Last week, I lamented about our national (USA) struggle to take care of our trash, and soliloquized about the lack of attention afforded to the “Reduce, Reuse” part of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”. Today, I’m talking solutions.

It feels good to throw a recyclable container into the magic blue bin. But as you might have been hearing lately, a lot of those materials aren’t being recycled. This is because recyclables are often too dirty or too mixed together to be fit for reprocessing into new materials. Waste management services (and regular citizens) across the country are attempting to improve recycling volume and cleanliness with AI-enhanced sorting robots, better labeling on bins, and public awareness campaigns. While these measures can certainly fix a broken recycling system, the waste crisis has shown me that recycling alone is not an effective long-term solution for dealing with our waste. Recycling, of course, is a key short-term solution, and will continue to be one vital piece of the waste management puzzle in the long term. Recycling alone will not be enough, however. We will not be able to efficiently manage our civilization’s waste unless our civilization’s packaging and products are designed specifically to be recycled and reused.

One thing that we all can agree on is that our current system isn’t working. Something has to change. Before we obsess about AI or blockchain as a panacea for all our problems, let’s look more closely at the reasons we’re not making the Dean’s List at Healthy Planet University.

Almost nobody can make a profit with recycling, and because of that, nobody will make invest in improving our recycling infrastructure unless they have to. Municipal, state, and national governments sometimes decree recycling targets at the behest of their people. However, any funding for such initiatives usually comes from tax-funded coffers, and you know it’s a process to raise taxes or deficits for anything in this country.

You would think, at least, that waste management companies might at least stand to make money off your recyclables. However, re-processed packaging materials (often called “post-consumer materials”) are usually not worth enough money to cover costs for the recycling operation. (The main exception to this is aluminum, which often subsidizes the negative profits of paper, glass, and plastic. Aluminum is wonderful, and we will talk much more about it in a future post.) Instead, waste companies cover their costs by charging fees for moving trash (and in some cases recyclables) away from your home or for dumping trash in their landfill. Even if you don’t pay for that service directly, the county or city you live in does. This causes a perverse incentive for most waste management companies: more trash means more garbage collection and tipping fees. Some particularly progressive or passionate towns and companies may push better recycling for the sake of it, but none of these organizations are charities.

To see why recycling is a losing game financially, let’s run some financials for an imaginary recycling operation. PET, the material that makes up single-use plastic water bottles, was worth 16 cents per pound about a year ago. It takes about 40 bottles to make a pound of PET, give or take 10. Imagine we can collect about 1 pound of PET from each house each week. (Hopefully that’s not all in water bottles – shampoo, juice, and many plastic food packaging is also made of PET.) Say you can hit 500 houses in one collection run. That’s 16 cents/pound x 1 pound/house x 1,000 houses/run. That’s $160 per run.

Now we consider the costs. A typical garbage truck makes about 1,000 stops a day along a route that is 130 miles long. There are always at least 2 people on a garbage truck crew – pay them minimum wage for each hour of an 8-hour day ($7.25 x 8 x 2), and you’re already spending $116. (Note also that most garbage drivers are paid much more than minimum wage since the job is so dangerous and technical.) Garbage trucks are incredibly inefficient and get you just 3 miles per gallon of diesel, which costs around $3/gallon. 130 miles means you need 43 gallons of diesel, costing you $129 altogether. The collection alone cost you about $250. The sorting, the shipping to the reprocessing facility, the reprocessing, and the distribution to your buyers? Forget about it. Throwing in aluminum cans, which went for 67 cents a pound last year, evens out and sometimes rights the balances.

The already sketchy business case gets even sketchier when you consider the time and effort required to sort and clean recyclables for reprocessing. According to Waste Management (a fitting name for one of the largest waste management companies), roughly 25% of the items Americans put in the recycling bin are contaminated. Those items are often thrown away. The remainder has to be meticulously sorted, usually by human hands over a conveyor belt but increasingly by computer-controlled optical sorters. The more mixed and dirty the recyclables are, the more meticulous the sorting and the more the sorting costs.

There are several reasons why we have trouble sorting and cleaning our recyclables. Over the past few decades, many waste management companies have switched to single-stream recycling, where the consumer can simply toss every type of recycling into a single bin. While this makes recycling more convenient for us, it makes the recyclables harder to sort. It also leads to dirtier materials: originally, an un-rinsed milk jug would only get spoiled milk on other plastics, but with single-stream, it also gets the cardboard right under it.

Mixing together all the recyclable materials makes it easier for people to mix unrecyclable materials into the bin. Wishcycling is the creative and euphonic term that the garbage intelligentsia use to describe this wishful recycling. I feel good putting something in the recycling bin because I assume that things in the recycling bin actually get recycling. However, I cannot get radioactive plutonium recycled just by putting it in a bin because this material (a) is not recyclable and (b) will make it more dangerous and expensive to recycle the other things in the bin.

