EnviroPolitics Blog

Recycling rates held steady despite declines in U.S. paper and paperboard production

A person in a hard hat inspects a bale of recyclables

The American Forest & Paper Association has released its annual analysis of fiber recycling rates. The figures for 2025 are roughly flat compared with the prior year.

AF&PA estimates the 2025 paper recycling rate was between 61% and 65%, up from 60% to 64% in 2024. The cardboard recycling rate was estimated to be 70% to 75%, compared with 69% to 74% the prior year.

U.S. mills consumed 31.4 million tons of recycled paper to manufacture new products in 2025, a year-over-year decrease of 1.3 million tons. Mills’ consumption had increased by 1.29 million tons the prior year.

“Containerboard capacity adjustments demonstrate the industry adapting to shifting global market and operational strategies,” said Abigail Sztein, executive director of recovered fiber at AF&PA. Total paper and paperboard operating rates increased to 89.4% in 2025, up from 88.1% in 2024, she said.

Despite market dynamics that led to decreased fiber production last year, paper recovery remained strong relative to the available supply, according to AF&PA.

“Our industry shows continued resilience. The paper industry operates at a significant scale, and it’s adapting to changing market conditions,” Sztein said. “The rate shows that the paper recycling system is functioning as designed, and the system held steady.”

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Trump frees Johnny Doc from prison. No reason given for commutation

John Dougherty in 2023.Yong Kim / Staff Photographer

By Chris Palmer and Sean Collins Walsh, Philadelphia Inquirewr, Sept. 3, 2026, 7:16 p.m. ET

Cvicted former Philadelphia labor leader John Dougherty will have his six-year prison term cut short after President Donald Trump agreed to sign a commutation ending the rest of Dougherty’s sentence, according to Dougherty’s lawyer.

George Bochetto said in an interview Thursday night he’s hopeful that Dougherty, the former city power broker known as Johnny Doc, could be freed from a federal penitentiary in Lewisburg as soon as Friday.

Bochetto called Trump’s decision “a magnificent gesture of compassion.” He said Trump had signed the commutation Thursday afternoon.

Records on the Office of Pardon Attorney’s website did not yet reflect a commutation approval as of Thursday night.

Trump had denied Dougherty’s bid for a commutation earlier this year, according to that agency’s website. It was not immediately clear why circumstances changed this week.

For months, Dougherty had been petitioning U.S. District Judge Jeffrey L. Schmehl to be released on house arrest to provide care for his gravely ill wife. But Schmehl had repeatedly denied those efforts, saying in part that Dougherty had failed to demonstrate he was the only person who could serve as an adequate caretaker.

Prosecutors had opposed Dougherty’s request for similar reasons, and said they did not believe he had served enough of his sentence to merit release. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday night.

Read the full story here.

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What Role Did Climate Change Play in the Deadly Nepal Flood

By Lili Pike, Lou Del Bello and Bloomberg Green Daily.

Scientists are pointing to a glacier collapse as the cause of a devastating flash flood that killed at least 350 people and left many more missing near Nepal’s border with China, a mountainous region that’s increasingly imperiled by the effects of man-made climate change.

Initial assessments based on seismic and satellite data, as well as videos of the event, indicate that a very large section of a glacier detached and collapsed. That in turn caused seismic waves equivalent to a 5.2 magnitude earthquake, according to the US Geological Survey. Ice from the glacier may then have blocked the Lhende Khola river, causing water to quickly accumulate and ultimately surge downstream.

“What we’ve certainly confirmed – there was a large ice avalanche, probably a mixture of ice and rock, which detached and then became fluid and then transformed into this devastating flood,” said Simon Allen, a research associate at the University of Zurich who studies glacial hazards in the Himalayas.

Nepal is particularly vulnerable to flash floods because of its mountainous terrain and rapidly melting glaciers. Such events are becoming more frequent as global warming accelerates the ongoing thaw in the Himalayas, an area that holds more snow and ice than any place on Earth besides the Arctic and Antarctica. The development has a cascading effect — from mudslides to water scarcity — for the nearly 2 billion people living downstream from Himalayan-fed rivers, according to the United Nations.

Himalayan glaciers melted 65% faster between 2010 and 2020 than during the previous decade, the UN said, while the risk of glacial lake-related flooding across the broader Hindu Kush Himalaya region is expected to roughly triple by the end of the century.

