and cost-effective national recycling system. The strategy correctly explains that “different definitions and measurement practices create challenges to setting goals and tracking progress. Stakeholders across the recycling system agree that more consistent measurement methodologies are needed to measure recycling system performance.”

Achieving this objective will depend on the effective execution of these key activities:

  • Develop and implement national recycling system definitions, measures, targets and performance indicators.
  • Create a tracking and reporting plan.
  • Create recycled content measures.
  • Coordinate domestic and international measurement efforts.
  • Increase data availability and transparency about recyclable materials generated and the materials manufacturers need by:
    • Gathering data.
    • Improving data availability and transparency.
    • Improving the accessibility of data for product design and procurement.

In addition, the emergence of EPR in states across the country offers hope and good reason to be optimistic about recycling’s future. These policies are likely to bring significant changes to the recycling landscape including:

  • Producers now share the responsibility of material collection and recovery.
  • Reduction of the financial burden placed on local governments in the collection and processing of materials.
  • Incentivization of producers to improve the recyclability of their products and packaging.
  • Motivation of the private sector to promote recycling in support of a circular economy.
  • Encouragement of industry collaboration to reduce costs and increase recycling.

As EPR programs are developed, it’ll be important for producer responsibility organizations to explore opportunities to connect to existing local government programs to streamline data reporting and facilitate data-sharing.

The implementation of national data reporting policies is not just a bureaucratic exercise, it is a necessary step toward creating a more efficient, transparent and effective recycling system in the U.S. With reliable data, policymakers can make better decisions, the public can regain trust in the recycling process and the nation can move closer to its national recycling goals.

Josh Reid is the CEO of Re-TRAC and parent company Emerge Knowledge Design Inc. This article first appeared in Policy Now.

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author 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.

First-person perspective: Market-driven solutions to precious-metals supply

Published: September 26, 2024
Updated:

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Joaquin Corbalan P/Shutterstock.

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

Global growth in uptake of electric vehicles, semiconductors, fuel cells, battery panels, medical devices and other products and components is fueling heightened demand for precious metals. Manufacturers of a diverse range of products favor these metals for their superior electrical conductivity, corrosion resistance, hardness and a range of other valuable qualities.

At the same time, precious metals are a limited natural resource. It is not uncommon for mines in South Africa, for example, to plunge 2 or 3 kilometers into the ground to reach their deposits. Many major mining operations around the world are advanced in their life cycles. While exploration for new sources is ongoing, the price of such efforts is very high.

Of course, the approaching shortage of precious metals is problematic not only from the perspective of simple industrial supply and demand; there also is the devastating impact on our environment and human well-being to be taken into account. According to a February 2022 research briefing to the U.K. Parliament, “Mining and mineral processing consume large volumes of water, including in arid regions. The discharge of water from mine sites can result in serious contamination of waterways. The industry uses over 8% of the world’s total energy each year to produce metals, and contributes to 10% of the annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Improper storage of mine waste has resulted in humanitarian and ecological disasters.”

The mining of precious metals in particular involves long-established and well-understood methods and high safety standards, making it a much smaller contributor to environmental issues than some base metal or rare-earth mining operations. However, according to a study published by the International Platinum Association in 2023, the carbon footprint of recycled precious metals is still more than 90% less than primary mining.

Recovering Vs. Mining Precious Metals

There are so many recoverable precious metals — gold, iridium, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhodium, ruthenium and silver — that are being wasted today.

The World Health Organization has referred to e-scrap — computers, household appliances, medical devices, mobile phones, etc. — as “the fastest growing solid waste stream in the world,” of which only 17.4% was documented as formally collected and recycled. E-scrap typically contains precious metals such as gold and silver as well as platinum group metals, depending on the kind of material.

By contrast, the majority of waste and spent catalysts from industrial production worldwide is a ready source of recoverable metals that is already being recycled.

Even slightly improving the ratio of the precious metals that are recovered in various ways relative to those that are mined would offer tremendous, varied and widely shared benefits. To date, the relative complexities associated with recovering precious metals have made the process only a limited player in industry’s plans for attaining the resources that it needs. Market-driven trends, however, are changing the equation.

Changing Business Models

Primary among those trends is that the math of recovering versus mining precious metals is evolving.

As we see the various in-demand precious metals grow more scarce, we also are seeing those metals grow more expensive. Ironically, the trend toward scarcity will improve the business models for processes such as refurbishing and repurposing of components that utilize precious metals, and for more efficiently and effectively recycling recoverable metals from production scrap.