Recycling properly (e.g. calling the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to come pick your plutonium out of your trash before sending it all to the landfill) requires a lot of effort. Even when you’re dealing with a typical batch of weekly waste (i.e. not plutonium), recycling takes a solid hour or fraction of an hour. No American would recycle if they didn’t feel like it was worth the time. But as the recycling gets dirtier and harder to sort, we are more skeptical that our recyclables are actually sorted and processed into new materials. And so, the value of recycling in many people’s minds will decrease. When the value decreases in someone’s mind, the effort he or she spends to recycle will decrease to match that value. This person spends less time sorting and cleaning their recyclables, further polluting the system, making it more expensive to salvage recyclable material. The downward spiral continues.

I’ve comfortably established why our waste system is broken. Obviously, something has to change so that our waste stream is smaller and easier to manage. As before, I insist that the only real solution is to design packaging and products specifically to be recycled and reused.

In general, designing something to be easier to reuse or recycle will make it easier to reuse or recycle (duh). Single stream recycling was introduced to make recycling easier. It got us to throw more materials into the recycling, but in the end recycling became more difficult because single stream made the sorting and processing more complex without making the materials themselves any easier to recycle. What if we could make the consumer’s act of recycling even easier than putting something into a single stream bin, without mixing everything together and getting spoiled milk on the cardboard? For now, just accept that it’s possible – most of the rest of my blog will be spent on explaining just how that’s possible. Some of the things that we wishcycle today would actually be recyclable, leading to less wishcycling, which further improves our utopian recycling stream. The more easily I can get my recyclables into the recycling stream without polluting it, the lesser value I will need to justify spending that effort. On the other hand, citizens of this utopia already know that the recycling stream is clean, so the potential value of recycling will skyrocket. Low effort and high rewards will make proper recycling a no-brainer.

What about the financial incentives for the people who actually handle the waste? I said earlier that recycling is a money-losing game, so no respectable for-profit organization will bother, unless they can pair the recycling service with a garbage service that charges by the volume that is hauled from your house and/or dumped into the landfill. The problem here is that the little value in recyclables is the value of the material that is sorted, cleaned, and processed, and getting to that point usually costs more than the material can be sold for. Using easier-to-recycle materials will decrease the expenses of getting from old packaging to fresh materials for new packaging. If the value of the material stays the same, then profits are more likely. Sadly, the value of the material is dependent on the need for the material, so there is no way to reliably raise it.

If products are designed for total re-use, however, the end value does increase. Recycling only re-uses the material, but here we consider re-using the entire form of the product. Re-using the material requires a middleman to re-process the material into a new product. A re-usable product, though, can be re-sold directly to a new consumer without having to buy the re-made product from a manufacturer. Now that there is a more definite profit involved with recovering the product, the relevant companies will actively attempt to recover them. This puts even less of a burden to recycle and reuse on the consumer, making recycling and reuse much more likely, making the businesses that collect recycling and reused products more profitable. The upward spiral continues.

This has all been very abstract. As an example, I’ll quickly return to single-use plastic water bottles and PET, the plastic from which the bottles are made. They’re often discarded on the ground because it requires effort to carry them from where you finished it to a garbage receptacle. It requires even more effort to keep the empty bottle with you until you locate a recycling bin. We could make the bottles easier to recycle by replacing PET with a material that evaporates into oxygen and other good, organic gases when you put the cap back onto the empty bottle. (There’s no material like this as far as I know; it’s all for the sake of the example.) The bottle has become significantly easier to recycle – all you need to do is remember to put the cap back on once you’re finished. The effort is low, and the benefit – a little bit more oxygen in the air instead of trash on the sidewalk – almost definitely exceeds the cost of the effort.

Say, though, that this type of evaporating water bottle is ridiculously expensive to produce. Making them more recyclable is good for the environment, but not for business. You could go back to producing the PET bottles that people leave all over the sidewalks and overburdening the recycling system. Instead, though, we make the bottles easier to reuse. You create bottles out of yet another plastic, which is easy to clean and safe to reuse multiple times. You set up a kiosk which gives thirsty men and women store credit for every empty water bottle they return. Now, you can collect those empty bottles, clean them, and sell them to people again. Or, since people have shown to be receptive to owning reusable water bottles, you could switch to producing high-quality water bottles that people buy and use for years at a time before the bottles break or are lost on a hiking trail somewhere in Brazil.

This focus on reusable products is known to many as the circular economy. (You can bet your pet badger that I will do lots of circular economy talk in the coming months.) Traditionally, products are made for one person, used up, and discarded. We can’t just beef up sorting equipment at recycling facilities and expect our trash to magically be recycled… We need to have less trash. Reducing use of anything helps with that, but there is a limit to how much we can reduce without seriously lowering our quality of life. Our waste and products need to be circular – each feeding into the other, so fully and so frequently that we become unable to distinguish between the two. Recycling, of course, is a key short-term solution, and will continue to be one vital piece of the waste management puzzle in the long term, but it is not the drastic solution that such a drastic problem requires.