“When you put together all the physical understanding that the glaciers are retreating, permafrost is thawing, it certainly adds up,” said the University of Zurich’s Allen. Experts are concluding “that we are seeing and we are expecting these events to become more frequent,” he said.

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Panama Canal Congestion Drives Gas Tankers To Unusual Routes

Aug 28, 2026 (Bloomberg) –Growing congestion at the Panama Canal is forcing some gas tankers into unusual journeys, from a rare detour around South America to the possible emergence of shuttling through the waterway.

Two supertankers were recently observed conducting an unusual ship-to-ship transfer off Balboa port on Panama’s Pacific Ocean coast, according to vessel-tracking data, traders and shipbrokers. The process allows one of the tankers to shuttle back and forth through the canal to ensure the steady flow of liquefied petroleum gas to Asian customers, traders said.

The Iran war has diverted more traffic through the canal, while authorities tightened restrictions on how much cargo vessels can carry along with the number of ships that can cross due to drier conditions triggered by El Niño. Waiting times for vessels that haven’t made bookings in advance to transit the waterway have grown in recent months and some operators are paying millions of dollars to jump the queue.

There are currently 14 ships waiting near the canal without reservations, while there’s a total of 115 scheduled to transit, a canal spokesperson said Friday. Of the 14 vessels without bookings, those seeking northbound passage face a maximum wait of 8 days, while those looking to go south have to wait as long as four days, the spokesperson said.

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Tesla dumping vaunted solar roofs for solar roof panels

The product meant to redefine both roofing and home solar never moved beyond expensive niche status. Does the new plan reflect lessons learned?

Close-up of roof with solar panels that look like black roof tiles, brick and white wood home

Tesla’s solar roof (Benjamin C Tankersley/For The Washington Post via Getty Images)

By Dan McCarthy, Julian Spector, Canary Media, August 24, 2026

A thousand solar roofs per week. That was the pace Elon Musk predicted Tesla would install its electricity-generating roof tiles in 2020, more than three years after he unveiled the product to great fanfare on the set of the TV show Desperate Housewives.

That estimate fell flat. Tesla installed just 3,000 solar roofs in the U.S. by the end of 2022 and now appears to be scrapping the product altogether, Electrek reports. As of Monday, the solar roof was no longer featured among the home energy products on Tesla’s website. Tesla did not return requests for comment.

The official demise of Tesla’s supposedly transformative solar roof comes as the company is back in the news for a fresh round of eye-popping claims about its solar ambitions. In July, Tesla said it was interested in building a $10.1 billion solar cell factory in Texas. Earlier this year, Musk declared that Tesla will work with SpaceX to manufacture 100 gigawatts of integrated solar panels — meaning each major step of the supply chain. That’s far more than the entire country makes or installs annually.

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Regulators: Operator of leaky PA-NJ pipeline blocked inspectors

Fuel conduit that cuts through New Jersey linked to hazard in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, that went unconfirmed for years

By Benjamin J. Hulac, Washington Correspondent | August 26, 2026 |

WASHINGTON — The operator of a pipeline that bisects New Jersey, carrying jet fuel, diesel and gasoline from suburban Philadelphia to a terminal in Newark, last year denied federal safety inspectors access to documents following a leak, a “probable violation” of federal law and regulations.

An official of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration leveled the accusations at Energy Transfer in an official “warning letter” in September 2025.

According to the letter, agency staff conducted field inspections of the Twin Oaks pipeline on Aug. 20 and 21, 2025, in three Pennsylvania counties: Chester, Delaware and Montgomery. Sunoco, the company that operates the pipeline, denied inspectors’ request to photograph the pipeline and to produce records about completed repair work, the regulator said. “Specifically, Sunoco failed to allow PHMSA inspectors to take photographs of field notes created by Sunoco contractors during remediation work on the Twin Oaks pipeline.”

Officials carried out the inspections after a fuel leak polluted wealthy, semi-rural Upper Makefield Township. It borders the Delaware River on the Pennsylvania side, where 38% of the property is preserved from development.

An unknown volume of fuel has leaked from the Twin Oaks pipeline.

A spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection referred questions to Pennsylvania environmental regulators.

Read the full story here

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