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United States Government

The US Finally Adopts a National Recycling Strategy (theverge.com) 94

The Environmental Protection Agency announced a new national recycling strategy today, the agency's first ever such commitment, according to the Washington Post. The Verge reports: It's a roadmap for the US to achieve a goal of recycling at least half of its municipal waste by the end of the decade. That's a steep rise considering the US' recycling rate has actually declined since 2015, and was only at about 32 percent of all municipal waste in 2018 (the most recent year for which there's EPA data). The recycling plans the EPA announced today are just the first piece in "a series" of forthcoming documents the agency plans to release to work towards a "circular economy," or an economy where resources are recovered and reused to make new products rather than allowed to wind up in landfills. It's a sort of tacit acknowledgement that recycling alone doesn't make a huge dent in the world's trash problems.

There are several key tactics the EPA plans to employ to meet its new recycling goal. For starters, the US will have to do a better job of collecting recyclable materials. The uptick in online shopping has changed where packaging waste winds up. There's less cardboard for instance, coming from shopping malls and grocery stores because of the popularity of home deliveries. That has posed problems for recycling companies because cardboard coming from peoples' homes tends to be dirtier than retailers' trash, experts tell The Verge. Often times, cardboard or plastic that's too contaminated with food or other items can't be recycled. So the EPA intends to do more public outreach and education to ensure more of the stuff people throw out actually gets recycled.

The EPA also wants to develop new markets for recycled materials so that it's worth it for companies to recycle. That means there could be new policies or financial incentives on the way to boost demand for recycled materials. The strategy document mentions, for example, a "Demand Challenge partnership program" that would recognize companies for using more recycled materials in their products. Notably, the EPA says it might finally "explore" ratification of the Basel Convention, a 1989 international treaty aimed at reducing the flow of e-waste and other hazardous trash from wealthy to lower income nations. The new strategy also marks the first time, the EPA says, that the agency's recycling plans will connect the dots between waste, environmental injustice, and the climate crisis.

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The US Finally Adopts a National Recycling Strategy

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  • I put out one or two bags of garbage a week. The people across the street put out 10-12. I have no idea how they generate that much trash or even if it all is truly theirs. But charging per bag would make recycling as much of it as possible a much more attractive proposition.
    • by Freischutz ( 4776131 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @03:03AM (#61992585)

      I put out one or two bags of garbage a week. The people across the street put out 10-12. I have no idea how they generate that much trash or even if it all is truly theirs. But charging per bag would make recycling as much of it as possible a much more attractive proposition.

      I'm not so sure about that. They'd just start stuffing their bags into other people's bins and when that is no longer an option due to the angry neighbour factor, they'd just dump their trash some place in the woods, or down an alley when nobody's looking. Selfishness, after all, is supposedly a virtue.

      • They pay people for the waste. I heard recently that once-used plastic is now as valuable as virgin plastic. I expect much of this comes from the ability of bottle makers to say that they have some percentage of recycled plastic in the bottles they make. There's money to be made in virtue signalling, people just need to cash in on it.

        In reality there would be far less energy used and waste produced if we just burned the plastic in a waste to energy plant, something any city of a given size could use. Ci

    • by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @03:06AM (#61992587) Homepage

      Great, you've just given poor people an incentive to dump their waste improperly.

      Recycling anything besides metals has never made much economic sense. I say toss anything that's carbon based into a thermal depolymerization reactor, recycle the metals, and landfill the rest. Problem solved. But that won't happen because the crony capitalists want a profitable return on their "political contributions", so we get government subsidized recycled cardboard. Yay.

      • That is not what actually happens in places where you pay for waste disposal. Most people want to do the decent thing and the financial cost has to get really bad before they change the approach. In general people who dump their thrash don't do so because the can't afford otherwise.

