Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogue bomb here. In the nineteen seventies, Americans first
Speaker 1: started embracing a new idea intended to help protect the
Speaker 1: environment and reduce our squandering of natural resources. Instead of
Speaker 1: just throwing their garbage away, people began separating materials such
Speaker 1: as glass, metal, and paper that potentially could be processed
Speaker 1: and reused, and started leaving them by the curbside in
Speaker 1: bins to be collected and transported to recycling plants. Back then,
Speaker 1: recycling seemed like a revolutionary step toward a less wasteful society.
Speaker 1: But not quite half a century later, that revolution seems
Speaker 1: to be stuck in neutral, which leaves us wondering whether
Speaker 1: there is a peak recycling point and whether we may
Speaker 1: have already reached it. Thanks to population growth, we continue
Speaker 1: to generate an ever increasing amount of trash, two hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty two million tons of it in the US
Speaker 1: loan in the most recent year for which the Environmental
Speaker 1: Protection Agency has data. That's up from two hundred and
Speaker 1: eight million tons in nineteen ninety, and it works out
Speaker 1: to about four point five pounds or around two kilograms
Speaker 1: per American each day. Over thirty percent more trash than
Speaker 1: Americans generated individually back in nineteen seventy. Of that mountain
Speaker 1: of refuse, in fifteen, slightly more than a third was
Speaker 1: either recycled sixty eight million tons or composted twenty three
Speaker 1: million tons. That might seem pretty impressive, but it's not.
Speaker 1: As of seventeen, the US ranked just twenty five among
Speaker 1: the world's industrialized nations in recycling. Germany, in contrast, recycles
Speaker 1: or composts about two thirds of its garbage, and ten
Speaker 1: other countries in Europe and Asia achieve a fifty percent
Speaker 1: rate or higher. Even more troublingly, U s recycling rates
Speaker 1: have pretty much stalled in recent years. As a result,
Speaker 1: we're still burying more than half of the trash we
Speaker 1: generated landfills and burning the remainder. One challenge to recyclers
Speaker 1: is that the waste stream has evolved. In prior times,
Speaker 1: there were more glass bottles and aluminum cans, plus a
Speaker 1: lot more discarded newspaper, which was heavy and accounted for
Speaker 1: a lot of the volume. These days, in contrast, recyclers
Speaker 1: have to deal with more plastic bottles and e commerce packaging,
Speaker 1: as well as a new generation of complex materials that
Speaker 1: are more difficult to process, metal cans made with blends
Speaker 1: of metals that would have to be extracted from one another,
Speaker 1: and cans and paper products that are coded in plastic.
Speaker 1: Both the base and the coating are technically recyclable, but
Speaker 1: separating them is tricky, and tricky means expensive. Also, although
Speaker 1: what we're discarding has changed rapidly, it's not so easy
Speaker 1: for recycling plants to adjust. These are costly facilities that
Speaker 1: were built to handle the old mix of trash. New
Speaker 1: equipment could cost millions. While the typical person who puts
Speaker 1: bottles in cardboard packaging in the curbside been for pickup
Speaker 1: may think of it as just another government service, recycling
Speaker 1: actually is an industry that has to generate income to
Speaker 1: be sustainable. Bowl sure, they're technically selling your stuff, but
Speaker 1: they have to pay for drivers, trucks, insurance, the facility,
Speaker 1: the equipment to sort it, and shipping to the processor
Speaker 1: that will actually break it down and sell the material.
Speaker 1: And it's a volatile market. Recently, the industry was thrown
Speaker 1: into disarray by China's decision to stop importing twenty four
Speaker 1: categories of recycled materials, including plastic and paper from the
Speaker 1: US and other countries. The ban is causing materials to
Speaker 1: pile up without buyers at sorting centers across the United States,
Speaker 1: forcing many communities to either bury them in landfills or
Speaker 1: burn them. Even where China is still willing to accept recyclables,
Speaker 1: they insist on materials with extremely low contamination rates. That's
Speaker 1: a big problem for the U S, where many communities,
Speaker 1: in an effort to encourage recycling, no longer require residents
Speaker 1: to separate and clean recyclable materials. As a result, about
Speaker 1: of recyclables collected turn out to be contaminated and unusable.
Speaker 1: A stuff like food waste stuck in con hainters can
Speaker 1: be too difficult to clean, meaning that the recycling plant
Speaker 1: may wind up sorting these containers out and throwing them away.
Speaker 1: But there are potential solutions to the problems that are
Speaker 1: hindering recycling. Makers of packaging could help, for example, by
Speaker 1: thinking more about the reality that the stuff has to
Speaker 1: go somewhere at the end of its brief useful life
Speaker 1: and designing it to be more easily broken down and recycled,
Speaker 1: and US manufacturers of products could strive harder to find
Speaker 1: new and innovative uses for recycled materials that can be
Speaker 1: reused multiple times, what the US Environmental Protection Agency calls
Speaker 1: sustainable materials management that would improve the market for recyclables. Additionally,
Speaker 1: nearly fifty years after the recycling movement began, there are
Speaker 1: still places across the US, most notably Indianapolis, that still
Speaker 1: haven't even started curbside recycling programs. That suggests there's still
Speaker 1: potential for growth. Today's episode was written by Patrick J.
Speaker 1: Keiger and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeartMedia and How
Speaker 1: Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other topics,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.