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It's also slowed the development of closed-loop recycling systems, in which used plastic bottles can be recycled back into new plastic bottles. Closed-loop systems represent recycling at its most environmentally beneficial. Turning an old bottle into a new one offsets the need for virgin resin, which is ultimately the best way to reduce the resources required to make the things we want. But the FDA has stringent regulations about the quality of recycled plastics that can be used in food-grade products, and the bottles from curbside programs are rarely up to snuff, which is why so many are instead repurposed to make polyester fiber or pallet strapping. Critics call this process downcycling because it's reprocessing the bottles into products that didn't depend on virgin plastics in the first place. Downcycling is the common fate of other types of plastics that get into the recycling stream, such as the grocery bags that are used to make plastic lumber and the milk jugs that are fashioned into landscaping board. Such products may have their own value—there are lots of advantages to plastic lumber—but their production doesn't in any way discourage the ever-mounting production of virgin resin, which is ultimately why we're drowning in plastic waste.
Mary Wood is sure she knows a way to improve the collection and reuse of plastic bottles. She's a huge supporter of bottle bills, such as the ones that now exist in California and nine other states. I ran into Wood at the trade show of a plastics recycling conference in Austin, Texas, in early 2010. Actually, it was hard to miss her—or at least her booth. With a broad banner reading Plastic Pollution Texas, it stood out in the hall of plastics-happy business exhibitors. Certainly it was the only one emphasizing the consequences of recycling's failures: one wall featured photos of streams stuffed with empty plastic bottles and a picture of the skull of a pelican with a plastic bottle trapped in its beak. Wood and her booth mate Patsy Gillham were spearheading a drive to pass a law that would put a refundable ten-cent deposit on all beverage bottles and cans sold in Texas, a state with one of the nation's lowest recycling rates.
They were only a few months into the campaign, said Gillham, a vivacious sixtysomething with tight curly hair and a gap-toothed smile. She got involved through a friend in Houston who had long served as an unofficial river keeper of the bayous that cut through Houston. He'd become convinced that the only way to stop the pileup of riverine litter was through a bottle bill, and he'd asked Gillham to help run the crusade. "He knew I had a little green heart," she explained. She, in turn, recruited her friend Wood. The two soon decided to quit their jobs to work full-time on developing the bottle bill.
Wood, also in her early sixties, is new to political activism. Though a longtime supporter of the Sierra Club, active in local prairie restoration and animal rescue programs, she'd never before done outright campaigning. But a bottle bill seemed such a straightforward no-brainer solution to the problem of plastic waste, she just had to take it on.
Though the specifics of deposit laws vary state to state, the mechanics are largely the same: A store selling a bottle of Coca-Cola, for instance, pays a deposit on that bottle to the Coca-Cola distributor. When I buy that Coca-Cola in a bottle-bill state, I pay the store a deposit (usually a nickel or a dime). When I'm done, I take the empty back, and my deposit is refunded. The store then recoups its deposit on that bottle from the distributor, plus a handling fee, generally ranging from one to three cents, to cover the cost of dealing with the empty bottle. In some states, the empties are collected by stores, in others at redemption centers or in reverse-vending machines.
These laws work because they make sense, said Wood. "Bottle bills have proven where there's a financial incentive, people will recycle," she said, and she began running through the statistics: bottle-bill states have at least twice the recovery rates as non-bottle-bill states. Michigan, where bottles can be returned for ten cents apiece—the highest amount in the country—gets more than 90 percent of PET bottles back. It also has one of the country's lowest litter rates. You put value on that discarded empty, and someone will pick it up and return it, she argued. Otherwise, it stands little chance of getting into the recycling stream.
