The Good Intention But Troubling Problem of Wishcycling

Imagine one morning you’ve just finished your to-go cup of coffee and you are ready to dispose of it. Your hand hovers over the trash can, pulling towards the recycling bin. Where does the cup go? It’s made of paper, so it must go in the recycling bin. But something is telling you that it might be better to put it in the trash. You’re unsure, so just to be safe, you put it in the recycling bin. After all, it’s better to put something in the recycling so that it has a chance to be recycled than to put it in the trashcan where it will go to a landfill with no chance of being recycled, right?

To Go Coffee Cup. Photo by Daniel Hooper on Unsplash

This good intention is called wishcycling. Wishcycling is the process of adding an item to the recycling bin without knowing if it’s actually recyclable. It’s a problem familiar to many of us, whether we are avid or beginner recyclers. When faced with items like a coffee cup, plastic bag, or takeout container, we choose the hope that it is actually recyclable over the guilt of having to send something to the landfill. However, this good intention is actually a major problem for recycling centers.

Why is wishcycling a problem?

Materials Recovery Facility. Photo by Re-Thanks.

When we place an item in the recycling bin, we tend to forget about it.  We don’t often think about what happens to the item after we take it to a convenience center or it’s picked up in our curbside recycling. We often feel as if our job is done, and the recycling centers will take it from there. In the case of wishcycling, we trust that the workers at the recycling centers will know what to do. They will find a way to magically make our to-go coffee cups into something new.

After they are picked up, recyclables go to Material Recovery Facilities (or MRFs) where the materials are sorted. Materials travel down a conveyor belt where workers hand-remove items that cannot be recycled. This is the first problem of wishcycling. If workers are constantly delayed by having to remove a significant amount of non-recyclable items, the process is no longer efficient, which can lead to higher sorting costs. Recycling is a business, and costs need to stay low so that it can continue running.    

Even more significantly, wishcycled items can also lead to contamination. Contamination is when non-recyclable materials end up in a recycling center. Recycled materials are packaged in bales, but when a certain percent of a bale is contaminated, the whole bale of recycling is considered unusable and thrown away. That means that all the recyclable items also end up in the landfill, which can make it seem like our recycling habits were wasted. A study in the UK showed that in 2018, over 500,000 tons of recycling was sent to the landfill because of contamination in 2018.

How did wishcycling become a problem?

Before the 1990s, recycling had to be sorted before it could be picked up. That meant that the residents themselves had to separate the paper, plastic, glass, and metal. With these separate recycling bins, it was easier to determine what was and what was not recyclable.

But in the 1990s and 2000s, curbside recycling became increasingly single-stream. That means that everything – paper, plastic, glass, metal – went into one bin. By 2014, 80% of US communities used single-stream recycling. While on the surface this made recycling seem much easier, it actually made it more difficult to distinguish what could and couldn’t be recycled. Instead of sorting the recycling ourselves, we now could just pop something into the bin and hope someone else would figure out whether or not it could be recycled. 

Wishcycling and Consumerism

Ever since the 1970s, recycling has become a part of many people’s daily lives. From a young age, we are taught the importance of recycling and how it will help the planet. But recycling isn’t a cure-all for the problems caused by climate change.

Recycling Cartoon. Photo by Plastic News.

Just as we hope that recycling will help the planet, society also depends on the ability to recycle to maintain habits of excessive consumerism. The ability to recycle encourages us as buyers to continue buying single-use plastic and other disposable items, because we know we can recycle it. But in 2018, only 8.7 percent of plastic was recycled, which means the majority of it found its way to either the landfill or the ocean. The ability to recycle promotes further consumerism, instead of encouraging us to buy and use less.

A personal example is when my apartment complex took away their single-stream recycling dumpster about a year ago. When the option of accessible recycling was taken away from me, I had several options. I knew I didn’t want to just start throwing everything in the trash can, so I could either buy less  or I could find another place to take my recyclables. I chose the latter option. It was not even a conscious decision – buying less did not even cross my mind. Recycling is such an essential part to continued consumerism, that it didn’t even occur to me that I had the option of reducing what I bought.

Rethinking our consumerism habits so that we are buying less is one way to decrease our wishcycling. If we are buying less, then there is less need to recycle what we have. However, the responsibility shouldn’t completely be on the shoulders of the consumer. Companies have the ability to create less packaging for their products. We as consumers must show them this through demand. By buying less products with excessive packaging or non-recyclable packaging, we have the power to affect what companies sell to us.

How can we stop wishcycling?

With recycling rules varying so drastically across the country, it can seem like wishcycling is an inevitable part of recycling. The best solution to wishcycling is to learn about what can and can’t be recycled in your city or county. The City of Knoxville has a fantastic guide about what can and cannot be placed in curbside recycling, and they even have a toolbar where you can search specific items to find out if they can or can’t be recycled. The City and County convenience centers are multi-stream, which makes it easier to sort items ahead of time and weed out any wishcycled items.

Although it can be difficult to throw something away that seems like it should be recyclable, you are actually helping make recycling more efficient in doing so. Remember – when in doubt, throw it out!