Many smartphones, for example, currently end up in landfills and/or incineration plants around the world; however, as the metals that mobile phones require grow more expensive to mine and procure, it will fuel a greater economic incentive to spur reuse of the devices. The potential impact on sustainability of a large-scale and global shift from discarding to reusing phones would be profound.

Furthermore, mining is inefficient and expensive relative to recycling. There are variables to be factored around the vein of the ore, but, in most cases, 1 ton of mined gold ore can be expected to yield about 5 grams of gold, while 1 ton of cell phones, about 10,000 units, could offer up to 280 grams of gold.

Changing Customer Demands

In many cases, manufacturers of products that rely on precious metals have new demands that are forcing change in the ways that they are sourced. Buyers in multiple industries are becoming more demanding of “conflict-free” resources via mineral sourcing programs that take into account human rights, environmental impact and ethics — as well as supplies that are sourced by less environmentally damaging means.

Plus, supply-chain disruptions in recent years have crystallized manufacturers’ attention on sourcing precious metals and other supplies geographically from nearer to where they will be processed. In this way, operations are rendered less vulnerable to geopolitical issues, and manufacturers potentially gain greater control over and visibility into their supply.

Consequently, recycling is moving closer to recovering and refining bases, enabling, for example, precious metals to be reclaimed from metal fragments and other waste generated during a manufacturing process. Integrating recovery and refining of precious metals with the manufacture of industrial precious metals products in this way can greatly contribute to sustainability and help ensure a steady supply of pure resources.

Indeed, decentralization in the recycling industry is key to reducing global reliance on mining. Increasingly, the precious metals industry is moving away from the traditional, CapEx-intensive solutions such as electric and plasma arc furnaces, which depend on very high utilization to turn a profit, and toward more environmentally friendly technologies. Relying on, for example, hydrometallurgical solutions that utilize chemical or microbial techniques facilitates the deployment of recycling operations next to where scrap is being generated and where the recovered precious metals are going to be used.

Ultimately, it’s likely to be these sorts of market-driven reforms that will drive real, lasting solutions to the world’s precious metals supply issues.

If properly recycled, there are significant amounts of valuable and finite resources to be reaped from e-scrap. Precious metal raw materials that are 100% recycled today are challenging to achieve without substantially more recovery, so it is crucial to grow understanding of precious metal recovery across manufacturers and general consumers alike.

Bodo Albrecht is president of Tanaka Precious Metals (Americas), responsible for all operations in North, Central, and South America, including sales, distribution and support for all Tanaka products in close cooperation with manufacturing, marketing, technical, research and development and related operations in Asia. He is a precious metals executive with deep roots in the industry, as well as in rare earth elements and strategic metals, with 20 years of international management positions with Degussa AG and 15 years running a consulting firm, BASIQ Corporation, before joining Tanaka.

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.

Reaching for circularity

Published: September 26, 2024
Updated:

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3rdtimeluckystudio/Shutterstock.

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

Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series exploring the concept of circularity. Part 1 was published in the August issue.

“It’s circular. It’s like a carousel. You pay the quarter, you get on the horse, it goes up and down and around.” –Kevin Nealon as Gary Potter in “Happy Gilmore.”

In part 1 of this article, we explored the appeal of circularity and the circular economy as powerful principles of materials management, envisioning the endless cycling of package materials to reach the goal of conservation/containment of energy and material inputs — a materials management system that emulates natural stable systems, such as a mature forest, where carbon levels are balanced, and the amount of carbon naturally released in the form of gas is equal to the amount stored by the reservoir of tree and plant biomass. Everything falling to the forest floor becomes usable carbon food, which is cycled up into living trees, plants, bacteria and fungi in a closed, homeostatic system requiring the lowest productivity and inputs needed for forest resiliency and diversity.

The deep metaphorical power of circularity and the circular economy mimicking healthy natural systems led it to replace the old, more linear waste management hierarchy in the public sphere, providing a more inspiring path toward mitigating the unsustainable environmental impacts of resource consumption.

Recycling is a strategy often connected to circularity. They comparatively present an opportunity for further exploration. Recycling functions as a last resort that seems to accept the fact of mass consumption but works to mitigate it by capturing remaining value — whether monetary, energy, lower emissions or reduced carbon before disposal. Recycling and circularity can be seen as two related but separate goods, one a tactical method of salvage that aims for convenience, the other a framework for sustaining resources and lowering energy use. However, at the nexus of recycling and circularity are troubling real-world paradoxes.

