rjzimmerman:

Excerpt:

In the past few years, one of the core pillars of the environmental movement — recycling — has fallen on hard times. News dispatches reveal hundreds of cities and counties scaling back their recycling programs because of the high costs associated with processing recyclables and the lack of demand for the materials. A new conventional wisdom is gaining ground suggesting that recycling may not be worth the effort.

But is that true? And has recycling ever gotten a fair shake? After decades, less than a third of municipal solid waste is recycled — and much of that is contaminated with garbage, which diminishes or destroys its value. Almost 50 years after the first Earth Day, are we really ready to admit defeat and return to the “Mad Men”-era ethos of the “throwaway society”?

The root of the crisis starts with the way recycling has been presented to the public. There are thousands of confusing recycling instructions on bins throughout the country, which makes people skeptical and apathetic about recycling, and projects the message that recycling is unimportant. And the inconsistent labels on bins lead to millions of tons of garbage being thrown into recycling bins. The contamination is extremely expensive to try to pull out of the recyclables during processing, which makes the recycled commodities less desirable to manufacturers — and, therefore, makes it less cost effective to recycle.

Some of the biggest and most dominant recycling companies in the U.S. are owned by landfill companies. Therefore, when recycling doesn’t work well, the landfill side of their businesses becomes more profitable. You’ll notice in many news articles, the recycling professionals that are providing the excuses why recycling isn’t profitable or isn’t worth it right now are often working for or funded by the landfill industry, the virgin materials industry or the waste-to-energy incinerator industry.

When there is this type of conflict of interest at such an influential level in the recycling industry, it becomes clear why the simple issue of public confusion at the bin wasn’t resolved. Because when recycling is highly contaminated and too costly to process, then the landfills generate more revenues, the virgin material industries sell more virgin materials and there is a stronger appetite for building incinerators that burn waste to create energy.

Opinion | The Conflict of Interest That Is Killing Recycling