Once upon a time, recycling was considered the answer to the growing waste problem around the world. For many years, we all heard the same mantra over and over again: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.”
And it’s no wonder that we’ve continued to hold on to the hope of recycling.
Experts are finding more and more evidence of plastics contaminating the oceans, killing marine life, and even altering migration patterns. And that’s to say nothing of the amount of nonbiodegradable waste in landfills.
However, researchers are now saying that recycling might not be the answer we hoped it would be. In fact, it’s not making much of a difference.
There are a couple of reasons why this is happening.
For one thing, much of what we do recycle doesn’t get cleaned. And when it’s not clean, it can’t be recycled. That includes food containers and many other items.
“Our biggest concern and our biggest challenge today is municipal solid waste and contamination in our inbound stream,” James Delvin, CEO of ReCommunity Recycling. “It’s an economic issue if you think about we go through all this effort to process this material, and roughly 15 to 20 percent of what we process ends up going back to the landfill. It’s incredibly inefficient to do that.”
Unfortunately, Americans are really bad at figuring out what belongs in a recycling bin.
But we want to recycle, so we throw everything in the recycling bin where it mingles and gets contaminated, meaning that it’s destined for a landfill.
“People refer to this as ‘wishful recycling,’ that’s just when in doubt, put this in the bin because there’s an outside chance they might be able to recycle it,” Delvin notes. “So, you see Styrofoam. You see PVC. You see batteries and those types of things…”
Another problem is that the United States is drastically under-equipped to handle its own recycling needs.
We don’t have many recycling facilities — at least not in comparison to the amount of waste we produce. For years, we’ve been shipping our waste off to Asia.
Unfortunately, the countries that handle it there don’t have the resources to process it all either. So, their solution has been to dump it into landfills or, even worse, into the ocean.
That’s right, your carefully-recycled bottles and plastics might just end up floating through the Pacific.
In 2018, China announced it would no longer be accepting waste shipments from the United States. For now, we’re continuing to send much of it to other countries in Southeast Asia. But the day might be looming where we have to deal with trash ourselves.
What’s the solution? For most of us, the only possible change is on an individual scale. And since recycling isn’t as successful as we hoped, it’s time to emphasize the first two parts of the mantra: reduce and reuse.
That means making fewer purchases, buying secondhand, and avoiding packaging as much as possible.
It’s time for us to reevaluate our needs and cut back on the things that we can do without — for the sake of our planet.
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