      • by Chameleon Man ( 1304729 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @08:25AM (#61993001)
        Yes, the recycling industry is rife with corruption and greed, compared to, say, oil and tech, who literally dump billions into lobbying. /s
        • Big Oil propped up recycling so they could peddle plastics and lie to the consumer that plastics are good for the environment because they can be recycled.
    • You're describing my parents. I don't know what they do to generate the amount of trash they do.
      • The mass of trash in a bag can easily vary by a factor of 5 or so based on whether you bother to collapse cereal boxes before putting them in, for example. So an older couple that fills a whole bin might be loading in bags that only a weigh a few lbs each.

        Before we had a second bin for recycling, with the 6 of us and 1 bin I would pack the garbage some weeks like a jigsaw puzzle if we had a lot of trash. Cutting down the boxes to all the same-sized slats. It was a time-wasting exercise.

    • by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @03:33AM (#61992609)

      Where I am you pay by the (company-provided) can, and they do not pick up extra bags. If you have too much, you have to pay for extra pickup, pay for a bigger can, or take it to the dump yourself.
      The recycling cans are bigger than the residential garbage cans, but if you put garbage in it you can be billed extra, and they'll cancel your service if you do it repeatedly.

      • by SandorZoo ( 2318398 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @05:14AM (#61992739)

        That's similar to how it is where I live, except we only pay for however many general rubbish bins (cans) we need. The bin(s) for recyclables, bio/compost and paper are all "free". That gives some incentive to separate our waste.

      • Same here. When recycling became "a thing", the trash cans actually got smaller and the pickup frequency went down. You either manage to get by with the smaller trash can or you pay more.

        On the other hand, you can have as many recycling bags as you want. Be careful what you put in them, though, because they're transparent and if the trash people see anything improper in your recycling bag, it's considered "normal" trash and you pay for extra trash.

    • But charging per bag would make recycling as much of it as possible a much more attractive proposition.

      No, it would drive increased contamination. The greatest way of improving recycling is to a) stop relying on people, and b) given them a financial incentive at the source.

      To do a) you need to invest in technology and garbage separation plants. We did that here, and after a brief trial period showed an absolutely humungous increase in the amount of recycling collected we finally got our official notice from the government last year: Stop separating plastic and metals, throw them in the waste bin and we'll se

      • To do b) you need to charge people at the point of purchase. It's amazing how much people will go out of their way to return bottles if there's 25c in it for them.

        I strongly favor raising the CRV fee. I don't think it's changed since the 80s and 5 cents is not nearly enough any more. Homeless people won't take a bag of cans if you give it to them.

    • I called my local collection service, and they were willing to drop off a second recycling bin for no charge at all. Given that it's easier to lug two recycling bins to the curb rather than 10-12 bags, you might want to see if your scavenger will do the same for your neighbors. They might thank you.

      But the problem I have in my neck of the woods is that recycling is sort of a token operation - collection is every other week, and there's a lot of recyclables which go into the garbage because the local co

    • I'm charged per can and all trash must fit in the can to be collected. Bags next to the can cost more.

      I'm also forced to pay for recycling as part of my property taxes. The same truck picks up both cans and dumps them into the same truck.

    • by Rhipf ( 525263 )

      You don't already pay per bag for your garbage pickup? We have had garbage tags (a bag of garbage needs a tag or it won't be picked up) for more than a decade now. I don't know that it has actually increased recycling though.

    • I put out one or two bags of garbage a week. The people across the street put out 10-12. I have no idea how they generate that much trash or even if it all is truly theirs. But charging per bag would make recycling as much of it as possible a much more attractive proposition.

      Why are you monitoring your neighbors trash production?

      Maybe they are doing home remodeling. Maybe they put less trash in each bag because they can't lift heavy ones.

      Whatever it is, it's none of your business.

      • by j-beda ( 85386 )

        I put out one or two bags of garbage a week. The people across the street put out 10-12. I have no idea how they generate that much trash or even if it all is truly theirs. But charging per bag would make recycling as much of it as possible a much more attractive proposition.

        Why are you monitoring your neighbors trash production?

