I am in the middle of looking at plastics recycling in my area.
Any internet search in this area feeds you a lot of pessimism about the entire concept of plastics recycling. People say that it’s not worth doing, that it’s greenwashing, that it’s a scam, that it all ends up in the landfill, and so on.
But is that true? It all seems to start from a figure that just 5 to 8 percent of U.S. waste plastic is recycled.
Less than an hour of internet search, and I now know that figure is totally irrelevant to the situation I’m investigating. The often-cited 5% is for every conceivable form of plastic waste — stuff that was tossed in the trash, stuff that was tossed on the ground, plastic resins that are not recyclable, plastic items that are not inherently recyclable, plastic integrated into multi-material items, and so on.
That’s a problem, for sure. But right now, I just want to know what happens if I properly handle a recyclable plastic object, where I live. I want to know two simple things:
- What plastic should go in the recycling bin, here in Vienna, VA, and
- What fraction of (say) a clean #1 (PETE) bottle actually gets recycled?
To cut to the chase
In Fairfax County, VA, for now, my short answer is:
- Recycle #1 and #2 plastic containers,
- if they had food or soap in them,
- and they are not black,
- and they are not flimsy “clamshell” containers, typically used for produce.
Maybe recycle #5 (polypropylene) wide-mouth containers, such a yogurt containers. Again, only if they had food or soap in them. No clamshells.
Put all your other plastics in the trash.
With regard to how effective that recycling is — what fraction of a PETE soda bottle I can expect to be recycled, if I toss it in the bin — I still have no idea.
But, for sure, the often-cited 5 to 8 percent figure is not relevant here. Several different municipalities say that about 80% of what goes into their recycling bins ends up recycled. That benchmarks well with state-level reports from Virginia showing that the fraction of the recycle(able) stream that ends up in the landfill is less than 20% of the total.
That still does not directly answer the question of plastics alone. I’ve seen figures suggesting that if you get a clean PETE bottle into your recycling, an average of 70% of it will get recycled. I’ve seen figures implying less. But nobody says 5%. And, as explained at the end of this posting, it’s entirely possible that nobody has any hard data to provide a definitive answer to this question.
What plastics to recycle, or, why does my Town tell me to try to recycle non-recyclable items?
In 2021, when I last looked at my local recycling rules (Post #G21-021), one particular craziness that stood out is that I got contradictory advice. My local governments’ list of what was acceptable for recycling differed from that of the actual materials handler.
There’s a broad set of no-no’s that everybody agrees on. No plastic bags, no plastic sheets or film, no Styrofoam. But between that, and #1 and #2 plastic bottles and jugs, lies a gray area where my Town and the actual recycling facility disagree.
Now, having looked around the internet a bit, I realize the discrepancies are not random. Typically, when there are differences, local governments uniformly have broader lists of what to recycle than the actual Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) can deal with. Local governments routinely instruct citizens to throw stuff INTO the recyclables stream that the MRF then has to sort OUT of the stream and send off to the landfill.
That’s still true today, where I live. The Town of Vienna, VA tells me to recycle all types of plastic. Simply disregard the chasing-arrows number that indicates the type of plastic resin, and recycle if the shape is right. Separately, they tell me to recycle large solid plastic objects such as buckets or toys.
Source: Town of Vienna, VA.
By contrast, a quick glance at the website of the Materials Recover Facility (MRF) itself — that is, the people actually doing the recycling — says to recycle #1 and #2 containers, and #5 wide-mouth containers.
Source: American Disposal.
And it’s not just my Town that does this crazy and dysfunctional thing. Here’s an article from Kansas City, where the municipality says that any type of plastic is fine, and the recycler says they have never, within living memory, recycled any (e.g.) Type 3 (PVC) plastics, and so on. When those odd plastics show up, they have to be pulled out of the waste stream and landfilled.
The excuse offered in that article is that the municipality wants to make it easy for consumers, to encourage the greatest rate of potential recycling.
I have a darker view. All around the country, municipalities now have goals for recycling. They need to divert a certain fraction of their waste stream to be recycled. And — key point — once you put something in the recycling bin (and not the trash), that counts toward your goal. As long as you deliver it to the MRF with a straight face, the fraction that the MRF has to discard isn’t your problem.
