What caused this rapid growth? Some reasons:
- More economic for businesses to sell their waste (notably cardboard and scrap metal)
- The advent of mandatory recycling laws and curbside recycling programs
- Growing environmental concerns
This is the current state of recycled materials by type. This implicitly hints at the value, ease of recycling, and amount produced for these materials. The question is how do these compare to the tonnage of those material types consumed? Knowing this could help identify critical areas to target and investigate
Notes
- Residential (domestic) vs commercial waste is roughly equivalent 1 but require different approaches for reducing or recycling waste. This is enough to show that a meaningful effort can be made on both sides of the coin. An argument can be made that a majority of residential waste is obtained from commercial or industry sources.
- While the U.S. has typically lagged behind other developed developed nations, the U.S. is severely stagnating in recycling rates which are hovering at around 30-35%. This is due in part to China’s 2018 National Sword Policy which restricts allowed materials and set contamination limits, effectively stopping China from being a dumping ground for global waste (they handled nearly half of the worlds recyclable waste!). This revealed a significant lack of infrastructure for handling recyclable waste in the U.S. leading to increased landfill use. Of the major countries that track recycling data, the U.S. ranks 25th of out 32.
- Other ways of handling municipal waste include composting, incineration (with OR without energy recovery), or landfill.
Sources of Waste (obviously not comprehensive)
- Fruit and Veggie Stickers - Often made of plastic and seldom removed from certain foods. This can reduce the quality of industrial composting. ^[https://ecology.wa.gov/blog/may-2023/keep-plastics-out-of-compost]
Single use …
- Plastic Bags
Existing Recycling Websites
- Scrapp - Allows consumers to scan barcodes to provide recycling (including municipal specific) info.
- Eco-Cycle A-Z Recycling Guide - Specific to boulder Colorado, but provides generally helpful guidelines. Has a “What do you want to recycle?” search engine.
- Recycle Nation - Provides a location specific “Recycle Anything” search engine. It seems to lack enough data to be useful. Has a great number of categories though.
- Recycle Coach - The best one on this list, but is unfortunately a mobile app and lacks many locations. Charlottesville is a location that has recently adopted recycle coach.