Recycling Ramp-Up: Strategies To Overcome Infrastructure Gaps And Boost National Rates
Let's dive into the complicated world of recycling in the U.S., where a broken system wastes billions and leaves a gaping hole in our fight for sustainability. In this episode, host Christine Yeager unravels why national recycling rates are stagnant and how Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) could revolutionize the industry. We’ll unpack the urgent needs of states like Maryland, Colorado, California, and Oregon, spotlighting the struggles with inconsistent access, outdated facilities, and confusing guidelines. Discover how hefty investments, ranging from millions for upgrades to billions for national system overhauls, could unlock the $70 billion potential of a circular economy, and learn about the game-changing strategies like mandated access, inclusive education, and closed-loop systems that are essential for real change.
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Recycling Ramp-Up: Strategies To Overcome Infrastructure Gaps And Boost National Rates
Let's Nerd Out About The Needs Assessments In Colorado, Maryland, California, & Oregon
In this episode, we're talking trash, literally. We're going to go deep into the recycling system in general here in the United States and why it's failing in most places and how Extended Producer Responsibility or EPR could flip the script on that. Bear with me because there's a lot of facts that I will be covering. I wanted to make sure that I spent some time giving you guys a little bit of context around what are the needs in the United States related to recycling.
I wanted to do this for a couple of reasons. One is that not everybody has read my favorite recycling report, which is The 50 States of Recycling done by Eunomia and Ball Corporation. Also, not everyone has read the Needs Assessments that have been put out in the name of the EPR legislation. There's one for the state of Maryland, there was one done for Colorado, and there's a lot of needs assessment information involved in the Oregon program plan that's now available.
I want to go deep into this topic to give a little bit of flavor around what recycling is. A lot of people don't trust it, fair enough, because it's failing in a lot of ways. The idea is that as we follow the path of how EPR legislation works, there's establishing the legislation and then generally there's this step where you do a needs assessment to understand the landscape of recycling in the particular state because how can you know how to improve it or where to invest if you don't know what the challenges are?
At following the needs assessment, the producer responsibility organization will develop a program plan. In that program plan, they align that with the regulator in the state of Colorado. It's CDPHE, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. In Oregon, it's DEQ, Department of Environmental Quality.
There's an alignment on what is the plan to improve, what is the program, what are the actions that the producer responsibility organization is going to invest in to improve the recycling infrastructure in the state where the EPR is passed? However, I'm going to take this a bit broader than the existing needs assessments tied to EPR because the needs are out there in every state and we know a little bit, not a lot because one of the gaps is that data collection is not great. I'm going to share a little bit about recycling across the country.
Just to set the scene, recycling across the country is stagnating or dropping. Nationally, only about 32% of the recyclable material value is captured. That's a $6.5 billion economic opportunity that we're letting rot in landfills. I mentioned this before, there's existing technology to support capturing that $6.5 billion in economic opportunity. This represents about 68% of the total material value in the marketplace.
What States Need
What's the environmental cost? Over 79 million metric tons of greenhouse gases could be avoided annually if we just got recycling right. It's like a big lever of low-hanging fruit. What's holding us back? First, what do states need from Maryland to Colorado, Oregon to California and across the country, really? The needs are strikingly similar. In general, there's inconsistent access. Rural, in a lot of cases, like multifamily homes, is a huge area of opportunity. They have a trash chute, but they don't have a recycling chute.
There's this very specific infrastructure reason why recycling doesn't exist in these multifamily households that is very cost-prohibitive to change. You've got stagnant recycling rates. Recycling rates across the United States have generally stagnated, indicating there needs to be a change if we're ever going to actually shift away from stagnation and into growth. There's outdated infrastructure. Many Material Recovery Facilities, MRS, as some people call them, are aging and inefficient. Organics processing or composting, there's no infrastructure or it's underbuilt, if it exists.
Stagnant recycling rates across the United States indicate a need for change to shift away from stagnation and into growth.
