“Recycling kind of lost its way in its overzealousness of trying to make everything recyclable,” Bourque said. “The bottom fell out of the market.”
China’s market for recycling boomed in the 1990s, largely because the U.S.’ trade imbalance made the process cheap and easy. China would ship exported goods to the West Coast, and, because the U.S. wasn’t shipping goods back, tons of empty shipping containers sat at docks, ready to take recyclables back east to process in China’s gargantuan facilities.
But that only worked because Chinese facilities were also largely unregulated, according to Bourque. Much of the unrecyclable plastic was being dumped or stuffed into landfills.
Philadelphia is reportedly burning half of all the trash residents think they’re recycling. In Memphis, the airport still has bins labeled for recyclable scrap to preserve “the culture” of recycling, a spokesperson for the airport told the New York Times. But none of that’s being recycled. It’s ending up in landfills.
“When a product claims to be recyclable, my immediate response is, OK, ‘Where? How?’” said Joe Dunlop, a waste reduction administrator in Athens-Clarke County, Georgia, who’s been watching recycling markets for 20 years.
To recycling experts, the shift could prompt a reckoning for plastics recycling. They hope the pressure from Asia will lead to a new understanding of what can be recycled and what can’t. What’s ultimately needed, they say, is a reduction in the production and consumption of low-grade, single-use plastics.