Only recycle clean and dry, paper, cardboard, bottles, and cans. Don’t attempt to recycle plastic. “When in doubt, throw it out.”
China used to be the world’s number one importer of recyclables, but in 2017 they stopped accepting it.
There is no federal recycling program in the US; municipalities have contracts with private companies; stuff gets recycled only if it makes economic sense.
Putting stuff in the recycling bin makes us feel virtuous, but is it really helping the environment? Where does it go once it’s out of our sight?
As it turns out, most of it becomes trash anyway. Only 68% of paper and cardboard, 27% of glass, and 8% of plastics labeled recycling are actually recycled.
The US used to ship millions of tons of recycled waste to China, which needed the material to fuel its manufacturing and was willing to pay. In 2017, though, they stopped accepting it: too much of the waste coming in, particularly plastic waste, was contaminated, unrecyclable, and ending up in landfills or polluting the Chinese countryside. (“Contamination” refers to anything in your recycling that does not belong there. “For example, if you are putting all of your recyclables in plastic bags, the plastic bag would be considered a contaminant because it is not accepted in most recycling programs. Even recoverable materials, like plastics and paper products, can act as contaminants if they are placed in the wrong recycling container.”)
The sudden disappearance of Chinese demand, plus low natural gas prices (plastic is made out of oil), meant that in many cases, recycling no longer made economic sense. It was cheaper for consumer companies to buy virgin plastic, and recycling turned from something where local governments could make money to something they had to pay money to dispose. Since the US doesn’t have any sort of federal recycling program and had never built up domestic recycling infrastructure, a lot of recycling ended up falling through the cracks -- and into landfills or incinerators.
So what can we do about it?
The single biggest thing that casual consumers can do is to educate themselves about what actually can and cannot be recycled and to not attempt to recycle something unless they’re 100% sure it can be recycled. Much of the “cost” of recycling has to do with sorting. The more accurate and granular the sorting consumers do at home, the more likely it is to end up in the right pipeline. In particular, while plastic mostly looks the same, it has wildly varying degrees of recyclability. (The plastics industry is to blame here, since it’s been blanket adding recycling symbols to their material as an optics play). To ascertain whether a plastic item is recyclable, look for the recycling symbol at the bottom -- INSIDE the recycling symbol will be a number, probably 1-6, that indicates the type of plastic. Only plastics labeled 1 or 2 which correspond to PET, and HDPE, are actually recyclable.
For more reading, check these out:
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-48127398
https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-02013
https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2020/03/13/fix-recycling-america/
It's also important to push the idea of REDUCE and REUSE, before we get to RECYCLE :).