However related, residential package recycling today meanders around but does not approach lofty circular tenets. Its approach to managing end-of-life materials stretches far back into human history to hunters and gatherers, when usefulness of an object diminished, lesser uses were found, or the material was consumed as fuel. In the present day, recycling of materials like paper and packaging is more of an open, linear system and business process, not a cycle of something valuable. It may be improved by using underlying principles of circularity, but circularity cannot be sustained for physical reasons through recycling — it can only get closer to that ideal. Implemented by free market actors, public programs, policymakers and other recycling supply chain players, recycling captures whatever it can for remanufacturing into beneficial products, with the uncollected or misprocessed materials being disposed of or lost.

RESIDENTIAL PACKAGE RECYCLING’S ROLE

For package recycling, the gold standard of circularity is arguably when materials are turned back into the same product. This is much less common than recognized and is found most often in materials with high captured energy and durability, like metals and paper fibers. Further, material consumption is not stopped by recycling, it is only slowed, and the residential recycling supply chain rarely closes the circle for any type of commonly recycled package. The powerful implication is that use of extracted virgin materials will continue on a massive scale for most packaging.

Yet we come not to bury recycling but to raise its absolute necessity, and with it, the need to finance and improve it for more material capture. We do, however, question the facile use of “circularity,” especially when recycling is pushed as a defining answer to a package’s circularity. Kristian Syberg, an environmental risk researcher at Roskilde University in Denmark, critiqued this tendency from across the globe, writing in Scientific American in 2023 that “attention has been primarily focused on recycling,” but the reality of recycling and the circular ideal is subject to scrutiny and misses the mark of reducing waste. This shows up graphically in some of the conditions recycling finds itself up against:

  • Household recycling rates have not materially improved for over 20 years despite more investment and the popularity of residential single stream recycling. As such, the base of any new potential cycle of materials is continually diminishing, a dwindling spiral that necessitates more virgin extraction.
  • Even with the high-value, energy-trapping aluminum can, 40% were still thrown away despite their value in 2020, according to The Aluminum Association, an industry group.
  • Persistent gaps in access and behavior, due to a fundamentally flawed system of properly financing material collection, result in almost 4 of every 5 generated tons being lost to disposal.
  • Extended producer responsibility laws are designed to address the system financing issue, but so far only five U.S. states have passed EPR for packaging.
  • According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, less than 20% of plastics enters the recycling stream and only 9% actually is recycled.

In addition to these overall system challenges, recycling circularity faces unavoidable physical limitations. Let’s examine one of the best cases of recycling circularity in the package recycling stream: aluminum cans. Other materials like glass and steel compare favorably with cans in the limited inherent loss of material in each remanufacturing cycle, but aluminum cans are much more likely to cycle back to their original form. Cardboard cycles well back to original form but material damage in each cycle limits the total cycles to around seven times, whereas can cyclability can be as high as 12-20 times.

The refining of pure aluminum requires distilling from bauxite ore, converting highly variable inputs into purified molecules of alumina, which are refined by chemical electrolysis requiring huge amounts of electricity. Newly formed pig aluminum then goes through a series of alloying and/or coatings through furnaces or chemical baths. Specific can sheet or top alloys are then painted and/or labeled to be used in the packaging process. When captured for recycling, the high energy concentration in the original product production is saved. However, if can material recyclability is limited to 20 times at best; by the end of the 20th cycle, the input of high energy concentrated virgin materials will have reached 100%. Thus, even in this best case, continued virgin material extraction is an unavoidable outcome.

The force that prevents true circularity is the same one that works against all structured systems in nature: entropy. The groundwork of entropic effects on circularity is laid even before collection in the design of packaging. From that point forward, through the entire recycling supply chain, including collection, processing and remanufacturing, entropy weighs heavily on package recyclability and its circularity. Let’s unpackage that further.

Today’s newer packaging formats have a complexity that inherently makes them less recyclable, while design trends seem to be working against recovery through recycling:

Downgauging. This umbrella concept encompasses using thinner gauge materials but also adjusting package size while maintaining functionality and quality until discard. Both trends have affected highly recyclable packaging. Steel cans and PET bottles have become at least 30% lighter, thinner or smaller over the last 20 years, and aluminum cans in the last 50 years have become lighter by half.

Downgauging is a very circular-economy practice, reducing material consumption and increasing efficiency through net savings on materials and energy. But it makes the return of materials to use harder and more expensive. Like reduce and reuse, recycling benefits from higher durability, which runs counter to common upstream sustainability and efficiency efforts. As McKinsey & Company wrote in 2020, brands and packagers “will have to face complicated trade-offs such as recyclability versus carbon footprint.” Some brands with lofty circularity goals seem to understand the dilemma and are now publicly announcing alternative carbon metrics over recyclability.

