While recent news stories about recycling might have you believe otherwise, the answer is an emphatic no, recycling is not a wasted effort. The cans, bottles and paper you put in your recycling bin are part of an important supply chain that returns used materials to the manufacturing sector to make new products and packaging in the U.S. and overseas.
But what you put in your recycling bin does matter, now more than ever. In 2018, the Chinese government imposed a ban on the import of most recycled paper and unsorted plastics from the U.S. and Europe. Known as “National Sword”, the ban was a wake-up call to the recycling industry. For the previous 2 decades, almost half the recyclables collected in the U.S. were sold to mills in China where they were converted into packaging for the myriad consumer goods that China exports to the U.S. each year. The Chinese recycling mills accepted low quality material and using cheap labor, sorted out the good from the bad. Until they decided they’d had enough.
National Sword caused a global disruption in the secondary materials market. The oversupply of scrap paper and plastic caused their value to plummet. Markets in Southeast Asia stepped in to buy at low prices, while demanding higher quality, cleaner material.
And that’s where each of us comes in. Despite the complex system of screens, scanners, jets and magnets used to sort our recyclables at the recycling facility - non-recyclable items inevitably slip through. Recycling facilities just cannot meet the new standard for cleaner material without our help.
Over the years, many of us became “wishful recyclers”, putting items in the recycling bin that we hoped would be recycled. Our recycling habits became a little sloppy. And quite frankly, most of us simply didn’t know there was a problem.
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