Neil Seldman & Peter Anderson offered their opinion in WasteDive

The Atlantic and The New York Times recently carried near identical stories about what they portrayed as the “end of recycling” due to China’s ban on scrap imports from the U.S. They outlined how this sent the price of recycling soaring, causing some cities to begin cutting down or even eliminating programs and sending materials to incinerators or landfills.They got some of the story right, but omitted the fact that some 20 years ago, Big Waste companies made a deliberate decision to disrupt the then well-functioning dual-stream systems by convincing cities to switch to single-stream recycling. This caused contamination rates to increase and led to the market crunch started by Chinese import restrictions

Pitfalls of single-stream recycling

Recycling is a cyclical industry. In the past 50 years, commodity prices fell — in some cases more than they have during the current China-induced crisis. In each instance, many in the media proclaimed the death of recycling. Each time, recycling revived and returned better than before.

After rising quickly in the 1980s and 1990s, recycling rates slowed in 2000 and peaked to around 34% by 2010, where, according to the most recent EPA data, the country has remained since. Most cities had programs that collected paper separately from glass, metal, and plastic, minimizing contamination and allowing for cost-effective processing that was attractive to local and regional markets. 

According to a 2016 EPA study (based on 2007 data), the U.S. recycling industry comprised of more than 757,000 jobs, $36.6 billion in wages and $6.7 billion in tax revenue.

At the close of the 20th century, most homes had a recycling service. Recyclables that were collected in dual-stream systems had less than 10% contamination at local sorting facilities, which made them highly desirable to domestic processing plants. Citizens and small business networks did their job to promote recycling by working hard and long to promote laws that mandated recycling and composting. Other new rules encouraged reuse and minimum scrap content in finished products. Container deposit laws, dedicated industrial parks and waste surcharges that capitalized a public-private recycling infrastructure were all components of an increasingly sophisticated system that waste hauling companies had to adhere to in order to keep their market share while still allowing small local operations to flourish.

Wall Street told Big Waste for decades that recycling diversion was “the enemy of [waste industry] profits” that had to be halted — or materials would continue to be diverted from landfills, “where they are supposed to go.” The vibrant, environmentally-sound network was disrupted. Big Waste was content with a stagnation of U.S. recycling at 34%, which kept their lucrative hauling and landfill monopolies in place.

The nation’s largest waste collection and disposal companies pushed a system that allowed all recyclables to be dumped in the same container, promising that this would lead to increased diversion from landfills — and cities eagerly adopted it.

Single-stream collection replaced dual-stream at an accelerated pace after being introduced in the 1990s, and by the mid-2000s, it was well on its way toward becoming the predominant collection method throughout the country. Today, 9 of the 10 largest U.S. cities use single-stream. Single-stream systems did increase participation, but not actual recycling — contamination levels climbed toward 30% in some cases.

For a number of years, China was willing to accept these increasingly contaminated bales, becoming the favorite dumping ground for America’s waste companies. U.S. residents believed that whatever they dumped into that single container ended up being recycled. Then, China wised up as labor costs rose in its expanding economy. The country stopped accepting our contaminated materials, and soon other importing countries did the same.

But by that time — like Gresham’s law about bad money pushing good money out of circulation — China’s two-decade willingness to accept contaminated materials had already undermined U.S. recycling markets. This made cities dependent on large-scale processing facilities that produced low-grade materials and often don’t recover any quality glass – 20% of the single-stream recycling mix.

In many cases, the companies that run these facilities also manage — and profit far more from — collection and landfill disposal, disincentivizing them from maximizing recycling. Big Waste promoted the mantra of single-stream with evangelical enthusiasm.

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