The transportations, the places where you bring the material and then they're moved around, are not equipped to handle the volume or types of material that's coming through. The infrastructure's outdated and hasn't been invested in. A large reason for that is something we'll talk about later, which is market volatility and in-market availabilities. If there's not enough value to the material, there's not enough investment in the infrastructure.
There's also contamination and confusion. How many of you have stood at the bin and said, “What do I put and where? Is this allowed to go in the recycling bin? I don't really know.” A lot of that is backed to the previous note about inconsistent access. It's because what I throw in the bin might be different than what you throw in the bin. People want to recycle but they're not sure what goes in.
Education is weak and underfunded. Also, there is contamination because you're not sure what is recyclable in your community. You might throw the wrong materials in. This is called wish cycling. I casually said it in a previous episode, but this is the detriment of wish cycling or putting things in the bin when you don't know if it's accepted or not causes this contamination, which now you've got the wrong materials ending up the bin that have to be sorted out.
If they aren't properly sorted out, now the quality of the bale at the end of the line is lower and nobody wants to buy it or less people want to buy it. There are also just unrinsed containers and food contamination that can happen as well. There are equity gaps. Environmental burdens are concentrated in communities with the least access to services and taxes collected in that area and then reinvested back into that area.
Perpetuating cycles of pollution and injustice. Equitable access to recycling services is lacking in many areas, especially and rural and underserved communities. Disparities exist in the availability of services in environmental justice areas compared to other regions. Also, multifamily housing units often face infrastructure gaps and compliance issues and commercial and industrial properties also present challenges related to material variability and lack of standardized processes. It's just not one size fits all as far as availability. It's a heavier, more disproportionately difficult situation for areas that are considered underserved communities or rural.
Those are hurt the hardest by in in the concept of access to recycling. You have market volatility and in markets. Recycling material market volatility, it's just changing. It's a commodity that goes up and down inconsistently with other commodities. That is tied to the fact that there's insufficient long-term purchasing agreements because of that volatility.
People aren't willing to buy long-term commitments. That makes it harder for companies who are selling to invest in long-term infrastructure growth. The location of the end markets are far from the processing facilities which can make transportation costs prohibitive. All of that is discouraging investment in local infrastructure.
Finally, this I have to say. Even though in theory, we wouldn't have to improve this in order to make a change, but the reality is data collection, the fact that it's so inaccurate and it's not very comprehensive, we know all of this because of the data that we have, but we could know more if we had better data. When you have better data you can be more targeted and lean and where you invest and why. Right now, data collection on recycling rates and material flows is inconsistent. Reporting standards are not the same. Therefore, it makes it difficult to evaluate effectiveness across the states.
When you have better data, you can be more targeted and lean in where you invest and why.
One of the things that comes through in the state of recycling report is that they actually track through the lifecycle of the recycling activities. Sometimes your recycling report will just be what material is taken to a material recovery facility or MRF. However, there's no truth to the fact that just because it was taken to that facility that it was actually separated and then recycled for many reasons. The state of recycling report looks at did it go into the MRF and did it come out of the MRF as a recycled material. Did it come out of the MRF as a high enough quality bale to be sold?
What can happen in some states is the quality of the bale is so low. By bale, I mean like a cube of material that's on a pallet that's been squished together of all like one type of material. If that is not homogeneous in one material type, then people won't be able to recycle it easy and then they won't buy it. It can become more expensive to find a buyer or to take the material to the faraway buyer than it is to take to a landfill. There are cases where the MRF collects and separates and then can't find a buyer and takes it to the landfill. That is happening, which is a detriment to the belief in whether or not recycling works, which puts us where we are now.
Infrastructure And The Investment Gap
Those are the overarching what's needed in across the various states from what are the biggest challenges. Next, I want to talk a little bit about more specifically infrastructure challenges and the investment gap. Meaning there's a gap between how much investment is happening in recycling and how much investment is needed in the recycling industry.
There's a gap between how much investment is happening in recycling, and how much investment is needed in the recycling industry.
From an infrastructure standpoint, specifically, some of the challenges are the fact that there is a varying infrastructure across regions. This plays into some of the challenges I mentioned earlier. The fact that the infrastructure is different and, in many cases, managed by from municipality to municipality, this causes that inconsistency in what is accepted. That causes the confusion because the infrastructure's different. What they can accept is different. Therefore, if you move from city to city, even down the street, your definition of what is recyclable can be different.
