FPA Responds to ABC News’ “Trashed: The Secret Life of Plastic Recycling” Investigation

ABC News’ recent “Trashed: The Secret Life of Plastic Recycling” investigation isn’t about plastic bags or even plastic packaging, it is about the current U.S. recycling system. Put trackers in any recyclable item today and chances are they may end up in an incinerator or landfill. This should be the intended result, given that these trackers are actually contaminants to the recycling stream and would be filtered out for disposal through most recycling processes. It is also because we have over 20,000 different municipal recycling programs across the country that are based on the value of the materials being collected and recycled. This value changes with market conditions and when it does, some products destined for recycling are diverted to disposal instead. Also, until recently, much of that value was in exporting our recyclables overseas. Because of these foreign markets, governments running the recycling programs here in the U.S. did not invest in the infrastructure needed to manage our own recyclables. When China, the biggest importer of U.S. recyclables, stopped accepting them, the markets collapsed.

Plastic bags and films have never been accepted at traditional material recovery facilities through the curbside collection of recyclables because these facilities were never designed to handle this type of packaging and because there is little value in the post-consumer product. Thus, the store drop-off program was created for bags and films, and value was added to these post-consumer materials by combining them with the “back of the house” items from grocery stores, like pallet wrap and shipping materials. Is it a perfect system? Perhaps not, but it is the system we have, and just like our curbside systems, unless and until the needed investment is made in modernizing our recycling systems across the board, not all the items collected for recycling will ultimately get recycled.
read more at: https://www.flexpack.org/