US Lags Behind Other Nations in Recycling

March 30, 2023

Germany, Austria and South Korea recycle 20% more trash than the US. Can they lead the US to a new era of recycling?

Landfill in Danbury, Connecticut, United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

The United States recycles 32.1% of its trash, meaning the other 67.9% of U.S. waste ends up in landfills, is incinerated, or gets lost somewhere else in the environment. Moreover, only 5 to 6 % of plastic ends up being recycled, while 85% of plastic American plastic goes to the landfills, and another 10% is incinerated. These numbers are especially concerning given that plastic is the one of the most difficult types of waste to biodegrade.

Nationally, there are few to no laws in the U.S. that mandate recycling. There have been efforts to change that. On March 5, 2021, Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Alan Lowenthal reintroduced the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act, a bill that would ban single use plastic bags and discourage the use of plastic utensils and straws. In addition, it would increase post consumer recycling minimums to 25% by 2025 and 80% by 2040. However, like many similar bills in the United States, it has not been passed.

While the federal government lags behind, certain states have been considerably more active in promoting recycling. Since 2022, New York has passed two important laws; one demanding that the carpet industry becomes more responsible for its waste and the other allowing consumers to fix their own electronics. California has banned certain types of produce bags, and Michigan has committed to overhauling its recycling system, striving for a 45% recycling rate, albeit without a clear deadline as to when this needs to be achieved.

With that said, even with state efforts, the US still remains far behind the world’s leaders in recycling; Germany, Austria, and South Korea. They recycle 56.1%, 53.8%, and 53.7% of their waste, respectively, each of which is over 20% more than the current US figure and around 10% more than Michigan's new recycling goal. This largely is due to enhanced recycling laws, as well as cultures and practices in those countries that incentivize and engage their populations to be environmentally conscious.

Germany

German Recycling Bins, 3268zauber, CC BY-SA 3.0

The first pillar of Germany’s recycling success is its Deposit Refund System (DRS). In Germany, when consumers purchase a bottle that can be recycled, they must pay a deposit between 0.08 and 0.25 euros. Single use plastic bottles and more environmentally harmful products tend to have a higher deposit. Once the items are returned to a retail store, the consumer will be reimbursed for their deposit. This system has proven to be incredibly successful, reaching a 98.4% return rate. In 2024, Germany plans to expand their DRS to include all milk and dairy product containers.

Germany also has a mandatory recycling system. Each household has four different recycling bins: yellow bins for lightweight packaging, green or blue bins for waste and cardboard, black or gray bins for residual and household waste, and brown bins for compostable kitchen and garden waste. If the waste is not sorted correctly, workers at the recycling plant will go through the waste and sort it manually, and the household that failed to sort the waste will be fined.

Austria

Plastic Bags Package, zeevveez, CC BY 2.0.

Three major policies contribute to Austria’s high recycling rate. First, like Germany, Austria has a rigorous recycling sorting system. Second is the country’s blanket landfill ban. This policy instructs that any item with a total organic carbon emission rate of more than 5% is banned from going into landfills, meaning that the most harmful products have to be recycled. Finally, in 2020, Austria prohibited the use of plastic bags, completely removing one of the longest lasting products in landfills, with a decomposition time of 200-500 years.

South Korea

South Korea’s “pay-as-you-throw” recycling system requires consumers to buy specialized food waste bags, costing about 20 cents. The profits from the food waste bags goes straight back into the recycling market, greatly minimizing the cost of recycling to the government. When these bags are full, consumers leave the bag in a special bin. These bags are then picked up and composted, leading South Koreans to recycle almost 100% of their food waste.

In 2022 Keppel, a Singapore-based company, spent about 600 million dollars to buy EMK Co, South Korea’s biggest waste management and recycling company. Keppel expects the value of their investment in EMK to almost double in five years. South Korea has created a system in which private companies are able to make a profit buying and selling waste, greatly increasing the percentage of their waste being recycled.

It's important to recognize that while all these systems are successful in their own countries, the cultural, political, and economic environment in the US is very different from that of Germany, Austria or South Korea. Additionally, the US has a population about four times the size of Germany, the biggest of the three countries, meaning any recycling measures are much more difficult to implement. Yet, with the US lagging so far behind the world leaders in recycling, it would be foolish to not at least consider the solutions that have worked so well for these other countries.

GET INVOLVED

Keep America Beautiful was founded in 1953. Since then, they have created many different recycling programs, including recently a Cigarette Litter Prevention Program. Within a ten year period, they earned their communities over a billion dollars in economic value, have planted millions of plants, flowers, and bulbs, cleaned over 500 kilometers of roads, and collected over 750 million pounds of litter. You can donate to Keep America here.