Multi-material packaging. Package system choices trend toward customization to increase benefits such as barrier and taste protection, structural efficiency and shopping aisle appeal. It is not surprising that for the most malleable material, up to 20% of plastic packaging is multi-material or multi-layered. The benefits of custom packaging are real and include safety, food preservation and longer shelf life — all these connecting to circular principles around efficient use of resources. However, multiple layers complicate recycling by adding variables to the primary targeted material to be captured through cross-contamination.

Packages utilizing materials with new chemistries and formats. Many new packages may be worth recycling (i.e., carbon capture or energy saving positive), but each new input into mixed recyclables for processing is marginal, and can result in increased contamination cost, scale inefficiency, and lack of local markets. Examples include complex forms of flexible packaging, the ever-changing cosmetic and home health package segment, ultra-convenient one-step delivery systems, and an array of food service packaging items, some having very good recycling characteristics, some of which do not.

The upshot is that conscious brand packaging design choices add entropy to the package recycling system. Although cardinal materials for packaging may still predominate in today’s packaging systems, the trends outlined above multiply against each other with deleterious effect. A key corollary of these trends is that the pace of packaging innovation has constantly outpaced the ability of residential recycling’s business and technological model to keep up. This may be the reason growing numbers of brands are now actively postponing or adjusting their recyclability and content goals downward.

AN IMPERFECT RECYCLING PROCESS

A natural part of the package recycling process from collection to remanufacturing is loss in material yield and purity from the inevitable entropy from each refinement process to reach the same package function. This system of collection and processing, through the complexity and impacts of sortation and separation to pure commodities, can be illustrated through some of the following examples:

  • After packaging serves its useful function, some of it is placed in ultra-convenient household recycling carts. But data indicates that homeowners don’t always recycle all their recyclables, perhaps in part due to the challenge of making them clean and dry.
  • Misleading labels and recycling messages cause “wish-cycling” of non-recyclable items. These contaminating materials erode the system’s ability to move material-sorted recyclables to remanufacturing due to chemistry, complexity or lack the scale for removal in the system.
  • Recycling collection’s efficiencies optimize material deliveries at low cost but also add entropy by mixing and densification. Compaction of materials en route flattens, crushes, deforms and pushes disparate materials into each other, degrading, decaying and cross-contaminating target materials.
  • Mixed-material recycling processes introduce more entropy as unloading and sortation misdirect or similarly degrade some materials.
  • Reclamation and manufacturing steps for reusing the material contribute further to the loss in packaging yield per cycle, i.e., everything from re-sorting to furnace losses, fines loss and the need to improve chemical properties through dilution and so on.

The final non-circular reality is that too many materials do not ever return to the same product due to things like costs, material color, chemical composition, contamination, lost durability or specialization. Most of what we consider to be recycling is actually downcycling. The reason that packages tend to downcycle is materials used lose their purity or other characteristics in each run through the cycle, and repairing to their original condition can be prohibitive. Examples abound, such as post-consumer food-contact PET made into carpet fiber; glass recycled into fiberglass or used as alternative landfill cover (especially where there is no glass bottle manufacturing), colored HDPE containers made into piping, and mixed aluminum container bales going into lower-quality ingots.

It’s not that downcycling is a bad thing — it still reduces virgin materials, saves energy, lowers emissions and captures carbon, but it begs questions around circularity, especially when the downcycled products are not typically recycled at scale. Carpet and textile recycling happen at a small scale nationally, and few programs exist to recycle fiberglass insulation or drainage pipe.

So recycling is not a closed loop, and the benefits of recycling material are not endless but only finite inputs that diminish with each cycle through the system so that total loss is achieved in a determinate number of cycles. Though the battle for better yield from the residential package recycling process is continually waged throughout the recycling supply chain, there is simply not yet enough energy or financial capability in the system to close the losses. Ironically, as capture and recycling of material increases, getting to a pure cycling of materials with little to no loss may have infinite costs and not be desirable due to the effort required.

This is clearly a pessimistic characterization, but every step in the recycling process — reaching all the way back to design — is improvable, and clear steps can be taken that will lead us closer to the circular chimera. Many of the tactics for circular strengthening are well-known but we still need new, broader and more robust approaches. Remembering that the battle against entropy in material circularity is a product of conscious business and political decision-making choices, to provide the proper motivation and sense of urgency, we remind readers that if we keep consuming increasingly complex materials at the same rate, the powerful forces of entropy will guarantee ongoing high-impact, high-energy of virgin material extraction and use, all of which will make it extremely difficult to sustain nature or help cool the planet.

There are some essential steps forward we can take.

