Properly designed, our recycling system could work more like the one in Germany, where roughly two-thirds of municipal waste (and almost 90 percent of plastic “#1” PET bottles, like those carrying most peanut butter) is recycled. Instead, the patchwork of thousands of local programs in the United States ends up recycling about 24 percent of municipal waste (around a third if composting is included), according to the most recent federal estimates, from 2018. Meanwhile, Americans burn or bury nearly 180 million tons of trash each year.
None of this discourages Miriam Holsinger, co-president and chief operating officer of Eureka Recycling, a nonprofit recycler in Minneapolis.
Each year, Holsinger’s materials recovery facility, or MRF, receives roughly 100,000 tons of stuff tossed by Minneapolis, St. Paul and surrounding communities, including car parts, bowling balls, diapers and other items. Yet the vast majority ends up as new products, thanks to a gauntlet of machinery, including massive ballistic separators and optical sensors, that sorts more than 1,000 items per minute. Reclaimers — the next stop, where bales are washed, shredded and processed — pay for these raw materials.