Recycling in U.S. expands amid outcry over plastics
The epiphany came when a certain coffee chain started replacing plastic straws with paper ones. Despite increasingly dire warnings about Texas-size islands of plastic in the world’s oceans, the sudden public debate over straws was arguably a turning point in how American consumers think about sustainability.
On one hand, the rise of paper straws is a brazen case of greenwashing, since straws make up only a tiny share of waste. On the other, the proliferation of paper and bamboo straws marked the beginning of a larger commercial pivot away from plastic.
Companies are beginning to realize there’s more to lose from offending consumers who are aware of how cheap plastic products feed global warming, choke oceans, kill wildlife and more slowly threaten us. This is especially the case when it comes to packaging.
Containers, cartons, wrapping and everything else discarded after a product is used make up about 30 percent of all American trash, or more than 76 million tons annually. Now the biggest retailers and consumer goods giants are racing to replace everything from plastic envelopes to styrofoam meat trays with fiber-based iterations.
The U.S. paper recycling industry, it turns out, has suddenly found itself in demand and maybe just in the nick of time.
Until 2018, recycling in America, from plastics to paper to assorted waste, was propped up by China’s willingness to purchase much of it, ostensibly for recycling and reuse by its domestic industries. Instead of returning to China empty, shipping containers were filled with refuse, bales of plastic bottles, cardboard and wastepaper.
But when Beijing decided it didn’t want the world’s garbage anymore, slashing the amount it would take while requiring the rest to be near-pristine, the value of American recyclables plummeted.
With an excess supply and no one to sell it to, prices for recycled residential paper even touched negative territory. That means cities have to pay someone to take away the material they collect. The S&P 500 Paper Packaging Index has dropped more than 25 percent since China started restricting trash.
For U.S. towns and cities, with their colorful recycling barrels and bins, what was at best a break-even proposition suddenly became very expensive. Unable to sell recycling at a high enough price, they either had to raise taxes to pay for collection, dump it all into landfills or burn it. Many chose the latter options.
Renee Yardley, a senior vice president at recycling company Sustana Group, said 2019 has been “a challenging year” for municipalities that collect paper.
But consumer goods companies might be starting to turn that around.
Trying to get ahead of regulations in countries that ban or tax plastic packaging, some product manufacturers are turning to recycled paper for the first time. With restrictions on singleuse plastics in place across 60 nations and 350 U.S. municipalities, analysts on MSCI’s environmental, social and governance research team said plastics “could lose market share to alternatives.”
More than 200 businesses, representing about 20 percent of all packaging used globally, have made commitments to reduce plastic waste, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Coca-Cola European Partners became the latest to do so, saying it will replace plastic shrink wrap with cardboard for its multipacks across Western Europe, removing about 4,000 tons of plastic annually.