        Maybe they are doing home remodeling. Maybe they put less trash in each bag because they can't lift heavy ones.

        Whatever it is, it's none of your business.

        If people want to hid what they are doing, putting a bunch of bags on the curb the night before (or even the day of) garbage pickup isn't the way to do it.

        Someone noticing what is happening on their street isn't really "monitoring your neighbors' trash production". While there is some merit to the "live and let live" philosophy, as a social species sharing the same world, we are well served in noticing those around us and altering our behaviour to assist all of us in working together more effectively. Going

  • by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @04:26AM (#61992659) Homepage

    Recycling is great, but at best handles only a tiny fraction of trash. Modern incinerators are the rest of the answer. Instead of filling immense tracts of land with trash, which *will* start to leak yummy chemicals sooner or later, get rid of it.

    Somehow, the really filthy incinerators from the 1940s and 1950s have remained in the US imagination. However, modern incineration is nearly pollution free, you get "free" energy, you can recover virtually all of the metals from the ash, and your aren't leaving square miles of time-bombs for future generations to deal with.

    • Modern incinerators are the rest of the answer. Instead of filling immense tracts of land with trash, which *will* start to leak yummy chemicals sooner or later, get rid of it.

      Because releasing lots more CO2 into the atmosphere is an excellent plan right now.

    • by Hadlock ( 143607 )

      So, instead of burying it in the ground forever, just vaporize it and inject it into my lungs to filter for Lord Government? Sign me up Bradley13 I'm a patriot and if that's what I've got to do for my country, by God so be it

    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      It turns organics into syngas and metals into a slag that can be recycled. We need to stop making recycling harder and make it automatic. Currently we are wasting billions of hours of peoples lives making them wash bottles and sort trash (often only to have it be dumped in a landfill anyway). If you want to keep the current system then develop trash sorting robots. Otherwise plasma gasification is the way to go. Syngas can be used for production of hydrogen, ammonia,

  • Landfilling IS recycling - only it works over geological timescales. Still, it's recycling. So there: 100% of the goal is achieved already.

    • To be recycled wouldn't it need to be mined and remade into things? Are we sure that's going to happen on a geological timescale?

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's kind of sad how desperate people are to keep trashing the Earth, that they resort to silly word games like this.

      Then they complain about being forced to change their ways, as if that's not an inevitable consequence of their attitudes.

  • There's less cardboard for instance, coming from shopping malls and grocery stores because of the popularity of home deliveries. That has posed problems for recycling companies because cardboard coming from peoples' homes tends to be dirtier than retailers' trash, experts tell The Verge. Often times, cardboard or plastic that's too contaminated with food or other items can't be recycled. So the EPA intends to do more public outreach and education to ensure more of the stuff people throw out actually gets recycled.

    Shouldn't that last sentence be "... to ensure more of the stuff people recycle actually gets thrown out"? Because the preceding sentences say the stuff is too contaminated to be recycled, but people are putting it in the recycle bin anyway.

    • by bartwol ( 117819 )

      I noticed that too. It's nonsense. And nonsense is a common refuge for people who mean well, and most importantly, want you to know that.

      Recycle more. Recycle less. What difference does it make? I *did* write an article about recycling, and *that's* what matters.

    • I think they're saying if your recycle bin is 80% amazon boxes that could have been recycled, but then also 20% greasy pizza boxes and unwashed cottage cheese tubs that spill out - the whole bin is now 100% trash.
      • by bjb ( 3050 )

        I think they're saying if your recycle bin is 80% amazon boxes that could have been recycled, but then also 20% greasy pizza boxes and unwashed cottage cheese tubs that spill out - the whole bin is now 100% trash.

        A little grease on a pizza box is just some vegetable oil absorbed into loblow pine - that is nothing for a digester at a paper plant to deal with. Honestly, if it isn't paper that you can practically see through, the paper recycling plant is not going to have any trouble with it.

