Recycling is About Economics, Not Technology

“Is this recyclable?” The question seems to come up often while cleaning up after a party. Unfortunately, it’s rarely a straightforward answer, and counter to common assumptions, it is rarely a question of technical capabilities. Instead, it is a question of economics and market demand.

For example, up until 2018 China purchased nearly 100% of the US’s collected plastics. The country was growing fast and desperate for raw materials. Shipping containers of recycled plastic were sent across the Pacific Ocean. The contents were notoriously impure, as a result of our country’s inadequate recycling infrastructure, resulting in comingled items of various resin types and other debris. China had the labor and the demand to justify sorting out the truly valuable plastics and incinerating the rest.

In 2018 the Chinese government decided they were done with our “trash” and that they could obtain the raw materials more efficiently elsewhere. Literally overnight, plastics became “unrecyclable” in the US!

How could this be? If anything, the technology to return post-consumer plastics into feedstock has improved dramatically over the years. Unfortunately, for American manufacturers, it was and is still cheaper to refine oil and produce virgin plastics than it is to use recycled feedstock. It seems impossible to believe: the exploration and drilling of oil, shipping it from halfway around the world to an extremely complex and expensive refinery in Houston, where it undergoes a lengthy process before becoming virgin plastic; is still less expensive than collecting, sorting, and grinding up an old milk jug from across town!

If it wasn’t so cheap and easy to obtain oil the story would be different. The same can be said for all other manner of items. If the price of lumber skyrocketed, sofa manufacturers would clamor to obtain post-consumer couches and mattresses for disassembly and utilization of the materials in their manufacturing.

We can look at this fact optimistically, in that we as consumers can play a role in generating that market demand by prioritizing products made with post-consumer materials or even better, used and refurbished products. Refurbished tech retailers have exploded with popularity, resulting in a purchasing process as seamless as at your local Apple store. So check out your local Goodwill, online sites such as BackMarket, or even refurbished products offered by the brand, like Apple or Patagonia.

By driving demand into these areas of the market, we’ll slowly see infrastructure to support this oft-ignored backend, and ultimately a seamless recycling experience.