I experienced this in Atlanta. I had friends who lived in a certain county and they accepted glass. I had friends in another area where they didn't have any curbside recycling. They were further North and living their best life on a beautiful lake, but they had no recycling, no trash pickup. They had to take everything to the dump. You have Decatur, which has pay-as-you-throw, and you separate glass from everything else and then you pay per plastic bag to throw your trash away. That encourages or incentivizes consumers to throw less trash and more. The recycling was free. That's all within a 50-mile radius of each other. All different scenarios.
Beyond the fact that the infrastructure is different across regions, you also have aging facilities. Again, these facilities are not being invested in unless they're privately owned. I did tour a Pratt MRF. Pratt is a paper company and this is a weird thing to say, but that was the cleanest MRF I’ve ever been to. There were three optical sorters, it was beautiful. I was like, “You could eat off this floor.” They see the value in the paper that they get from those recycling facilities.
They invest and own these MRFs because they're in the paper business, not because they're looking for the plastic or aluminum, which is also very recyclable. If you're not a privately-owned MRF, then your facility is aging and you don't have the investment in optical sorters and things like this. That's another infrastructure gap. There's limited processing capacity. Within the MRFs that exist, that are aging, they have a limited amount, different types of materials that they can actually process, depending on who is available, like how they work there. Is it people or is it optical sorter or what have you?
There's limited local recycled material processing capacity. Now the recycling partnership is doing their best to provide grants to invest in aging facilities and expanding processing capacity. That is funded largely by corporations and has its limitations. They can't fix everything in one year. We would need a lot more investment in that.
The next thing is transportation and logistics. Transportation challenges hinder recycling efforts, particularly in challenging geographies. It's just that it's far to take and then it costs money. It's heavy. It's a bale of material or it's a lot of trash and you have to pay and it's also carbon-intensive to move it around. There's even just like roadway infrastructure like that. Maybe it's hard to get around. An example of this might be coastal Louisiana.
Transportation challenges hinder recycling efforts, particularly unchanging geographies.
Finally, there is no reuse and refill infrastructure. If you wanted to shift to reuse and refill, you would have to build a whole new infrastructure and you'd have to reeducate consumers on how to even do that. There are also geographic challenges of the location of where those washing stations would be and the equipment and then moving it to the production facility. We produce things all over the United States and sell them all over the United States or the globe. In order for reuse and refill to work, you need to have some proximity from consumer use washing station and then refilling. Now, geography becomes an important aspect of building that infrastructure.
To fix recycling, all this adds up to we need some serious capital. It's expensive. Maryland alone means $9 million to $10 million for just MRF upgrades and up to $25 million per composting or organic facility. Colorado is facing 2 to 3 times cost increase to build a robust system that actually works, $160 million to $340 million annually by 2035. There's a range in the needs assessment, but that's the investment. Oregon's plan identifies phased investments in local government reimbursements, depots, networks, and expanded collection services to meet equity and convenience standard.
California system is expected to be among the largest in the country and will require significant investment in infrastructure, data tracking, education and refill and reuse. California's EPR legislation includes a statement that portion of source reduction or plastic reduction has to come from reuse and refill. They have to build an infrastructure in the state of California to support that.
Nationally, if we implemented EPR and modernized recycling refunds, AKA bottle bills, the system could return $70 billion in value annually. That would be circular wealth creation. Is that going to happen? Likely not, but the state of recycling report very clearly calls out that coupling EPR with bottle bills or deposit return scheme for bottles and cans is the most effective way to improve recycling infrastructure and bring back that circular wealth creation. EPR is all about responsible end markets and building a market for that commodity.
Recycling: We need to prioritize equity and environmental justice, ensuring that recycling programs and infrastructure development align with environmental justice priorities and support healthier living conditions.
