Next time you publish a piece on recycling, we encourage you to work with industry experts to make sure you get the data right.?Here are a few points to get you started:
- ?40 million US household still lack equitable access to recycling.?Robust recycling occurs when old stuff turns into new stuff – that’s called recycling fate.?But if people don’t even have the opportunity to recycle (i.e. access), there’s no chance that fate will end well.?That is why equitable access really matters – it’s the baseline for getting the whole systems started.?For example, California’s recycling rate is higher than that of most states because 95% of its residents have recycling carts.?Pair that with education and outreach and you have a solid 1, 2 punch for getting material back into the circular economy.?
- A $17B investment in recycling would deliver a $30B return.?That’s an investment we can’t afford?not?to make.?Our?Paying it Forward report?calls for this $17 billion investment in recycling because we know that a recycling system funded solely by local governments (i.e. taxpayers) cannot deliver the scale of the solution needed. The Partnership was specifically formed to raise and deploy capital outside of traditional municipal financing to improve the recycling system. And in states that have adopted producer responsibility laws, companies will provide that critically needed financing.
- MRFs are actively recycling plastics and it’s false to claim otherwise.?MRFs have been successfully sorting and marketing PET and HDPE for more than three decades. We know this based on our robust community and MRF data set. Although sorted plastics make up only 10% of a MRF’s shipped commodities, they constitute more than 30% of a MRF’s material revenues. The MRF business model depends on plastics being sortable and sellable.?
We get it – it’s confusing.?9,000 different community programs, 300+ MRFs – that’s a lot to keep track of.?That’s why we have a whole team on the ground, committed to supporting communities and MRFs to recycle more.?Greenpeace, we’re happy to work with you to better understand the data and tighten up your methodology for next time.?Why??Because solutions are built on facts and a desire to get things done.?
?We are not going to recycle our way out of the challenge, but we aren’t going to re-use our way out of it either. We need both, and undermining the system of recycling is incredibly unhelpful. Tearing down the system hurts the thousands of people working to make the world a better place.
The Recycling Partnership
There is nothing here that disputes anything in our report, Circular Claims Fall Flat Again. This is the kind of "say the critics are wrong without providing any specific evidence to back it up" approach we typically get from industry front groups. I am sure The Recycling Partnership does not want to be viewed that way, but... here we are. The facts, as documented in our report, are that very few types of plastic are widely recycled in the US. The vast majority of plastic waste is landfilled or incinerated. It has always been that way. We could spend billions on subsidizing recycling for single-use plastic packaging, but it would make more economic and environmental sense to invest in reuse. Maybe what undermines the system of recycling is pretending that it makes sense to collect, sort and recycle trillions of throwaway plastic items a year, knowing that it drives down the efficiency of MRFs and makes it harder for them to recycle materials that make sense to recycle. John H