National Issues With Plastic Recycling

In 2018 China stopped accepting our plastic recycling, and it caused quite the stir nationwide as people wondered whether it was still worth it to recycle their plastic. While this did pose a problem for many communities in the US as 70% of our plastic recycling went to China, Knoxville was actually insulated from this. I’ll explain more about why in the next section, but for now let’s take a look at plastic recycling nationwide.

China’s policy banned the import of most plastics and other materials headed for their recyclables processing facilities. In China’s defense, the world was sending them highly contaminated materials which were overwhelming their facilities and creating another environmental problem for them. However, as they had accepted roughly 50% of the world's recyclable materials, this created a problem for the US and many other countries worldwide, particularly in the plastics department.

Hauling recyclable materials is rising in cost and making recycling unprofitable, which means that more plastic is ending up in landfills, incinerators, or on the road as litter. Across the US, local governments have halted or reduced their recycling programs as they’ve scrambled to find different facilities to process their recyclables. In Philadelphia, they are now burning much of their recyclables at a waste to energy plant, which has raised concerns about air pollution.

It’s not like we were the top plastics recyclers before China’s ban (we only recycled about 9% of our plastic), but the ban has made the problem worse. We’ve seen the increased accumulation of plastic waste, increased cost to the consumer, closure of recycling facilities, and decreased waste diversion. That’s not to say that this ban is inherently bad, as it may lead to the increase of plastic waste processing facilities here in our country, which could lead to more jobs, more local manufacturers of post-consumer recycled products, and easier to recycle products. But for now the cost of recycling plastic has gone up, while revenue has gone down.

Why recycling plastic in Knoxville still works!

Knoxville keeps our recyclables local. We send recyclables to our local Materials Recovery Facility (MRF), which is owned by Westrock, where it is sorted by people and machines to be baled and sold to local businesses in the southeast. Luckily for us there are many local businesses in the Southeast that use recyclable materials, so we never needed to send our recycling to China. For example, our plastic is sold to Mohawk Carpet in Georgia. Every time you recycle you’re contributing to the local economy, not only by producing recycling jobs, but by contributing to these local businesses that rely on our materials.

Proper Recycling Technique

The best way to ensure that your waste is recycled is by reducing the amount of contamination and only recycling items that can be recycled. Here is a list of proper recycling techniques and check out the City of Knoxville’s recycling program to see exactly what they do and do not take.

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

No wishcycling
- Items that are recycled that are not recyclable either contaminate a bail full of recyclables or get sorted out and thrown away once they’ve reached the sorting facility. Unfortunately, this adds unnecessary cost and it is much cheaper to just throw away the non-recyclable materials. So if you’re not sure if an item can be recycled, look it up before placing it in your recycling bin.
Keep it clean and loose
- Rinse every recyclable container and let dry.
- Do not place recyclables in a plastic bag - plastic bags are not recyclable - keep them loose in your curbside bin.
Know your symbols
- Be sure to check the recycling symbol to see what number plastic your container is.
- Knoxville only accepts plastics #1-7, except for #6 styrofoam.
No straws
No utensils
No plastic bags or plastic film
Mixed use paper including junk mail and envelopes with the plastic can be recycled.
Flatten recyclable boxes
Glass is only recyclable at the drop off centers - it cannot be placed in your curbside bin.
When in doubt, leave it out!

Why we shouldn’t rely on recycling as the only plastic waste solution

While recycling plastic is good for our local economy and has not been disrupted by China’s ban, recycling plastic in general still has some problems that make reducing our plastic consumption a more viable long term solution.

NPR and PBS Frontline recently released an investigative report documenting the oil and plastic industries efforts to sell us on plastic recycling. The ad campaign to get people to start recycling their plastic that appeared in the 90’s was paid for by the Oil and Plastic industry. They knew that large scale plastic recycling was infeasible, due to the cost and the degradation caused during the reclamation process, but they sold us on it anyways.

Recycling plastic is expensive and it has only gotten more so since China implemented its ban. Plastic also degrades each time it’s reused, so it can only feasibly be reused once or twice. However, new plastic is much cheaper to make and is of higher quality, so it’s easier to continue producing and using new plastic (for both the producers and consumers). These problems have existed for decades, even with the implementation of new technologies, and only 10% of our plastic has ever been recycled.

Patience Melnik from the City of Knoxville Waste and Resources Management wants to clarify that this number does not mean that only 10% of the plastic you recycled is actually recycled, it just means “that plastic is everywhere in the modern world—in commercial, medical, transportation, household, packaging, and other uses. The recycling system is set up to capture beverage bottles and some laundry, bathroom, and kitchen containers, but not much more.” So don’t be discouraged from recycling your plastic as this recycled plastic can be used to reduce the amount of new plastic being made for these unrecyclable materials.

Additionally, it turns out that most of the plastic we recycle is not very recyclable. Greenpeace looked at data from the US’s 367 material recovery facilities and found that only a small amount of our plastic materials are actually recycled. “PET #1 and HDPE #2 plastic bottles and jugs are being recycled with regularity. Plastics #3 through #7, while collected by municipal recycling programs, most often are “being sent to landfills or incinerated”” (Yale 360).

Ultimately, plastic recycling options and technology are bound to get better and better with time (see an overview of creative, new technological solutions here), as they have been since the 80’s, but we can’t depend on future solutions. What we can do is recycle the plastic that we can’t go without, buy mostly post-consumer recycled plastic, and ultimately look for creative ways to reduce our plastic consumption overall. Reducing plastic and other disposable waste consumption is the best way to solve our waste problems. Businesses can also work on ways to reduce the amount of packaging they use for their products, and we can all switch to reusable, instead of disposable, goods where possible.