Priority Actions For Real Change
What are the actions we should prioritize for real change? It was hard to narrow them down. I’ve got eight. We'll see if I can scope this down a little bit. There's a lot of things we need to do is I guess my point. It's not only that EPR or Extended Producer Responsibility is the only solution, but extended producer responsibility or policy in general is the most effective proven way to generate the investment that's needed to actually make the changes and the actions that need to be that need to happen.
One is mandating access or making consistent access. If you get trash pickup, you should get recycling pickup. This one change in Colorado would reach over 500,000 new households. That is written into the law that your recycling should be as easy as your trash. I don't think those are the exact words, but it's something like that. Programs should work to increase your access to recycling services for all covered entities, making it as convenient as solid waste collection.
This involves expanding collection services and ensuring no cost recycling services. It's about bringing access across the board. What we see is that if people have access, generally, they participate. Now, the consumer data I’ve seen says that Boomers generation actually is the most effective at participating in recycling if they have access. Younger generations, Gen Z, aren't as good at participating in recycling, not because they don't care about the environment, but because they do care about the environment. It's actually because they don't trust recycling.
With an average of 32% recycling rate across the United States, they're not wrong to not trust it, but if people have it, and then if you can convince them and educate them to trust it, then then people will do it. You need to fund inclusive education. Messaging that reaches all communities and all languages and reflects the realities of multifamily housing, renters, rural life, inclusive. Oregon's plan includes culturally responsive outreach strategies. California is following suit.
If you provide the access and you educate people on what to do, I think generally, they're wanting to do it. It's just they're confused. We also need to prioritize equity and environmental justice, ensuring that recycling programs and infrastructure development align with environmental justice priorities and support healthier living conditions for all residents, especially in historically underserved communities. These areas need it the most and will benefit the most from having it cleaned up.
Evaluating the investments needed to increase recycling rates in areas of low participation, then modernizing infrastructure, upgrading MRFs, building more composting sites, and retrofitting transfer stations to handle recyclables and organics. Oregon is building out a statewide depot system and they have already invested a lot in recycling access when they redid their bottle bill a few years ago. They're really the poster child in this space.
California's SB 54 requires transparency and accountability across responsible in markets. That is tied to the next one, which is improve market development. The reality is we need to modernize the infrastructure, but the investment won't come if there's nobody there to buy the end product coming out of the recycling facility.
We need to improve and develop those markets. We need to create the commodity that is valuable to the buyer. It needs to be high quality. It needs to be able to be reused in some way. That involves a lot of things. An example, since I worked at Coca-Cola for so long, I know the most about recycled PET. Recycled PET, as I mentioned, you're going to use it in a food-grade setting. Somebody's going to reuse it to drink out of or eat out of, your bale has to be really high quality.
It needs to be clean. It needs to be all the same material. There needs to be no food contamination, no biohazard contamination, and then it needs to be all the same material so that when you process it, there's no concern for some random wrong material that causes some random chemical reaction that causes some issue. You need to trust that the material you're using is the material that you're expecting to be using in this process, especially when it comes to food.
That's PET and PET is a responsible end market. In fact, recycled PET is playing a part in reducing the fees associated with PET in EPR states because there is a commodity value to that material. What about all those other materials that don't have an existing responsible end market? Basically, the PET market is just looking for material. There's only so much because the only good material that's quality enough comes from deposit return scheme states.
Now with EPR in those other states that don't have deposit return scheme like Colorado, the point is it's creating more market value here. There are more market opportunity. You then have the materials where there is no current responsible end market. People don't even know how to use maybe a recycled LDPE flexible film. If you chop it up, can you even remelt it? I don't think you can.
You have to create a new scenario in which you're using these materials in a new way and then they have to be able to be included in the existing machinery that's going to process and use that material. The infrastructure has to be built both on the sorting and processing standpoint from the recycle material side, but also on the processing standpoint from the reuse side. You have to create these markets.
Policies help in this space because they're then forcing companies to use recycled content and then therefore if they don't, they get a fine. The fine then becomes more expensive than the cost of figuring out how to use the recycled material. There are policies out there that include recycled content requirements, especially in California.
