Fixing Recycling

We’ve talked about this from time to time over the years, but it’s worth reiterating again how utterly broken the American recycling system is. The whole thing is a disaster–people can feel good about themselves by throwing their improperly cleaned bottles and cans in a blue or green tub (plus whatever other unrecyclable material they throw in there–pizza boxes, plastic wrapping, etc. Then it probably either just gets tossed in the landfill anyway or it gets shipped to Malaysia or Vietnam or Indonesia where it ends up in the ocean or being hammered out by workers dying of the chemical exposure they face or thrown into a landfill there or burned. There’s hardly any market for recycled consumer materials and the government hasn’t done enough to incentivize the industry. It’s really bad.

There’s a growing effort by environmental groups to get this system back in control and so I was glad to hear about this lobbying effort in the Senate about it.

Americans need convenience and incentive in order to effectively engage in recycling practices, experts told senators during an Environment and Public Works Committee hearing Thursday. 

“Ultimately, there are only two things that affect whether a system is successful: convenience, and incentive,” Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative President & CEO Jules Bailey said. 

Bailey was one of three recycling experts who served as witnesses for the committee’s “Examining Solutions to Address Beverage Container Waste” hearing. 

Oregon is one of ten states that have employed a statewide deposit return system, in which consumers pay an extra fee for recyclable materials that they are given back once the material is recycled.  

The witnesses argued that Oregon’s system serves as an example of one that employs both convenience and incentive, which helps its citizens to effectively recycle. 

“The combination of convenience and incentive in Oregon means nearly all beverage containers are collected with other beverage containers, helping protect food-grade materials from contamination, and returning them to their highest and best use, which is often a new bottle or can,” Bailey said. “Even if curbside invests in technology to improve the quality of recycling, without an incentive, these systems will not generate the volume necessary to meet the needs of American recycling infrastructure.” 

A national deposit return system could potentially increase the nation’s recycling rate of beverage containers by almost 50%, according to data from the Container Recycling Institute. 

“It [a national deposit return system] would boost the nation’s recycling rate of beverage containers from the current national rate of 34% to 80% and provide 8.5 million new tons of recyclables for the nation’s container manufacturers,” Container Recycling Institute president Susan V. Collins said. “This would improve the nation’s overall recycling rate for all materials by three percentage points.” 

Collins also said that a deposit return system would promote job creation. 

“According to estimates, a national DRS would add over 80,000 jobs, meaning that if the U.S. had a national deposit law with a redemption rate of 80%, it would support more than 100,000 jobs in the United States – 20,000 that already exist, and 80,000 new,” she said. 

Some lawmakers worry that incentivization, convenience, and other benefits such as job creation, may not be enough to sway all Americans because of a perceived lack of transparency in recycling.  

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) expressed concern about plastics recycling, saying, “it isn’t really happening,” and that American consumers and taxpayers “are the suckers in all of that because the recycling programs that propagate this mythology of plastics recycling are paid for by the taxpayers.” Whitehouse continued, calling recycling in America a “fraudulent scheme.”

The lobbyists claim this isn’t true, but Whitehouse knows more about this stuff than any other senator and plenty of it is backed up by things I’ve uncovered in my own limited writing on the subject. I’ve also done a bunch of research in recent years on reaction to Oregon’s bottle bill in the 70s and the level of freakout by the bottling industry was both unbelievable and extremely believable at the same time. They didn’t succeed at stopping this in Oregon, but they did in the rest of the West.