        The problem

    • by Rhipf ( 525263 )

      They don't want people to throw out more stuff that can be recycled. They want to educate the public on how to handle items so that they can recycle them. If your pizza box has a small grease spot you don't need to trash the whole thing. Cut out the grease spot and recycle the rest of the clean cardboard. If your plastic has food residue in it then rinse it prior to placing in the recycling bin. There is no need to put those items in the trash just because you are too lazy to clean the plastic and but out g

  • Wrong problem (Score:5, Insightful)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @04:45AM (#61992693)
    Recycling domestic waste is tackling the wrong problem. Somehow, we've been convinced that it's the consumer's responsibility to ensure that waste doesn't end up in landfill & dumped in the ocean, which is mostly beyond our control. Perhaps a more effective way is to make the manufacturers of food packaging responsible &/or the biggest users, e.g. supermarkets & fast food companies? Make it hit their bottom line. Make it expensive for them to pollute our environment, e.g. they have to pay for domestic refuse collection & recycling instead of consumers through their taxes. They have the control, scale & resources to make a more efficient 'closed loop' system, e.g. reusable packaging & stopping unnecessary packaging, consumers don't.
    • Any costs to the companies will be passed directly to the consumers as higher prices for the goods. The only motivation for companies is to find cheaper packaging that is less polluting.
      • Re: Wrong problem (Score:4, Insightful)

        by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @06:35AM (#61992819)
        Nope. Additional costs are additional costs. The company meets the difference out of profits &/or the consumer does. We can let the companies & consumers work that one out, prices go too high from an inefficient company, consumers can find a cheaper, more efficient one. Especially true for fast food companies. Consumer also pays less in taxes for refuse collection.
        • Elasticity of supply and demand dictate how much the supplier vs. the consumer pay for additional costs. ECON101.

          Cost of beef goes up and people switch to chicken. Supplier loses.
          Cost of cigarettes go up and addicts just pay more because they have to. Consumer loses.

          Most things fall somewhere in between.

      • Any costs to the companies will be passed directly to the consumers as higher prices for the goods.

        Wrong. These are for-profit businesses. If they could charge more, they already would. If they go out of business because they can't afford to pay for their externalities, so be it.

        • by tomhath ( 637240 )
          Wrong. It every supplier's costs go up, the consumer will be charged more. Don't believe me? Take a look at what's happened to the price of gasoline since Biden took office.
          • Take a look at what's happened to the price of gasoline since Biden took office.

            Ok, but what exactly am I looking for here? Are you trying to say they are going up because oil prices went up? Oil prices haven't fully recovered yet...

            Additionally, not every suppliers costs would go up.. that's the point of a sin tax like what they are talking about.

      • Re:Wrong problem (Score:4, Interesting)

        by LostMyAccount ( 5587552 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @11:28AM (#61993415)

        I don't know why people are so wed to the religious-like belief that pushing higher costs onto corporations because *some* of it might be passed onto consumers makes it a complete failure.

        Except in small cases, most corporations which produce packaged goods have competitors, meaning that added costs to producers for packaging wind up needing to compete on who can wind up with the least additional cost lest they lose their pricing advantage at the point of sale.

        They will end up needing to eat some of the increased cost of their packaging because of this, which should result in less wasteful packaging (provided the taxes or other disincentives are structured right, something tricky to get right).

        Some of this will even get pushed to manufacturers' product designs. If you've bought anything with a glossy finish recently, you've probably had to peel off a reasonable fraction of a square foot of static cling plastic, designed to keep that glossy finish pristine (despite the fact that the product itself is wrapped in plastic or foam, and immobilized in a clam shell or foam).

        Here the fix is obvious -- stop making unnecessary glossy surfaces. It's a direct cost reduction that eliminates a type of packaging, and one that seems especially pernicious because its plastic, light and prone to blowing away and winding up in the environment. It would also greatly streamline manufacturing because it eliminates the wrap-it-in-plastic step. We only get that shit now because marketing is filled with people who love shiny and the cost of the plastic to buy/apply is pretty small.

    • Make it hit their bottom line.