Now another couple of things to do that need to happen is supporting closed loop systems. Recycled material needs to stay in the economy, can to can, bottle to bottle. When we down cycle into textiles or something else, then they're only really reused one other time. It's like this closed loop, meaning it needs to repeat and repeat, even if it's not bottle to bottle or can to can. It needs to be material usage to material usage over and over again at scale.
I think for certain things that are like particularly difficult, if you're down cycling, it's better than putting it in a landfill. However, it's going to eventually end up in a landfill. Those are a bit of Band-Aid sometimes in a scenario where if you did a little more innovation, maybe you could find a different way to really close the loop on these things.
Standardized data collection and reporting, I know that's like everybody's least favorite, but the reality is without data, it's hard to know what to do. Establishing consistent methodologies for collecting data on participation, diversion, contamination, material flow and costs, then it allows you to use that data to evaluate program effectiveness across the states and inform adjustments.
The reality is without data, it's hard to know what to do.
Finally, one of the recommendations that I can't not say, and I said it before, is rolling out EPR and deposit return schemes. There's a value in both. Generally, the idea's the same. The market's not doing it on its own and not one company can fund the millions, billions of dollars that need to go into the recycling industry to actually make a change. Not one company can fund it and not one nonprofit, so legislation plays a critical role in forcing that funding mechanism to shift.
Best In-Class Example
What is best in class example? British Columbia and Canada, their system pairs EPR for packaging with an effective deposit return scheme for beverage containers. Producers are responsible for the full cost of managing their packaging waste. What's different here is that producers actually run the system through a producer responsibility organization. That producer responsibility organization answers to both the regulator and the producer, and they're funded.
This is how the US is operating now. It forces this reinvestment into the infrastructure largely because producers are incentivized to bring down the costs because the more they reinvest, the faster they move. In the future, either they don't have fees or their fees are very low because there's a responsible end market for every material that they're using. There's a commodity value that decreases the need for the fee. You've actually got the economy aspect of the circular economy.
In British Columbia, the result’s over 90% of beverage containers are collected through the deposit system, and over 80% of paper and packaging is recovered. The system is transparent, data-driven, and designed for convenience. Consumers can drop off recyclables, electronics, and even batteries at the same location. The circularity of it is made very visible and it works.
What’s Possible With Full-Scale EPR
British Columbia proves that when policy and powers producers and holds them accountable, and when infrastructure is built around convenience and material recovery, the recycling rates ultimately soar. It would be possible with full-scale EPR. Maryland can jump from a 34% to a 50% recycling rate. Colorado could jump from 22% to as high as 60%. Oregon projects a major boost in materials recovery, especially through its expanded deposit system and coordinated statewide collection list.
California is aiming to achieve a 65% recycling rate by 2032 under SB 54. Nationwide, we could nearly double the value captured and slash landfill we use. We could shift the material out of landfills, take away the carbon footprint that comes with that, and really inject value back into the stream. Recycling alone isn't the solution, but smart, equitable producer-paid systems are a big part of the transition to a circular economy. If we can hold producers responsible, invest in infrastructure and make recycling accessible to everyone, we'll finally get the system that the US needs, in my opinion, that we ultimately deserve.
I think also, there's this opportunity, I keep saying this, for low-hanging fruit. I guess it's not that low or else it would've been done by now, but it's not hard from an innovation standpoint. It's just hard from an investment in infrastructure standpoint. It could have a huge impact on our carbon footprint, which would dramatically shift the direction of the challenges that we're facing as a society related to climate change.
That's it for this episode. Thank you for reading my deep, nerdy rant about recycling. I’ll leave you with why embrace the change to improve recycling rates. I think systems change starts with pressure. You've got to keep pushing, you've got to keep pressing for the difficult things and changing recycling rates will change our carbon footprint. Thank you. Until next time. Thank you for your time and attention and please feel free to share if you liked this or like and subscribe and all the things. Again, just thank you for being here.
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Tune in to our next episode of Change Cycle where we interview Don Bates and discuss from swamps to startups. He shares how passion, invention and grit are driving real change in recycling infrastructure where big systems fall short. This is grassroots circularity in action.