U.S. Recycling Industry Is Struggling to Figure Out a Future without China

by Christopher Joyce (National Public Radio) The U.S. used to send a lot of its plastic waste to China to get recycled. But last year, China put the kibosh on imports of the world's waste. The policy, called National Sword, freaked out people in the U.S. — a huge market for plastic waste had just dried up. Where was it all going to go now?

How many kinds of plastic are there? "Ohhhh," he (Ernie Simpson, TerraCycle's global vice president for research and development) sighs. "Indefinite, just about. There are about 20 different categories of material, but there are blends and there are hybrids." Almost all possess their own characteristics, some easily recyclable, many not. Some can be melted down; others shredded mechanically or chemically broken down. They end up as pellets the size of small marbles. These go to fabricators that turn the material back into products.

There's a catch though. "This particular one," Simpson says of the beach plastic, "is probably three times as expensive as virgin" — virgin being brand-new plastic made straight from oil and gas out of the ground. This is one of the obstacles to circularity: It costs a lot. There's not a lot of money to be made from recycling to begin with, and it's tough for recycled plastic to compete with virgin plastic made cheap by the boom in U.S. oil and gas production. And there aren't nearly enough recyclers in the U.S. to handle the tsunami of new plastic pouring out of the petrochemical industry.

Several petrochemical companies have joined big consumer brands in pledging to make most of their plastic recyclable, reusable or compostable within the next decade or two. Their group, Alliance to End Plastic Waste, has promised to spend $1.5 billion over five years to do that.

But as environmental groups like Greenpeace and Break Free From Plastic point out, just because something can technically be recycled doesn't mean it will be. There has to be an industry robust enough to do it — and a profit at the end of the day. And, they say, building up recycling allows plastic producers to keep making 300 million tons of new plastic every year (half of which is for single use) and to put the burden of cleaning up the waste on someone else.

Recycling companies need huge investments, and to get that, they have to show they have a market for their products. And for that, Pochiro (Kara Pochiro from the Association of Plastic Recyclers) says, they need commitments — voluntary or mandated by law — by consumer goods companies to buy recycled plastic.

One thing driving that growth is the belief that demand for petroleum-based fuels will decline — the oil and gas industry is looking to produce more plastics from petrochemicals to take up the slack.

So if a new circular plastics economy recycles — that is, reuses — more old plastic, why is the petrochemical industry spending billions of dollars for a boom in new plastic? Where is all that new plastic going to go? It seems the industry isn't too worried. The American Chemistry Council's analysis includes this statement about new plastic: "In a virtuous cycle, as the manufacturing renaissance accelerates, demand for plastic products will be generated, reinforcing resin [raw plastic] demand." READ MORE