      Otherwise known as tax the consumer. If it hits the manufacturer's bottom line the costs get passed on.

      The reality is that there's a very real reason for much of our consumption and none of that changes. If something is truly biodegradable then it becomes useless for many of the properties you need recyclable materials for. Also your post sounds like it is focusing on a singular problem of "packaging PET peeve of the day" (pun intended) rather than recycling as a whole. Replace plastic with aluminium and yo

      • Replace plastic with aluminium and you still need to recycle. Replace it with paper and you still need to recycle.

        Nah, there's no comparison between how long plastic vs. paper will linger in the environment. Sure a tightly-packed and buried stack of newspapers may still linger for decades, but compared to plastic, that's nothing. The issue with paper though would be whether it's sustainably produced.

        • Nah, there's no comparison between how long plastic vs. paper will linger in the environment.

          And that is supposed to be some kind of reason not to recycle? Recycling is about more than just not having something linger in an environment.

      • by Ichijo ( 607641 )

        Make it hit their bottom line.

        Otherwise known as tax the consumer.

        Otherwise known as an opportunity to gain a strategic advantage over your competitors who tax their consumers.

        • Otherwise known as an opportunity to gain a strategic advantage over your competitors who tax their consumers.

          Said no one ever. No seriously I think you may not have been paying attention to consumerism over the past 20 years. A combination of race to the bottom combined with razor thin margins on products while also trying to maximise shareholder value. Precisely no supermarket chain will try and undercut another over this. The potential volume gains wouldn't offset the losses due to the already razor thin margins they operate under.

          You have some fantasy that competition will result in corporations eating all thei

    • Before that, I think that there needs to be full-disclosure to the public that THINKS it's recycling and how much that is in that blue bin ends up being burnt or in a landfill.

      I tried to do due-diligence and choose a good provider, but the process is largely opaque.

      Most people care enough to take the extra steps, but as the O.P. mentioned, business gets the same pass they always do.
  • Just like the most expensive parts for your vehicle get remanufactured so should most of the things we have in life. Appliances will kill us now that the median time before failure is under 5yrs. Seriously tossed a 21cf refrigerator as the parts were back ordered and half the price of a new unit excluding the repairman cost.
    • It is fairly common practice here for large discards to be left at roadside, sometimes with an honest attempt to give away something still useful, but more frequently to dodge the cost or the logistics shit show that the local landfill/transfer point is. A couple of years ago, I saw someone at the freeway on ramp where someone else had dumped a washing machine, busy with a wrench removing parts from the machine. The 1988 car that I scrapped a few years ago, had a fuel injection controller that was unique
  • by GretschGoblin ( 6217154 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @06:45AM (#61992839)
    The dirty little secret most towns have is that the recyclables your town makes you wash, separate and put out at the curb, just end up at the landfill these days because in some areas of the country, there is such a volume of material, there is no one to sell it to. In the case of newsprint, you actually have to PAY and DELIVER the newspaper to the recycling facility -- if they will take it at all. Some types of plastics have NO MARKET AT ALL. In many cases it is simply cheaper in the end to just to straight to the landfill, and more and more municipalities are doing just that -- while still doing recycling theater. If your regular trash and recycling are being picked up by just one truck, you can guess what the real story is.
    • If your regular trash and recycling are being picked up by just one truck, you can guess what the real story is.

      And if they're being picked up by two separate trucks yet ending up in the same landfill anyway then not only has recycling failed to reduce waste, but "recycling theater" has probably made it worse through the inefficiency of running an unnecessary truck all over town. Recycling is a good idea and worth getting right, but my impression is that our current execution (on average) is more about reducing consumer-guilt than actually reducing waste.

  • Nobody should be charged a deposit/redemption value if they can't redeem their containers for a refund at the point of purchase, or within a fifteen minute WALK from there.

  • To give money to various ad agencies, pay for various politicians and executives to attend EPA parties... sorry, seminars on recycling, and to bribe... sorry, lobby the Senate.