First, bring back “reduce and reuse.” As observed by the World Economic Forum, “in a properly built circular economy, one should rather focus on avoiding the recycling stage at all costs. It may sound straightforward, but preventing waste from being created in the first place is the only realistic strategy.” Here we come full circle back to the old waste management hierarchy that prioritized reduce, reuse and recycle, with the first two being the only true circular methods for reducing waste that bring the highest benefits to the environment. It is high time to push these strategies to funded policy and into brand business models. The recent move to EPR is beginning to create a long-needed bridge to do just that. Along with deposit recycling systems, enforcement components and supply chains to reduce and reuse are taking hold, a highly welcome development. Finally, brands still have, and are constantly working on, the many opportunities to pursue waste reduction upstream by addressing the size of formats for product delivery and product/package ratios. Efforts downstream to make reusable or more durable package formats and minimization of materials that simply become waste traveling through the recycling process need similar attention.

Second, accountable circularity metrics throughout the package supply chain could help even the playing field where circularity features are more highly favored:

  • Create enforceable design metrics that measure and reward brands for packaging reductions, reuse potential and recyclability in a cumulative, hierarchical scoring format. This would drive them to do things like maximize material strength and durability for reuse and recycling while consistently moving toward less material complexity and more material uniformity.
  • Insist upon accountable recycled content metrics and clear labeling to both enhance market pull for clean recyclable materials and ensure cleanliness through consumer understanding.
  • Provide easy-to-understand, full greenhouse gas accounting and public incentives as requirements for residential, EPR and deposit recycling programs.

Third, properly finance recycling collection through a combination of EPR, DRS and mandatory recycling ordinances, providing the resourcing and legal motivations needed for universal recycling access and for the educational efforts required to expand clean recycled material stream yields. Meanwhile, properly cost disposal options for all of the externalities in their disposal fees, i.e., long-term emissions and impacts on downstream life systems, so that clear choices can be made.

Lastly, while eco-modulating packaging for recycling-oriented attributes is a tenet in EPR, virgin material eco-modulation could also be used to internalize upstream externalities, minimize material loss and mitigate the impacts of virgin material use. For instance, packaging fees and incentives could help identify and monetize the necessary capital to drive up regenerative conservation, use renewable energy in virgin material production and better control pollutants such as methane from oil and natural gas production.

This two-part article has sought to explicitly recognize the limitations of recycling to meet full circularity, and to challenge recycling professionals to think about the strategies that improve the ability of recycling to contribute to circularity as the final resort before household packaging is disposed of. Our hope is that it also helps build discretion in the current uses of the word circularity to make it become less superficial, i.e., tossing around the goal line of circularity through the method of recycling, which can only partially get us there.

In addition, package recycling supply chain stakeholders must consider making more fervent strides towards reduction in overall waste potential and more complete cycling of materials. They must bring forward real solutions to address the impacts of single-use packaging waste as soon as practicably possible, including mitigating the impacts of continued virgin material use. This will take the resources and further regulatory underpinnings that a circular economy will be based upon. It won’t happen by itself. We need to pay our quarter now for the speed of results to be meaningful.

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.

Bright spots in glass recycling

Published: September 26, 2024
Updated:

by

Courtesy of Glass Half Full.

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

Glass Half Full, a Gulf Coast glass processor with an environmental focus, needed a bigger facility as soon as its first one opened, CEO Franziska Trautmann said in a recent interview. As the concrete slab for a new facility is poured on the coast of Louisiana, she’s already imagining the 3 acres filled with glass.

“We pretty much said go big,” Trautmann said. “Ever since we started, it’s always felt like there was more demand for glass recycling than we’ve been able to handle. It’s always felt like we were piling up glass and struggling to process it and satisfy everyone.”

The new facility, located on a capped landfill in Chalmette, Louisiana, is sited on 3 acres of land and will be indoor-outdoor, she said. It should be operational by early 2025, and at full capacity could handle up to 150 tons of glass per day.

That’s needed capacity, because Trautmann’s vision is to handle all the glass within a 200-mile radius of New Orleans.

“There’s always been a huge lack of glass recycling in the region, and so we’ve always felt like the only way to go is up,” she said. “Louisiana and Mississippi, especially, consistently are toward the bottom of the list in terms of recycling as a state, and so we’re trying to just reach out to these communities. We just launched in Mobile, Alabama. We’re starting to expand where we can collect from, so we can just fill this plant with glass and get as much recycled as possible.”

Glass is easy in theory to recycle, but it’s hard to transport, heavy and difficult to collect. If it runs through a MRF, contamination rates are high. And the domestic industry has been in flux lately, with several facility closures and bankruptcies. As Glass Half Full illustrates, there are nonetheless hopeful spots.

