Recycling ·
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Last week, fervent social media user Elon Musk took to his broadcast system, X (formerly known as Twitter), to declare that “recycling is pointless” atop a retweet of a video from YouTuber and climate change denier John Stossel called “The Recycling Religion.” The video, released last year, includes intentionally misleading information about recycling and a borderline libelous edit of AMBR’s video, “Chasing Arrows: The Truth About Recycling.”
As recyclers—some of only a handful of mission-based, community-driven recycling operators in America—we know Mr. Musk’s assertions are blatantly false. It’s likely that, like Stossel, Mr. Musk conflated the entire domestic curbside recycling industry with plastics recycling. To be fair, many people and organizations have misunderstood some key facts about recycling compared to plastic recycling.
Here’s the truth about plastic recycling:
- Your plastic bottles, tubs, and jars made of #1, #2, and #5 plastics are being recycled and made into new products (in 2020, nearly 4.8 billion pounds of plastic was recycled);
- Other plastics (like plastic bags or expanded polystyrene) can be recycled through dedicated collections, but it varies program by program; and
- If you put something non-recyclable in your recycling bin, it is not getting recycled.
Overall, there is far too much plastic; most is not designed to be recycled; most will never be recycled; and recycling alone will never solve the plastics pollution crisis. We must prioritize reduction, eliminate toxics in packaging, and redesign to alternative and/or reusable materials.
What types of material are typically recyclable in curbside materials recovery facilities? Cardboard, paper, glass, aluminum, steel, and #1, #2, and #5 plastics. Check out AMBR’s virtual tour of a recycling facility to learn more about how these materials are sorted and recycled.
Here’s the truth about recycling as an industry: Each year, recycling operators in the U.S. processing curbside recyclables recycle nearly 40 million tons of materials, most of which are recycled in North America. The majority of the material is NOT plastic. Roughly, a little more than half (53%) is mixed paper and cardboard, about 20% is glass, about 3% is steel cans, another 3% is aluminum, and the rest is recyclable plastic (#1, #2, and #5 bottles, tubs, and containers). In 2020, the market value of these materials collected from residents alone was an estimated $2.7 billion, according to the Recycling Partnership. In total, the US recycling industry generates about $117 billion in economic activity annually.
Unfortunately, another truth is that every recyclable material, including recyclable plastic, is UNDER-RECYCLED in the U.S.
- About three-quarters (76%) of recyclable material from homes is trashed, forever lost to a landfill or incinerator;
- About a quarter (26%) of Americans do not have access to recycling; and
- Less than half (43%) of households participate in recycling.
Let’s look at Mr. Musk’s assertion that “Recycling is pointless”:
Recycling is pointless – unless you care about jobs in the United States. Our president-elect, Donald J. Trump, campaigned on the promise of creating and preserving American jobs. The recycling industry creates many jobs—about 681,000 in 2012, according to the EPA, and this number is likely to increase as recycling programs expand due to new state policies (extended producer responsibility for packaging). These jobs equate to about $37.8 billion in wages and $5.5 billion in tax revenues. If you’re thinking, “landfills create jobs, too,”—that’s true, but recycling creates an average of nine times more jobs than trash, and composting creates at least twice as many jobs as landfills and four times as many jobs as incineration facilities.
Recycling is pointless – unless you care about domestic supply chains and the economic success of the United States. Our president-elect, Donald J. Trump, also promised to bring back American-made goods by implementing sweeping tariffs on imported goods and materials, raising alarm for economists and CEOs as they warn of skyrocketing prices. However, in many United States communities, there exists a reliable, domestic supply of raw materials at recycling facilities—nearly 40 million tons of material annually.
As we mentioned earlier, there is tremendous opportunity to bolster the domestic supply of recycled raw material by investing in recycling infrastructure to provide access to the 26% of Americans without it and to educate people on the benefits of recycling to support local and national economies.
Recycling is pointless – unless you care about the health of Planet Earth. Mr. Musk has pledged to colonize Mars with his Space X rocketships. But for most of us, Operation Occupy Mars will not be an option. And, even if it were, Mars has proven to be rather inhospitable. Earth is the best and most livable of the planets in our solar system. Planet Earth has oceans, rainforests, and grasslands; rainfall, rainbows, and snowstorms; 8.7 million species; and Dolly Parton. Mars has dust storms, permafrost, and a lot of red rock.
To survive the impact we’ve made on the Earth, we need to recalibrate our relationship with her to restore equanimity. To do that, we need to stop excavating her forests, minerals, and fossil fuels and start creating a circular economy where materials and resources are not lost from the system.
Recycling is a key part of this circularity! We can create a materials system where packaging and products are designed to be reused or recycled, reducing the materials we need to excavate from the ground, which will keep habitats and ecosystems intact and communities unharmed.
For example, aluminum can be remanufactured indefinitely! Using recycled aluminum instead of virgin material means bauxite, the rock that is the world’s primary source of aluminum, does not need to be excavated, processed, and shipped around the world. The U.S. doesn’t have much bauxite left to take from the Earth. To circle back to our point about domestic supply chains, if we don’t recycle our aluminum, we’re most likely importing it.
Recycling is pointless – unless you care about people and their well-being. Both in the United States and around the globe, our supply chains seriously harm communities, often disproportionately low-income and non-white communities. From the extraction, processing, transport, and disposal of our stuff, harm is inflicted. Land and aquatic ecosystems are harmed; human health is impaired; water, air, and land pollution is generated; toxic chemicals of concern are spilled into the environment; and irreversible damage is caused to people and their communities. Recycling vastly reduces the harmful impacts of the production of our stuff—even more so if we focus on reduction and reuse first and foremost and leave recycling as the last option (so much of our single-use stuff is a good candidate for reduction and reuse).
We invite you to tour our recycling facilities, Mr. Musk. As recyclers, we don’t find anything about recycling pointless. We do believe smart policy, strategic investments, and systematic improvements (like encouraging manufacturers to design for recyclability) could vastly increase its benefits.
We believe in recycling so much that we’ll end with an invitation: Mr. Musk, come see a recycling facility. Come see, for example, at Eureka Recycling in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the more than half a million PET bottles, half a million aluminum cans, and a quarter million pounds of cardboard collected every day. These materials reflect the collective actions of hundreds of thousands of citizens who recycle because they believe in a better world. They also represent the hard work of our employees, supported by emerging technologies that are increasingly making recycling systems more efficient and effective. Come take a tour, and then tell us how pointless you think it is. Drop us a line.
And please, stop recycling that John Stossel recycling video. Since 1996, his “recycling is garbage” narrative has been discredited time and again.