In Virginia, there’s even a separate category for the materials that the MRF has to discard — recycling residue. As I read the law, in urban areas (with a mandatory 25% recycling rate), five percentage points of that (that is, up to one-fifth of everything that counts as “recycled” under the law) can be tonnage that’s rejected by the MRF and sent off to the landfill.
Given that the law required a minimum of 25%, and the Town of Vienna currently recycles just over 28% (Source: Page 9, Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, Virginia Annual Recycling Summary Report, Calendar Year 2020) then, plausibly, the only way my Town complies with the law is by padding out our true recyclables with non-recyclable material. With stuff that we know is destined for the landfill, but that we are encouraged to toss into the recyclables anyway.
Alternatively, the Town just randomly gives incorrect or out-of-date guidance on its website. That’s happened before.
In any case, the weird lesson is that the materials you are encouraged to place in your recycling bin are not necessarily the same as the materials that can actually be recycled. Municipalities will knowingly give their citizens lists of rules that are broader than the set of items that can actually be recycled. Ignore what your local government says.
Find out who actually sorts and recycles your material — your local MRF — and follow their guidance. In Fairfax County, VA I believe that almost all recycling is done by American Disposal Services. When in doubt, check their disposal/recycle guide for Virginia. Scroll down to the “search” box, and enter the item you are interested in.
Plausibly, you can claim that’s just to make it easier for citizens to recycle. But the upshot is that you are told to place materials in the recycling stream, that your MRF then has to pull out of the recycling stream.
Don’t do it. Just toss that stuff in the trash, where it will end up anyway.
Addendum: The “5 percent of plastic is recycled” figure is not relevant to this question. And why I’m never going to get a hard estimate of the correct number.
The second question I’m trying to answer is this: If I take some highly-recyclable plastic such as a #1 (PETE) soda bottle, and put it into my local recycling stream, what fraction of that soda bottle eventually makes it into some new product?
That’s not at all the same as “what fraction of all U.S plastic waste gets recycled”. Which is why “5%” is not the right answer. But it’s the question relevant to the task at hand.
Unfortunately, the numbers for this are all over the map. So much so that I’m not going to cite anything yet. But part of the problem, right here in my home town, is this:
Source: Materials Recovery Facilities fact sheet, Northern Virginia Regional Commission, on behalf of the Northern Virginia Waste Management Board, adopted September 2022. (Google reference for the .pdf).
Say what? You don’t need a permit to open a recycling facility (MRF) in Virginia? No regulations apply? Better yet, there are zero standardized reporting requirements for such facilities? Admittedly, these are not facilities that handle hazardous waste. But … really? No wonder we know next-to-nothing about actual recycling rates in this area.
Near as I can tell, the sole recordkeeping is tonnage in, and then financial receipts for sales of the tonnages of sorted materials sold. Assuming the local governments or other entities require the MRFs to provide those receipts. Some extract of that information gets reported to the State. And the State tabulates it.
The resulting numbers are pretty much awful. Below are the 202`0 and 2021 numbers, as reported by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. Even a cursory examination shows those vary far too much from year to year to be credible.
Source: Virginia DEQ, Annual Recycling Summary Report, 2020 and 2021, accessible from links on the right-hand side of this web page: https://www.deq.virginia.gov/land-waste/recycling/recycling-data
I’d say it’s likely that some state, somewhere, does a better job of it than this. But that’s not entirely clear.
In any event, I now understand why I’m probably not going to be able to answer my question. First, if Virginia is typical, states might not even track the particular types of plastic that get sold for re-use.
But mostly, even if they track the amount of plastic sold for re-use, nobody tracks the amount of plastic that was in the original load of mixed recyclables. I might, with effort, be able to pin down how much #1 (PETE) plastic got sold for recycling. But I’m pretty sure that, in Virginia, nobody has any data at all on how much PETE was in the recycling stream in the first place.
And really, when you think about it for even a minute, how could they? Disregarding that the numbers are all over the place, fundamentally, it looks like nobody gathers (or maybe even, could possibly gather) the information that would let me know the true #1 (PETE) plastic recycling rate. To know that, you’d have to know how much PETE was placed into the mixed recyclables stream. And to know that, you’d have to sort the recyclables, to pull out the PETE, before you ran your recyclables through the sorting process.
So it looks like I might be able to find some (gu)esstimates, somewhere. But I strongly suspect that there are no hard numbers for the question I want answered.