I didn't have to go any farther than the lobby of the hotel hosting the conference to see her point. Sitting in the coffee shop there, I watched one of the conference participants diligently hand his empty juice bottle to the barista, clearly assuming she would pop it in a recycling bin. She took it with a smile, waited until he'd walked out of view, then tossed the bottle in the trash. Even though there was a drop-off recycling center a block from the hotel, the shop wasn't saving empties. In Houston, near Wood's hometown, curbside recycling is hit or miss, depending on the neighborhood, and the program is so underfunded that there's a waitlist for recycling bins. (On learning about the waitlist, a San Francisco activist held a fundraiser to send the city two hundred bins.) There's no curbside recycling at all in the suburb where Wood lives, so she and her husband drive fifteen miles to deliver their empty soda bottles to Houston's city recycling center. "Not too many people are going to want to do that," she said.
To gather support for the bill, she and Gillham are trying to present it as not only an environmental plus, but an economic one—a generator of jobs and money for the state. All day they'd been working the exhibit hall, hoping to drum up support from the industry.
They'd come to the right place. A running theme at the conference was reclaimers' complaints about the difficulty of getting a clean and reliable supply of PET bottles. They depend heavily on the bottle-bill states. Indeed, those states supply most of the plastic bottles that are recycled in this country, especially those bought by processors who are recycling used bottles into new ones. But the domestic supply isn't enough, as I learned from reclaimers at the conference. So many bottles are sold to China that American reclaimers commonly buy used bottles from Mexico, Latin America, and Europe to keep their plants operating. The market for clean bottles "is so ripe," said Gillham, "all we have to do is collect this stuff and they're ready to buy it up."
Still, the two women know they are in for an intense political fight. Aside from Hawaii, which enacted a bottle-bill law in 2002, no state has succeeded in passing a bottle bill since 1986, and there's an ongoing push to repeal existing laws. The fiercest opposition has come from the beverage industry, which would be on the hook for the cost of collecting empties from stores and redemption centers and disposing of them. The industry complains that it is being singled out from other producers and that the cost of the deposit could deter sales (though there's no evidence that beverage sales are any lower in states with bottle bills). Grocers too have fought bottle bills, arguing they don't want to be responsible for the hassle of dealing with and storing empties. Interestingly, the plastics industry has been mostly silent on the bottle-bill debate: it hasn't fought proposed bills outright, but neither has it supported them.
Indeed, unlike the paper, steel, and aluminum industries, the plastics industry historically has done little to support recycling, except when it's under political pressure, as in the current fight over plastic bags. Howard Rappaport, a longtime consultant to the plastics industry, explained why. The only players with significant financial resources to invest in recycling are the resin producers, the major oil and chemical companies, he said. But their top priority is "to make and sell virgin plastics." As long as oil and gas prices are reasonably stable, there's no financial incentive for the Dows, DuPonts, and ExxonMobils to get into the recycling business. Nor do they want to alienate the beverage companies that buy their raw plastics to make bottles. Meanwhile, the companies that make plastic products—which might be expected to have an interest in using recycled materials—are too fragmented a constituency to put together an all-out campaign for more recycling, said Rappaport. "The guy making trash bags has nothing to do with the guy making bottles. He's got nothing to do with the guy making toys. It's so fractured that nobody can get enough critical mass and money together" to put into developing the recycling infrastructure.
The aluminum, steel,
and paper industries are vertically integrated, which has made it easier and financially more appealing for them to incorporate recycling. So no surprise: those materials are recycled at three to eight times the rate of plastics. The sprawling assemblage of networks that makes up the plastics industry, said Rappaport, "wasn't built to incorporate recycling."
Whether it's recycled or thrown away, an empty Coke bottle is just the tip of a giant waste iceberg that starts much farther upstream. In waste circles, people like to point out that for every pound of trash put out at the curb, another seventy pounds is generated in the manufacture and production of their source materials.
To really reduce waste, says the EPA, you need to prevent it from being created in the first place. It sounds so obvious! Yet in our eagerness to relieve pressure on landfills, we've put the main focus on end-of-life solutions—managing the stuff already identified as waste—rather than reducing its production at the source. The mantra of solid-waste management has long been reduce, reuse, recycle. But the fact is most of the efforts have been centered on the last. And as a result, we haven't altered that essentially one-way flow of materials from factory to garbage can.
