As Earth Day approaches, many folks are rightly wondering how they can improve their environmental footprint. Fact is, the Earth has finite resources, and consumption — well, consumes them. Recycling can help stretch our finite resources by allowing us to reuse various materials. But, recycling is not the panacea it is sometimes treated as, and some supposedly recyclable materials end up in landfills anyway.
In recent years, recycling rates have stagnated. Each year, Americans recycle about 70 million tons of waste. Still, the EPA estimates that our recycling rate is only about 35 percent, meaning the majority of what could be recycled simply isn't. Experts also warn that Americans engage in "aspirational recycling," meaning they try to recycle the things that they think should be recycled rather than what actually can be recycled. As a result, seemingly full recycling bins often send large amounts of (unrecyclable) trash to the dump.
The United States is the world's leading producer of plastic trash, creating more than 45 million tons of it as of 2016. Many Americans diligently sort plastics with the belief that they'll eventually be recycled. Yet less than 10 percent of plastic is actually recycled. Why? For most types of plastic, it's simply much cheaper to create new plastic than recycle the old. Plastic also loses quality quickly during the recycling process.
Meanwhile, glass doesn't lose much quality during recycling and can be recycled over and over again. Yet only about 30 percent of glass in the USA is recycled. Glass is heavy, hard to process, and can be dangerous, so a lot of it ends up trashed anyway.
Still, it's not all bad news. Some plastics, like the PET plastics commonly used in water and soda bottles, are actually pretty easy to recycle. Ditto for paper products, which Americans are surprisingly good about recycling.