How to Make Recycling More Manageable

Recycling is supposed to be the last resort after efforts to reduce and reuse have failed. Unfortunately, most plastics are not reusable, and cheaper alternatives are few, making reduction difficult to attain.

Recycling plastic is expensive compared to manufacturing new plastic. For context, more than 85 percent of all plastic waste produced in the United States ends up in landfills. Plastic waste cost society, the environment, and the economy over its more than 150 years lifespan. For instance, it’s estimated that plastic waste produced in 2019 will cost $3.7 trillion over its lifetime.

The first step to making plastic recycling economically viable is to make recyclable plastics. All plastics come with a recycling rating of 1 to 7, one being the most recyclable and seven being the hardest to recycle. Consequently, most recycling efforts go to one and two, while the rest are shunned because they resist recycling, are expensive to recycle, or have no market for recycled products.

Beyond what can be done at the source, there are measures consumers can take to reduce the cost associated with plastic recycling. Consumers should put problematic plastics like bottlecaps, coffee pods, etc., in their respective bins to make it easier for recycling companies. Also, they should not put non-recyclable plastics that cannot be separated, like laminated papers, in recycling bins.

Plastic bags, bottle caps, and credit cards are called “tanglers.” They get caught in machinery, causing shutdowns. Moreover, they are difficult to collect, costly to sort, and environmentally harmful to recycle.

Recycling is relatively easier when similar plastics are recycled together, meaning only one plastic-type can be reprocessed at a time. Most recycling plants are mechanical, meaning sorting is manual.

Food waste contaminates the recyclables, rendering them economically unattractive because recycling companies would have to spend more to clean them up. To reduce the chances of recyclable materials ending up in a landfill, empty, clean, and dry recyclable materials before dropping them off.

Recycled plastic tends to be of low quality. Consequently, recycling plants avoid plastics that do not justify the recycling cost. So they’d rather make new plastics than recycle. However, recycling technology is advancing and expanding the use of recyclable plastics. For instance, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are exploring a plastic recycling method that recycles three widely used plastics, turning them into commercially valuable chemicals. Although this method is still susceptible to the problem of sorting, it has expanded both what’s recyclable and the use of recycled plastics.

The thing that makes plastics so useful is the same thing that makes them difficult and costly to get rid of. The cost of plastic waste comes in many forms, from health costs, mismanaged waste costs, waste management costs, greenhouse gas emissions, marine life losses, etc. Given the hidden high cost of plastic waste, more must be done to reduce the cost of recycling and thus the amount of plastics that end up in landfills. Plastic waste pollution is a far-reaching problem that demands a concerted effort to address. Plastic manufacturers, consumers, and recycling companies all have a role to play in recycling plastic.