Why Recycling Can’t Fix A Throwaway System

It feels like we’re doing just the right thing by putting recyclables in the blue bin. It’s an action — and a value — instilled in us from an early age. But unfortunately, a lot of what’s in that bin ends up in a landfill — like up to 79% of it.

And more importantly, if we keep trying to recycle our way out of a throwaway system, we won’t make any real progress.

Recycling is energy-intensive, resource-intensive, and fundamentally linear — even if it works perfectly. And it usually doesn’t. The plastics industry promoted recycling for decades to legitimize the continued sales of single-use products, and it is in the interest of all single-use packaging producers, no matter the material, to encourage recycling over source reduction.

Combined with support from the environmental community and regulators, focus on recycling and diversion from landfill has turned attention away from source reduction and reuse systems that would result in far less waste to manage in the first place.

Recycling is in Trouble in the United States

Packaging and food serviceware simply don’t have value in recycling markets.

In the U.S., the only plastic materials that have historically been economically recoverable at scale are clean PET (#1) and HDPE (#2) plastic — mostly bottles.

Laminated multi-plastic and multi-material packaging, such as Tetra packs (plastic coated paper cartons) and resin-lined paper cups, are hard to separate and recycle. Small plastic pieces like straws, utensils, and bottle caps are challenging to recover and bale, and often fall through sorting screens.

As packaging over recent decades has shifted to lighter and harder-to-recycle plastics, the struggle to maintain recycling programs has increased. Between shifts in international trade, declining consumer demand in a slowing economy, and recycled material competition with cheaper virgin materials, pricing for recycled commodities between 2013-2023 generally fell below the cost of processing recyclables. The economics just don’t work.

To weather this volatility and to protect the profitability of their processing investments, most privately-owned MRFs (municipal recycling facilities) charge processing fees to community recycling programs. Community recycling programs not only face the capital-intensive costs of collection (i.e., trucks, collection containers, crews, and equipment maintenance), they also incur these processing fees — which are frequently more than twice the cost of landfilling. This total cost to communities directly affects their decisions on whether to offer or expand recycling services, and what materials to accept.

Recyclers need clean, higher-value materials, and they’re not receiving them.

Single-stream recycling, food contaminated packaging, and multi-material packaging combine to create “dirty” streams of low-value materials for recycling.

Historically, many industrialized countries exported their low-value materials to Asia for recycling. In the U.S., this counted as recycling regardless of the final outcome for the materials overseas. But in 2018, China stopped accepting imports of other nations’ waste for recycling, and other Asian nations have been following suit since then. The materials that continue to be exported are rarely actually recycled and often end up as mountains of trash polluting communities across the Global South.

Without options, many waste management programs in cities and towns across the U.S. now send contaminated paper and plastic (mostly food packaging) to landfills and incinerators.

Recyclable materials are not always better for the environment. And more recycling will not solve plastic pollution.

various wine bottles lined up, with a wooden box of bottles in the foreground

Recyclability as an attribute does not necessarily mean the package is better for the environment.

Some recyclable materials carry a heavy environmental footprint long before they reach the waste stream. Energy use, water consumption, and climate emissions during production play a significant role in determining whether packaging is truly sustainable.

Certain materials require intensive processing to achieve recyclability. High-temperature manufacturing, chemical treatments, and complex refining all contribute to carbon emissions. A recyclable package with a high production footprint and low recycling rate will never be a plus for the environment.
A 2018 study by Oregon Department of Environmental Quality showed that some nonrecyclable materials that end up in landfills have a far lower impact on the environment than their recyclable alternatives (for examples, glass wine bottles). In over half the study’s life-cycle comparisons between recyclable and nonrecyclable packaging, the nonrecyclable option wins.

Local compatibility is essential. Sustainable packaging must align with the recycling and waste systems where it is used. A material that performs well in one area may fail in another due to infrastructure differences. Global businesses rely on universal claims of recyclability because they can’t customize for regional realities.

More recycling will not solve plastic pollution.

By 2060, plastic use in the U.S. is projected to be more than double that of 2019 — a rate that far exceeds the rate of even optimal recycling. Approximately 36% of all plastics produced are used in packaging, including single-use plastic food and beverage containers.

Almost all of the high pollution plastic products we find in the environment — pretty much everything besides soda and water bottles — have no value in today’s recycling systems. Recycled commodity markets can’t make money off these products, so they don’t collect them. As a result, a bare minimum of plastic packaging gets recycled (somewhere between 5% to 13%, depending on how you crunch the numbers). And, in large part due to food contamination and municipal recycling challenges, the rates aren’t great for other materials, either.

The real problem? For decades, the oil and gas industry has spent millions on public education campaigns saying recycling can save the world's plastic problem. But now we know that the oil industry has been well aware all along that it is nearly impossible to recycle the world's plastic. With a green energy transition meaning a fossil fuel drawdown for vehicles and home energy, petrochemical manufacturers have pushed more and more plastic onto the market — far more than any waste system can handle.

infographic comparing declining recycling rates between 2015 and 2025

Just 9% of plastics ever produced have been recycled, with less than 1% recycled more than once. And more than three quarters of plastic found in the environment is food packaging.

The touted benefits of recycling are based on a series of assumptions that do not match the reality of how the system operates and the impacts of the materials that flow through it.

Local solid waste policies often make the mistake of specifying that products be “compostable” or “recyclable,” without looking at what happens to these products once they enter the waste stream.

A “reality test” must be applied: do these items get recycled in the local waste stream? In most cases, food serviceware does not.

Even if the stars align and food packaging makes it all the way through the recycling system, we still lose out. Reusable foodware, tracked and managed with technology like QR codes or RFID tags, is the only packaging that can provide invaluable data and consumer insights. All of the information about packaging’s supply chain journey, use rate, dwell time, and more is captured by reusable assets and helps create stronger, more successful systems. No matter if packaging goes in a recycling bin, a compost bin, or a trash barrel — billions of data points are forever lost with single-use.

Bottom line: we need to create solutions further upstream. Keeping foodware and product packaging recirculating in its original form is a far more efficient and effective way to mitigate waste and achieve resilient, robust circularity.