"The recycling movement has missed the forest for the trees," complained Bill Sheehan, a longtime activist in the recycling and zero-waste movements. "The amount of materials flowing through the economy has gone up and up and up."
The evidence is clear in the reports the EPA assembles every year documenting the country's garbage habits. In 1970, the average American generated 3.25 pounds of trash each day and sent 3 pounds to landfill. In 2008, the average citizen created 4.5 pounds of trash a day and sent 2.4 pounds to landfill. We're recycling more, but nowhere near enough to offset our growing consumption. Forty years after the first recycling programs got under way, Americans are producing more plastic packaging than ever and throwing away nearly as much. That fact has led some critics to complain that recycling is an empty exercise, little more than "a rite of atonement for the sin of excess," as New York Times journalist John Tierney put it in a famous anti-recycling tirade published in 1996.
But Sheehan argues that recycling can be made to work. We just need to shift the burden from consumers to producers. He's part of a movement pushing for a set of policies that fall under the loose rubric of extended producer responsibility. The basic concept of EPR is simple: make the producer responsible for a product's entire life, not just while it is in use but also after it's been used. As one EPR expert succinctly explained it: "you make it, you deal with it."
Sheehan maintains this is perfectly logical if you look at how the waste stream has changed over the past hundred years. When municipal waste systems were established, most of the trash collected consisted of food scraps and ash (from stoves and fireplaces). Just a tiny fraction was manufactured items, such as paper and rags and bottles. Today, more than three-fourths of municipal waste consists of manufactured products such as PET bottles. Having taxpayers cover the costs of disposing of the tens of millions of pounds of manufactured goods is a giant unfunded mandate, said Sheehan. "It's enabling producers, in fact encouraging producers, to make throwaway products."
Sheehan and other EPR advocates say it's time for private industry to start paying for the collection, disposal, and recycling of those products. Making producers financially responsible for end-of-life waste management gives them the incentive to be less wasteful from the get-go, Sheehan explained. If they have to pay to recycle their products, they'll be more likely to design them for better recyclability, picking materials, such as PET, that are compatible with existing recycling streams. Such schemes create a positive feedback loop that municipal recycling simply cannot.
Some of this is back to the future. Those refillable-bottle programs that disappeared with the arrival of PET bottles? They were an early form of EPR. Bottle bills also represent a version of producer responsibility, since they require the industry to take the bottles back. But producer responsibility was launched as a movement in 1991 when Germany introduced the first explicit EPR law, the Teutonicly titled Ordinance on the Avoidance of Packaging Waste. It required manufacturers and brand owners to provide for the recovery and recycling of the packaging associated with their products. At the time, German landfills were nearing capacity—packaging waste was a major culprit—and the country was starting to have to export its trash to neighboring countries. The government set ambitious goals, requiring that 64 to 72 percent of packaging materials be recovered for recycling, for example, but left it to industry to determine how to fulfill them.
The result was the Duales System Deutschland and its Green Dot program, which has become a model for managing packaging waste around the world. Companies pay licensing fees to a nonprofit corporation for the right to put a logo—the famous Green Dot—on their packaging; this tells consumers they can put those packages in the recycling bins. The licensing fees help cover the costs of the for-profit corporation that then collects, separates, recycles, and processes the green-dotted waste. Over 75 percent of all packaging in Germany now carries a green dot, including, of course, PET bottles. And the program has expanded across Europe; tens of millions of packages sold in European stores now bear the Green Dot logo, which, unlike our resin code system, is a genuine guarantee that they will be recycled.
