What Should We Do About Our Massive Trash Problem?

• America has a massive trash problem, and it's gotten a whole lot worse in recent years.
• China’s 2017 decision to stop accepting the bulk of the world’s garbage has produced a crisis in U.S. recycling markets, demonstrating the fragility of a system that essentially relied on a fiction of easy materials recovery for beneficial use and almost completely ignored the problem of waste generation at its source.
• Now, an increasing amount of the stuff we were once recycling (badly) is going to landfill again, prompting debate about how policy makers should respond.

The challenge

Americans generate more waste than any other country in the world. Containers and packaging made up the largest portion, or about 30 percent, of the municipal solid waste (MSW) generated in 2015, the most recent year for which data are available.

According to our partners at USAFacts, a non-partisan, not-for-profit civic initiative aimed at making government data accessible and understandable, in 2015 the U.S. generated 262.4 million tons of MSW — that’s the equivalent of 4.48 pounds per person per day — and only recycled or composted 34.8 percent of that. Plastic products — which include durable goods, containers and packaging — accounted for 13.1 percent of MSW. The graph below shows how the volume of different categories of waste has changed over time:

Source: USAFacts

The United States recycles far less than other industrialized countries such as Denmark, Belgium or Germany. Moreover, the U.S. recycling infrastructure is underdeveloped compared to other thriving economies, with at-home recycling services available only to 53 percent of the population.

China's "National Sword"

In July 2017, China announced its new "National Sword" policy, under which it would no longer accept imports of “foreign garbage” starting in 2018. The country made the move because it planned new efforts to recycle its domestic waste and because foreign waste was often improperly sorted.

The ban upended recycling economics around the world, especially in the U.S. Previously, materials recovery facilities could sell mixed rigid plastics and mixed paper without much sorting and quality control, allowing them to operate at high volume. China’s shift slowed all of that down, and made curbside recycling — which typically features 15-25 percent contamination — even less viable.

In 2016, Chinese manufacturers imported 7.3 million metric tons of waste plastics from developed countries, including the U.S. The 2017 ban has far-reaching implications, given that China was the dominant market for recycled plastic.

Much of the waste that China imported, especially lower-grade materials, had few other places to go, certainly none with China’s vast capacity. China’s ban led to backlogs of recyclable waste, which companies went on to incinerate or dump in landfills given the inadequacy of alternative infrastructure, at least in the near term.

Filling landfills

The fallout from these developments would be difficult to overstate. As the AP reports, communities across the U.S. have been forced to "make hard choices about whether they can afford to keep recycling or should simply send all those bottles, cans and plastic containers to the landfill. Mountains of paper have piled up at sorting centers, worthless. Cities and towns that once made money on recyclables are instead paying high fees to processing plants to take them. Some financially strapped recycling processors have shut down entirely, leaving municipalities with no choice but to dump or incinerate their recyclables."

Beyond the actual damage from additional waste sent to landfills, there looms the additive risk of consumers losing faith in the notion of recycling and abandoning their already insufficient efforts to participate.

Policy options

Oregon provides an example of a successful bottle deposit system, which in 2018 recycled 90 percent of eligible beverage containers, up from 64 percent just two years earlier.

The Zero Waste movement has grown into what the Washington Post characterized as “one of the most widespread and successful recycling efforts in history, bringing cities the world over to the precipice of what once seemed fantastical: the elimination of waste.” Places from rural Japan to metropolitan Sweden now send very little of their trash to the landfill. Many more — including Washington, DC — have a “Zero Waste” plan. In the U.S., San Francisco leads the way, diverting more than 80 percent of its waste, which is two and a half times more than the national average.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), also known as “Make It, Take It!,” is a strategy to decrease the total environmental impact of a product by making the product manufacturer responsible for the entire life-cycle of the product, including the post-consumer stage where it's recycled or disposed. EPR also shifts associated costs and accountability for post-consumer waste from taxpayers and governments to product manufacturers.

In February 2018, the European Union adopted a new policy agenda, called the European Plastics Strategy, with the goal that all plastic packaging in the EU market will be recyclable or reusable by 2030. In January 2019, EU member states reached a provisional agreement to introduce restrictions on certain single-use plastic products.

What do you think?

How should the U.S. deal with its growing amounts of landfilled trash? Tell your reps what you think, then share your thoughts below.

—Sara E. Murphy

(Photo Credit: iStock.com / vchal)