Bob Hippert, sustainability strategy leader for manufacturing at O-I Glass, said glass recycling as a whole is in an interesting place. O-I has a network of manufacturing facilities but also has two glass-to-glass facilities that recycle glass into cullet in Oregon and Colorado. He pointed to the April acquisition of Strategic Materials by European glass recycling powerhouse Sibelco as an event that will spark a lot of domestic change.

“I actually think we’re in a good position, because there’s been a lack of investment in the cullet and the glass recycling processing area in the U.S. for probably the last 10 to 15 years,,” Hippert said. “I believe that what Sibelco is going to bring to the table is some renewed investment in a way that’s going to help drive improved quality of the furnace-ready cullet that can be used by glass plants, but also at a time when we’ve really seen kind of a degradation in the amount of material available in the market.”

Growing out of modest roots

Glass Half Full started in a backyard in 2020, with Trautmann and co-founder Max Steitz looking to recycle glass bottles from their friends and themselves. Word got out, demand exploded, and soon the business was moving into a 40,000-square-foot facility. But in 2022, the founders saw a need to scale up.

“We started fundraising at least a year and half ago, seriously, trying to raise some funds,” Trautmann said. “It was definitely a long time coming, and finally in April or so, all of the pieces started fitting together.”

That included a seed funding round that raised $6.5 million, led by Benson Capital Partners and supported by Momentum Fund and Innovation Catalyst. The Meraux Foundation and AMCREF Community Capital also supported the expansion.

“We are thrilled to partner with Glass Half Full to help further the company’s mission towards sustainability,” Gayle Benson, BCP’s founder, said in a written statement. “Through our combined dedication to green jobs and coastal restoration, we are excited to propel access to glass recycling for the entire Gulf South region.”

Back in 2022, Glass Half Full had five employees and 1,000 volunteers collecting 100,000 pounds of glass a month through neighborhood pickup and drop-off programs, grinding it into sand to be used in sandbags and coastal restoration pilot projects.

Now there are more than 20 employees, as well as a fleet of trucks and vans to do commercial and residential collection. The new facility will have enough space to allow Glass Half Full to produce cullet as well as satisfy the growing demand from restoration projects and for sandbags.

A local environmental benefit

Glass Half Full’s work falls at the intersection of two major sustainability issues: the immense global demand for sand and the widespread loss of beaches and coastlines, including along the Gulf. Human usage of sand for concrete, glass and other applications exceeds its natural production, according to a 2019 UN report. And the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has reported that climate change and other forces have eroded coastal beaches and wetlands, making the region more vulnerable to severe storms and sea level rise.

The sand that Glass Half Full produces completed baseline safety testing for Louisiana marsh restoration and has now moved on to demonstration projects — one of which is right next door to the new facility, Trautmann said.

Two new islands have been built there and planted with marsh grass. One island is made of sand from Glass Half Full and the other from sediment dredged from the Mississippi River. Over the next five years, researchers will monitor both islands to see if there are any differences between the two.

The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana and the Pointe au Chien Indian Tribe have also received sand for restoration projects. Next up are dune and beach restoration projects, in and out of the state, Trautmann added, and there is governmental interest from as far away as Delaware.

Commercial recycling and drop-off bring in the most volume, Trautmann said, but the company is also expanding its services into Jefferson Parish, St. Bernard, Slidell, Mandeville, Covington and Baton Rouge in Louisiana, as well as Birmingham, Alabama, and Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.
In Jefferson Parish, close to New Orleans, Glass Half Full is experimenting with single-stream recycling collection, which goes to a local MRF. But glass is still the focus, Trautmann said.

“It feels like there’s a lot of glass out there just going straight to landfill,” Trautmann said — less than a third of glass containers were recycled in the U.S. in 2018, according to the U.S. EPA’s most recent estimate.

“There’s so much potential in how much we can grow glass recycling across the U.S. and especially for us, we’re pretty focused on the South and Southwest, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida,” she continued. “We want to ideally be in those states collecting millions and millions of bottles and turning them into a useful resource.”

The Glass Recycling Coalition and other glass recyclers have been supportive since the beginning, Trautmann added.

“SMI, Ripple, there are a lot of great people in the industry. We have a common goal of recycling more glass.”

Courtesy of Glass Half Full.

The wider industry picture

Looking to packaging extended producer responsibility laws, Hippert at O-I said he’s pushing for deposit return systems to be paired up with the incoming legislation in states where there’s not an existing bottle bill, such as Colorado.

“If you just have an EPR (program), you lose sight of a lot of potential glass and a lot of material streams, so to me it’s really important that you’re able to capture all that,” he said.

In addition, DRS programs tend to provide a much cleaner stream of material.

“They really protect quality and minimize contamination of the various streams, whether it be aluminum, plastics or glass, versus single-stream where everything gets commingled and you have to try to unscramble the egg,” Hippert said.