Ample Harvest Inc. was founded in 2009 by Gary Oppenheimer as a way to reduce food waste by having gardeners donate their surplus food. Beyond this, they have created an Emergency Food Assistance Program to help food insecure families. Currently, they are working with over 62 million gardeners, spread over all 50 states, allowing them to generate billions of pounds of food they donate to over 8,000 different charities. This has given 4,200 different communities a sustainable food supply free of charge and, in 2020 alone, saved 1.6 million pounds of produce from being discarded. You can donate money to Ample Harvest Inc. here and give your excess food produce to your local food pantry here.

The Container Recycling Institute functions much like a Think Tank, researching recycling so they can provide recycling options and insights to local communities and governments. With a perfect 100% score for Finance and Accountability on Charity Navigator, The Container Recycling Institute, since its founding in 1991, has grown into an incredibly trustworthy Institution. As a leading recycling resource, they helped expand the Connecticut recycling Bottle Bill, the largest expansion of this kind in 10 years. In California, they helped raise the annual consumer recycling budget to over 100 million dollars. You can donate to The Container Recycling Institute here and become a member here.

Jeremy is a Writing Seminars and International Studies major at Johns Hopkins University. He is an avid writer and the Co-Founder of Writers’ Warehouse, Johns Hopkins’ first creative writing group. He is an advocate for Indigenous rights, and studies how Indigenous philosophies can be used to help prevent climate change. Using his writing, he hopes to bring attention to underrepresented voices in today’s world.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

September 16, 2022

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, plastic debris gets caught in ocean currents that drag it all together, creating a massive island of trash double the size of Texas

Plastic from the Ocean. Kevin Krejci. CC BY 2.0

In the Pacific Ocean lie two massive islands of garbage, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Western Garbage Patch is located near Japan, and the Eastern one is in the waters between Hawaii and California. Combined, both patches are estimated to span 1.6 million square kilometers (over 620,000 square miles). This is equivalent to twice the size of Texas, the second largest state in the United States in terms of land, and it is not even an exact measurement. Due to the fact that a lot of marine debris sinks to the ocean floor, the exact size of the patches is unknown. Trillions of pieces of plastic have all found their way into the ocean and were carried to these island patches by various ocean currents.

Washed up plastic. Fabi Fliervoet. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Part of that problem is because much of the debris consists of microplastics, small pieces of plastic 5 millimeters or less that have flaked off from larger items. These microplastics are also easily ingested by fish and other marine life, which is absolutely damaging to them. The chemicals in the plastic will affect the animals, which can start affecting the food chain as the smaller ones get eaten, and it could eventually make its way up to humans. It is hard to determine the full extent of the effects of them in human bodies due to the fact that we don’t know how long microplastics stay in our bodies, but studies show microplastics harm cells. Microplastics are the most dangerous and harmful part of all the litter in the ocean due to these effects.

Besides humans, the litter in the ocean is harmful to marine life. There are turtles that ingest plastic bags, thinking they are jellyfish, birds that mistake some bits for fish eggs and feed it to their chicks, causing their organs to rupture and other sea animals that die of starvation because their stomach is full of plastic that has no nutrients. Beyond that, some plastics will release methane and ethylene when exposed to sunlight, both of which are greenhouse gasses that contribute to global warming. In addition, the microplastics affect the efficiency of photosynthesis in plankton, which in turn affects the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Microplastic negatively impacts so many parts of life and the environment.

Cleaner beaches. Paul van de Velde. CC BY 2.0

To Get Involved

There are many organizations that fight plastic pollution in the ocean. As most plastic ends up in the ocean, a lot of them are focused on helping reduce the amount there, but there are organizations that aim to reduce the use of plastic in the world overall. For example, the Oceanic Society lowers plastic use by raising awareness of its effects, reducing usage in tourism practices and by supporting coastal communities. The Plastic Soup Foundation based in the Netherlands aims to prevent plastic from entering the environment in the first place. By sharing knowledge and monitoring research related to plastic pollution, the Plastic Soup Foundation educates people and formulates projects to aid in their goal. It also advocates for diminishing individual plastic usage and creating regulations and legislations for decreasing plastic.

To learn more about the Oceanic Society, click here.

To learn more about the Plastic Soup Foundation, click here.

To learn more about the Plastic Pollution Coalition, click here.

