SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019 | MOTHER JONES 67percent since the ban. The situation isn’t
likely to improve anytime soon: China’s
policy could displace an estimated 111 mil-
lion metric tons of the world’s plastic waste
by 2030. Some of that is going to Turkey,
Vietnam, and Indonesia, but according to
National Waste and Recycling Association
spokesperson Brandon Wright, those coun-
tries can’t handle the volume because they
don’t have China’s recycling infrastructure.
The United States doesn’t either.
Author ities in some cities have tried to
change behavior through policy measures.
Oakland, California, for example, fines resi-
dents $25 if they place “the wrong materials”
in recycling containers three times within
six months. Several states have banned
single-use plastic bags. At the federal level,
it would help to follow the European
Union’s lead and establish a national policy
that defines what is recyclable rather than
leaving that up to municipalities, says Kate
O’Neill, an associate environmental profes-
sor at University of California–Berkeley and
author of the forthcoming book Waste. The
Environmental Protection Agency is still
in the early stages of developing a national
framework, a spokesperson tells me.
For consumers, maybe the old mantra
needs an update: Don’t just recycle—
reduce and reuse. Zero-waste grocery
stores offer shoppers house-cleaning prod-
ucts and bulk groceries without the plas-
tic packaging. A new service called Loop,
available in the mid-Atlantic since May, de-
livers items like ice cream and shampoo in
reusable containers to people’s doors and
collects the containers when they’re done.
(It remains to be seen how many customers
will be willing to pony up the deposit fees,
which range from $1 to $15.75.)
When you do recycle, you should know
what belongs in the bin: Rinsed plastic
containers and glass bottles, cardboard,
and beverage and food cans are almost
always acceptable. Plastic bags, electron-
ics, and paper covered with food generally
are not. Neither are insulated coffee cups
and toothpaste tubes, in most cases. And
if you’ve checked your local guidelines to
see if an item is recyclable and you still
aren’t sure, it’s best to ignore your wishful
instincts and throw it in the trash. Qdual-stream system, where plastics and glass,
and paper and cardboard, each had their own
bins, to single-stream, in which all recycla-
bles go into one bin and the sorting is done
at the mrf. But when “we decided to put all
the things together, we decided to create a
contaminated system,” says Darby Hoover,
a senior resource specialist at the Natural
Resources Defense Council. It’s almost im-
possible, for example, to put paper in a bin
with beverage containers without the paper
getting wet, which makes it unrecyclable.
And it doesn’t help that many of us are
wildly confused about what we should re-
cycle. A decade ago, according to one esti-
mate, 7 percent of the objects Americans
put into their bins weren’t supposed to be
there. Today, it’s 25 percent. “For every ton
of material we get in, there’s 500 pounds
of trash that has to be taken out of it,”
says Brent Bell, vice president of recycling
operations at Waste Management, the
country’s largest waste disposal company.
This garbage ranges from recyclables that
are too dirty to process—mayonnaise jars
still coated in a thick layer of eggy goo, for
example—to items that just shouldn’t be
there in the first place, like plastic bags.
Nearly a third of us have no idea what
types of plastic our municipalities accept,
according to a 2014 survey. When I did a
quick audit of my household’s bin in April, I
found three plastic sandwich bags, a plastic
freezer bag, and a disposable razor—none
of which are recyclable. (Though places like
San Francisco let you recycle plastic bags if
you bundle them.) Our uncertainty leads
to climbing costs and waning productivity
at recycling facilities; contamination costs
Waste Management about $100 million an-
nually, or 20 percent of its total budget.
In July 2017, our recycling system faced an
even bigger setback: China, which had been
buying about half of US plastic, announced
it would ban the import of 24 materials, in-
cluding mixed plastics, largely because the
goods we sent them were too contaminated.
The policy, which took effect on January 1,
2018, sent shockwaves through the industry.
“It’s a global recycling crisis,” says Johnny
Duong, director of international sales at
California Waste Solutions, a collection
company whose costs have risen by 200
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