Recently I received a notice in the mail reading “we will no longer be collecting recycling from your address, and we apologise for the inconvenience”. My neighborhood cancelled recycling, something I had been taught to do since kindergarten. This news got me thinking – how does recycling really work? I had heard some rumors that recycling wasn’t really “worth it” because of new trade policies, and decided to dig a little deeper. 

I wanted to figure out if recycling was worth it. Was my sorting of paper from plastic really helping the environment at all? In short: It’s complicated. 

Recycling can often get contaminated, especially using the current system of a singular bin for every material. People often recycle materials without properly cleaning them, which can make the entire bin unusable, causing it to end up in a landfill. Contamination also makes recycling more expensive and less effective, decreasing incentives for cities and municipalities to recycle. Certain materials are a lot easier to recycle than others, and take a lot of greenhouse gasses to break down. Plastic and glass take a significant amount of energy to break down, and can actually create more greenhouse gasses than simply letting them break down in a landfill. On the other hand, paper, cardboard, and aluminum are easy to recycle, and have an overall positive effect on the environment. 

Recycling can become an easy “green trap” to fall into, tricking us into believing that we are being environmentally friendly. Reducing our single use plastic use is drastically better for the environment than recycling, and throwing something in the green bin can trick us into feeling like we are being sustainable when we could be doing more. 

On a broader level, the American recycling system is fundamentally flawed. We ship a lot of our recycling overseas to be processed, creating a large carbon footprint to transport all of the waste. The ways in which recycling is actually processed needs more development as well, as the systems to break down the waste are inefficient.