VIDEO: The Man Behind the World’s Largest Beach Cleanup

April 19, 2022

In 2015, Versova Beach in Mumbai was little more than a dumping ground for garbage and waste. After witnessing the devastating impact the refuse was having on the ocean, young lawyer Afroz Shah, with the help of 84-year-old neighbor Harbansh Mathur, decided to take matters into their own hands. What started off as a single man’s mission to clean up his favorite childhood beach turned into the world’s largest beach cleanup initiative with 70,000 adult volunteers and 60,000 student volunteers. After three years of work, Shah and hundreds of volunteers had cleaned up over 9 million kilograms of plastic and waste, with hopes to expand their initiative to other beaches in the future. The beach is now clean enough to welcome olive ridley sea turtles ready to lay their eggs to its shores. In 2016, Shah was awarded the UN’s Champions of the Earth award. He is currently working to clean Mithi River, Mumbai’s longest river.

A rainstorm over Bassenthwaite Lake in the English Lake District. Sagesolar. CC BY 2.0.

Plastic Rain: The New Acid Rain

July 16, 2020

The world produces approximately 359 million metric tons of plastic every year, half of which is single-use and immediately thrown out. A 2017 study discovered that of the 8.3 billion metric tons of plastics produced, 12% is incinerated and only 9% is recycled. The remaining 79% accumulates in landfills and the natural environment, including the oceans. More than 8 million tons of plastic makes its way to our oceans every year, polluting an already fragile environment due to habitat elimination, destructive fishing practices and other pollutants such as oil spills and reactive nitrogen and phosphorus that rivers like the Mississippi carry into the ocean.

Some of those pollutants enter the water cycle in the form of acid rain. Acid rain poisons everything it comes into contact with—the sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides harm humans, wildlife and the Earth. Acid rain was first discovered in the U.S. “in the 1950s when Midwest coal plants spewed sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides into the air, turning clouds—and rainfall—acidic,” according to the National Science Foundation. It wasn’t until widespread damaging effects began on forests and bodies of water in the Northeast that Congress took action by passing the Clean Air Act in 1970, which imposed emission regulations to target air pollutants. This was not enough, however, as acid rain became one of the most well-known pollutants during the 1970s and 1980s as it damaged German, Czech and Polish forests in the “black triangle” region and increased the acidity of bodies of water in the U.S., particularly along the Atlantic coast, which in turn harmed the aquatic organisms and ecosystem.

Acid rain may be slightly less of a problem now with effective environmental regulations, but our environment is not any less at risk. There is a new threat to our environment that is falling along with rainwater: microplastics.

A study conducted in 2019 by researchers at U.S. Geological Survey shows that microplastics have made their way into the water cycle and are permeating virtually every surface on Earth with no way to control where the plastic rains down. Researchers discovered that over 90% of the water samples taken along Colorado’s Front Range contained microplastics.

Microplastics are plastic debris that are less than 5 millimeters in length that come from a variety of sources, including microbeads—exfoliants used in skin products and toothpastes— textile fabrics, and larger plastic items that have degraded into smaller pieces after being broken down by wind, the sun and waves. In addition to taking a long time to decompose, microbeads are damaging due to their ability to absorb toxins and are notoriously difficult to remove from the environment due to their minute size. They became such a problem that Congress passed the Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015, which prohibits the manufacturing of rinse-off cosmetic products containing microbeads. Although there is not enough research at this point to determine how detrimental microplastics are, it is evident that they are polluting the Earth—appearing in remote areas such as the French Pyrenees and even hitching rides on sea breezes.

New research published last month indicates that plastic rain is a huge problem—leaving no place safe from plastic pollution. Researchers collected rainwater and air samples from 11 protected areas in the western U.S. for 14 months and discovered over 1,000 metric tons of microplastic pieces in the rainwater collected, which is “the equivalent of over 120 million plastic water bottles,” according to Wired. The researchers predicted that in just five years 11 billion metric tons of plastic are projected to accumulate in our environment, which is equivalent to the weight of approximately 55 million blue whales.

Asiya Haouchine

is an Algerian-American writer who graduated from the University of Connecticut in May 2016, earning a BA in journalism and English. She was an editorial intern and contributing writer for Warscapes magazine and the online/blog editor for Long River Review. She is currently studying for her Master’s in Library and Information Science. @AsiyaHaou

Turning Plastic Trash Into Cash in Haiti

November 6, 2019

Plastic Bank is a global network of micro-recycling markets that empower the poor to transcend poverty by cleaning the environment. Operating in Haiti, the Philippines, Indonesia and Brazil, it works like this…. Locals collect plastic trash, bring it to recycling centers where it is exchanged for cash.