In EPR states that already have DRS, such as Oregon and California, Hippert is working with CAA, “making sure that they know that the glass has got a home in Oregon.”

California will also be a state to watch, Hippert noted. California used to be a net exporter of glass for recycling, Hippert said, but now in order to meet its longstanding minimum recycled content mandates, the state is importing glass – and there are some new players in the market, such as Gallo, which may have contributed to Strategic Materials filing for bankruptcy last year, before it was bought by Sibelco.

Looking ahead

What comes next in the industry? O-I is not planning to build any more glass-to-glass plants of its own, Hippert said, but the company is scaling up the amount of recycled content it uses.

Jim Woods, who is in corporate affair for O-I Glass, added that O-I has “ambitious sustainability goals to increase our cullet use,” which include increasing recycled content 50% by average by 2030.

“That is why Bob and everybody are doing this work in improving recycling,” he said. “We want more cullet.”

O-I is setting itself up for a future of more demand for glass and glass recycling, especially with incoming recycled content mandates and consumer desire to move to non-plastic packaging.

“People are looking back to glass,” Woods said. “It just makes sense from a business and an environmental perspective to use as much recycled glass as we can.”

In addition, Hippert said he is looking to improve efficiency at the Denver glass-to-glass facility, which O-I purchased from Momentum Denver in May 2022. The two companies had formerly worked together before Momentum ran into trouble.

Today, the Denver plant is running at 40% or 50% capacity “because they can’t get enough glass in the front door,” he added, and it’s largely MRF glass. While he anticipates more funding coming out of the EPR program for glass clean up systems, those are still years away.

“Everyone is kind of like, all right, let’s wait and see what happens. And so that’s the challenge where we’re butting up against right now,” he said.

Moving the goalposts

Published: September 26, 2024
Updated:

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Sanya Kushak/Shutterstock.

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

Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, Keurig Dr Pepper, PepsiCo, Mars — one by one, many of the largest consumer goods companies in North America have said in recent months that they simply won’t meet their self-imposed deadlines for increasing recycled content and related goals.

The chorus of unmet expectations has also been consistent in pinning the blame on lagging recycling infrastructure.

“When we first set our goals, we used the best information available at the time to develop a credible but stretching plan,” wrote Pablo Costa, Unilever’s global head of packaging, in a statement this year outlining the company’s progress towards recycling targets. The company’s goals were intentionally ambitious, Costa noted, including an aim to reduce virgin plastic use by half.

“This has proved more challenging than any of us anticipated at the time,” Costa continued. “Assumptions made on the development of new technologies and infrastructure have simply not materialized as they are not fully in our control.”

Other industry watchdogs are less passive in identifying the reason for missed targets.

“Action is not keeping pace with ambition,” stated the Plastic Promises Scorecard, a report co-authored by shareholder activist group As You Sow and environmental consulting firm Ubuntoo.

In analyzing 225 companies for their work on plastic packaging and recyclability, the report found most companies had recyclability, reduction or recycled content goals and that an increasing number of companies supported policies like EPR. But most of those 225 companies “are not on track to meet the goals they have set.”

Companies vary in PCR targets

Brands are facing shortfalls in a variety of target areas. Unilever was one of the first to publicly acknowledge it would probably miss its goals for recyclability, reusability, or compostability, and its virgin plastic reduction goal, for example. On post-consumer resin use, the company is actually doing well: It used 22% recycled plastic in 2023, up from 21% in 2022 and 18% in 2021, and so is on track to meet its 2025 goal of 25%.

PepsiCo has also reported steady increases in PCR use, although it has a long way to go to meet its 50% goal for 2030. The company reported 10% PCR in its plastic packaging in 2023, up from 7% in 2022 and 6% in 2021.

Some companies have made less progress in PCR inclusion. Mars, for example, has a goal to use 30% PCR by 2025 but in 2023 used an average of only 1.5% across its packaging portfolio.

Part of the differing progress comes down to the types of packaging the companies use. Mars uses a great deal of flexible packaging, which doesn’t have the same infrastructure as PET bottles, the company noted, adding in its report, “We are working with governments and NGOs to address this, while also exploring redesign or alternative packaging formats.” Those redesigns could include moving from multilayer to monolayer material, or moving from plastic to paper and compostable packaging.

The U.S. Plastics Pact has taken these material nuances into account when outlining the goals signatory companies will strive for in the next five years.

The pact is one of about a dozen interconnected pacts around the world, which were formed to help plastics stakeholders meet pledges they’ve made under the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s New Plastics Economy initiative. In 2020, the U.S. pact released a list of four key goals its numerous stakeholders would work toward by 2025. This year, the pact reported on progress and outlined goals for 2030.