  • by djp2204 ( 713741 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @10:06AM (#61993237)

    It requires a massive investment in transportation to ship the material to low cost countries where it is manually sorted by people. Lots of plastics and paper products cannot be recycled. Those tetrapak boxes of soup and broth? Not without lots of mechanical processing to get the plastics and aluminum away from the card board. This system is fundamentally unsustainable. There are lots of neat engineering tricks that have come out, but most of them do not scale. Certain metals like copper steel and aluminum can be recycled and should be.

    Instead we need to encourage people to buy and discard less. We need to encourage manufacturers to make products that can be repaired and punish them through confiscatory taxation when they do not.

  • by Dereck1701 ( 1922824 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @10:16AM (#61993257)

    You can't throw a bunch of glass, metal, various plastics, etc into a single bin, crush it into one giant bale, and get much of anything useful out of the other side when you try to "sort" it. We need to do some kind of pre-sorting of recyclables before they get thrown into a bin and compacted. This will need to be done either manually by the people who are putting it in the bin (like we used to do) or via some kind of automated sorting system (think a more advanced version of a pop bottle return). The most the federal government can do as far as I am concerned is to try to standardize/catalog containers shape and materials (again, like pop bottles) so they can more easily be recognized/sorted. But of course I don't expect much sane action on this from the feds at the moment given that half the press release is rambling about things that have nothing to do with recycling, such as "health/quality of life in communities of color/Equitable Access/overburdened communities".

  • I would appreciate proof that recycling is better for the environment than proper landfilling.

  • by nzkbuk ( 773506 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @12:09PM (#61993573)

    Why not just charge the supplier / importer fees to recycle their plastics. Ring fence that money to places that actually recycle that plastics.

    If a supplier / importer cannot detail exactly what plastics are in the product (and all it's packaging) just charge them double the cost of recycling the entire thing if it was made out of the most expensive to recycle material.

    In short tax virgin plastics out of existance and make recycled plastics the commercially viable option. Once the industry for recycled plastics is viable the costs associated with virgin plastics can be rebalanced.

  • Recycling idiocy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Tuesday November 16, 2021 @12:27PM (#61993623)

    Current recycling "technology" relies on an infinite number of humans to sort through garbage. About a decade ago, the idiots in charge even determined that it was better to "comingle" recyclables rather than have the consumer sort them initially -- plastic mixed with glass mixed with paper mixed with steel. Apparently this was because garbage truck drivers make more than garbage sorters.

    Any rational recycling policy would involve industrial scale re-refining of plastics; for example, dissolving in solvents and then using a process like fractional distillation to separate the constituents into usable chemicals.

    Instead, the theory is that consumers need to wash their garbage before throwing it out, and separate plastics based on illegible triangle markings.

    Even better would be reuse, such as we had up through the 60s for Coke bottles. It was no exaggeration that you could hammer in a nail with a coke bottle.

    • To be precise, you can still hammer in a nail with a Coke bottle today, you just have to do it slightly differently. If you can't, you're holding it wrong. (Small bottle, completely filled with water, up side down with the edge of the cap on the nail, slap the bottom.) But the old style Coke bottles were good for many more things. Refer to the movie "The gods must be crazy"...
  • China and the 3rd world stopped buying America's contaminated recyclables. What should we do now?

    I know, let's make new laws that double down on the same failed ideas!

    • by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

      China and the 3rd world stopped buying America's contaminated recyclables. What should we do now?

      I know, let's make new laws that double down on the same failed ideas!

      They weren't buying America's contaminated recyclables only. Far more came from Australia, Japan, and other nations. In fact when they told Australia - No more it caused one hell of a big crisis. https://theconversation.com/ch... [theconversation.com]

      The whole systems needs an overhaul. Starting with banning plastic for the most part. Especially water bottles. People need to drink tap water. This is also a huge expense. Often the water out of the tap is better. We need to re-evaluate milk containers, soda bottles and so on. Ever

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