The law has accomplished most of its goals—and more. It has boosted recovery rates of packaging waste to more than 76 percent and hiked up plastics recycling to 60 percent; in some years, the numbers are even higher. It has also stimulated the development of new sorting and recycling technology to help the country meet those mandates. Germany's law became the model for a similar measure passed by the European Parliament in 1994. While that law set recycling targets, it left it to individual countries to determine how they would go about meeting them. Different countries have chosen different routes—varying arrangements of public and private initiatives—but the overall story is much the same. Less packaging is going to landfills, even while consumption has continued to grow. Overall, Europe now diverts more than half of its postconsumer-plastic waste from landfills and is recycling 29 percent of its plastic packaging. This doesn't sound that impressive until you consider that it's an average figure that includes the recycling rates of countries with still dismal records, such as Greece, which recovers scarcely 10 percent of its waste, in addition to places such as Germany and Denmark, which are closing in on 100 percent recovery of packaging waste. Sweden recycles 80 percent of its PET bottles, thanks to the equivalent of a national bottle bill.
It's worth noting that a large portion of the used plastic Europe recovers is burned to make heat or electricity, a technology known as waste-to-energy. There are about four hundred waste-to-energy plants scattered across the continent, and the EU counts what they do as recycling, which is why many European countries boast such enviably high recycling rates. Because landfill space is in such critically short supply, environmental concerns about the plants have gained little political traction. In the United States—where there's room to continue the debate, so to speak—there are only 87 waste-to-energy plants, most on the congested East Coast, and no new ones have been built since the mid-1990s. Yet as plastic packaging increasingly comes under fire, leaders in the plastics industry have begun advocating for such technology as a way to deal with plastic waste.
In addition to spurring recycling efforts, the EPR laws have galvanized manufacturers and brand owners to make significant changes in their packages. They are using less material and eliminating unnecessary packaging—no more toothpaste tubes in cardboard boxes, fewer packages made of rarely recycled materials, such as PVC, and more refillables and concentrates. There's also much wider use of refillable bottles—glass as well as PET—which studies have shown have the lightest environmental impact. The Green Dot law cut packaging consumption in Germany by 7 percent in its first four years, during which time, it's been estimated, U.S. packaging consumption increased by 13 percent.
The idea of EPR is spreading. Mo
re than thirty countries have packaging take-back laws, and many have followed Europe's example by passing laws that require producer responsibility for hazardous materials, such as mercury, and for some products, such as electronics and cars. The United States has long been a holdout on demanding producer responsibility, but that is starting to change. At least twenty-four states have enacted producer-responsibility laws covering electronic waste, and places as diverse as Florida, Minnesota, Indiana, and Maine are developing laws requiring producers to step up and take responsibility for the disposal of products such as unused pharmaceuticals, mercury thermometers, thermostats, and lamps. In California, Vermont, Oregon, and Rhode Island, the EPR concept is being embraced as a general principle guiding waste policy. The organization Sheehan heads, the Product Policy Institute, has established several product-stewardship councils—groups of policymakers, activists, and businesspeople who work on promoting EPR policies and laws—in California, Oregon, Washington, Vermont, New York, and Texas (as well as British Columbia). "Not only is it sweeping state legislatures," he said. "Industry is taking this very seriously."
Even without the explicit prod of EPR legislation, a growing number of companies are looking for ways to reduce their packaging footprints. What's good for the planet, many have realized, is also good for the bottom line. One forum for such efforts is the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, an organization created by architect William McDonough to implement some of the ideas laid out in his 2002 manifesto for industrial change Cradle to Cradle. In that book, McDonough and coauthor Michael Braungart argued that waste is a sign of fundamental unsustainability. Nature, they pointed out, "operates according to a system of nutrients and metabolism in which there is no such thing as waste." They used the example of a cherry tree. The tree produces blossoms and fruit, and though many fall to the ground, they are not useless there. They provide food for birds and insects and microorganisms, and they enrich the soil. In natural systems, "Waste equals food. This cyclical, cradle-to-cradle biological system has nourished a planet of thriving, diverse abundance for millions of years." Human manufacturing, they argued, should operate the same way, so that all the things we make and the byproducts that are generated can be cycled back into either the metabolism of industry or nature.