On the recycled content front, the pact’s initial 2025 goal was simple and standardized: “Achieve an average of 30% post-consumer recycled content or responsibly sourced biobased content across all plastic packaging.”

By the end of 2022, the average across the pact’s signatories was 9.4%, short of the goal, but the pact’s updated 2030 targets show significant variance by packaging type. The report indicated pact signatories had strategies in place to achieve 25% PCR inclusion in PET, HDPE and PP beverage bottles by 2026 and 60% by 2030. For household cleaning bottles and containers of the same materials, they said they’ll reach 25% by 2028 and 50% by 2030.

For PET and PP thermoforms, pact companies said they’ll hit 20% minimum by 2028 and 40% minimum by 2030. And for commercial secondary film, such as pallet wrap, they said they’ll hit 15% PCR by 2028 and 30% PCR by 2030.

For the flexible materials challenging companies like Mars, the pact did not yet set a goal or target date but instead noted that in the next year, it will develop guidance “for increasing PCR in food-contact packaging, including blow-molded products, injection-molded products, and film that contacts the product.”

Plastic use on the rise

Even as companies deepen their understanding of how to meet recycling goals, one notable trend is brand owners using more plastic even as their goals call for reduction.

Besides its PCR goal, when Mars signed onto the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s Global Commitment the company set targets that 100% of its packaging would be reusable, recyclable or compostable by 2025 and that it would reduce its use of virgin plastic by 25% by 2025 versus 2019.
The company has actually backslid on virgin reduction, according to its latest sustainability report published on July 24. But as of 2023, 61% of Mars packaging is designed to be recyclable, reusable or compostable, up from 57% in 2022.

“We are making good progress, and we would expect that to continue to accelerate,” the company wrote. “However, the design and infrastructure changes needed are taking longer than we anticipated when we signed the Ellen MacArthur Foundation Global Commitments, and we are unlikely to fully meet them by the end of 2025.”

On the third point, virgin plastic reduction, the company has moved in the other direction: Against a 2019 baseline of 180,000 metric tons of plastic packaging, Mars used 210,000 metric tons of plastic packaging in 2023, the company reported. And with recycled content totaling 1.5%, or 3,150 metric tons, that suggests Mars used 206,850 metric tons of virgin resin in 2023, which is 15% higher than the 2019 baseline.

Still, Mars reported in the latest sustainability update that it is “investing millions of dollars to improve the recyclability of our packaging, increase the amount of food-safe, recycled content and to reduce the use of virgin plastic.”

Mars is not alone in increasing its plastic use, even as it has targets in mind to reduce material consumption. For example, Amazon recently reported it used 88,698 metric tons of plastic packaging globally in 2023, higher by 3% from 2022. Amazon cited its business growth, reporting a 12% rise in full-year net sales for 2023. Globally, the company delivered nearly 6 billion packages, also higher by about 12% over 2022.

Similarly, despite PepsiCo pledging in 2021 to reduce virgin plastic use by 20% by 2030, the latest report indicates PepsiCo’s virgin resin use has increased by 6% since then.

As You Sow noted this trend in its report: “Despite setting a variety of plastics related goals, for many companies plastic use continues to increase as revenue increases,” the report stated. The report suggests using an alternative metric of “plastic intensity,” which it defines as plastic use per dollar of revenue.

“A laudable number of companies (100) have a goal to reduce use of primary or virgin plastic, yet the focus on reducing virgin plastic, rather than on reducing overall plastic intensity, paints an inaccurate picture of action toward plastic pollution prevention,” the report stated.

Mars is also not alone in investing in the recycling system to improve the conditions that have led to the target shortfalls. Coca-Cola, Kraft Heinz and Procter & Gamble are among several steering committees and funders of the PET Recycling Coalition, an initiative of The Recycling Partnership that launched in 2022, for instance.

Over the past two years, the initiative has distributed more than $5 million in grants, resulting in the addition of 29 million pounds per year of recycled PET that previously had not been captured, according to the group’s first annual report. Keurig Dr Pepper and Procter & Gamble are also among the funders of TRP’s Polypropylene Recycling Coalition, which takes a similar approach to that material.

Antoinette Smith contributed to this report.

First-person Perspective: The power of partnerships

Published: August 26, 2024
Updated:

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Cytonn Photography/Unsplash

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:

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.

The ideals and realities of circularity

Published: August 26, 2024
Updated:

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alybaba/Shutterstock

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.

The recycling plateau

Published: August 26, 2024
Updated:

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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.”

Breaking down barriers

Published: August 26, 2024
Updated:

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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.”