What's Wrong With Recycling, and How to Hack It

Since 2018 recycling has seen a lot of changes: price increases, canceled recycling programs, and big fluctuations in commodity pricing. So here’s what’s wrong with the system and how your organization can hack the system, and save money and hassle along the way.

Background on our authority on this subject: As an eco-friendly waste hauler in the Omaha, Nebraska area, we’re knee-deep in this conversation every day with thousands of residential customers through our affiliate Gretna Sanitation and hundreds of commercial partnerships that rely on us to help them meet their sustainability goals.

 
 
 
 

WHY IS RECYCLING MORE EXPENSIVE? 

When the recycling industry first started, it was all predicated on the assumption that recycling centers could sell that stuff to manufacturers for a profit. 

So you send your water bottle to a recycling center, and 100,000 water bottles later, some company buys the whole bundle to make something new out of it. 

This system worked so well that at different points in our history, recycling centers occasionally pay people or haulers to drop off good clean material.

But due to big shifts in the market, selling recycled materials at a profit isn’t a guarantee. Here are the biggest hurdles …

China stopped taking America’s recycled material back in 2018

Since our nation was overly dependent on sending materials there, this shift means that we have an accumulation of material just building up stateside.

Contamination

More Americans need to take responsibility to learn how to recycle right. Like, not putting in liquids or foods, or figuring out which materials are recyclable and which are not — because when you just throw everything in the recycle bin and assume it’ll get figured out on the other end - we’re here to tell you - that’s not how it works.

American’s are just consuming more materials altogether

When the modern recycling process began, the different types of recyclable materials were pretty simple. Today, with product variation and the splintering effect of different types of plastics and packaging, it’s increasingly difficult for recycling centers to properly separate those materials and find end-markets that want to buy it. Couple this with just more of everything, and you can see where this is going.

HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP

Learn How To Recycle Right

When you send cleaner & better materials to recycling centers, it takes less labor to sort through it & the materials have a higher value. Check our free guide for how.

Buy products that use post-consumer recycled material

If you have the option of buying toilet paper that comes from new trees, or toilet paper that comes from recycled paper - you should always choose the product that uses recycled paper. The more companies that use recycled material and the more people that buy products that use recycled material means that the faster our recycling centers will sell material to those companies.

Keep recycling!

While the recycling industry hit a massive funk after the 2018 China ban, good ol’ American ingenuity & entrepreneurialism has been kicking. Low commodity pricing means ample opportunity for the markets.

HOW CAN I SAVE MONEY?


Industry insider-tip: Right-Sizing 

Don’t assume your waste hauler will tell you if you’re not filling up your container each time. Those folks picking up your materials are way too busy to keep track of that stuff, and economically we’re not incentivized to do so.

So make sure you have the right size of container and the right frequency of pickup, because if you can reduce either, you save money. 


Reducing, Reusing, and Refusing

Imagine for a moment that we’re all reading a novel on how to be sustainable with our trash. The story doesn’t end with, “and everyone recycled and composted everything.”

No.

It ends with, “and everyone figured out how to reduce, reuse, and refuse the materials they could.”

That’s because if you’re producing less waste, then you have less of a need to pay someone to take it somewhere and less need to pay someone for those materials you aren’t throwing away.

The point is, is that if you take a look at the waste you’re producing, there are some really easy changes you can make to produce less of it by reducing, reusing, and refusing — which can, in turn, save you some money. 

Go deeper …


From the team at … 

Gretna Sanitation, Hillside Solutions, and Soil Dynamics


Brent Crampton