Impacts on Material Recovery Equitable and informed access along with improved MRF infrastructure and the addition of new materials in the stream will get the U.S. system beyond its stubbornly flat business-as-usual performance, delivering new tonnage into the circular economy.
Figure 10 below shows these tonnage impacts. With the intervention we are proposing, the system pushes upward from recovering an estimated 32% of residential material to 68%, an enormous jump given the stagnation of the past decades.
Figure 10: Commodity Increases From Equitable Access (Note: For more details on impacts for specific commodities, see Appendix B.)
Material
Current Annual Tonnage
Increased Annual Tonnage From Equitable Access
New Total Annual Tons
Paper
10,245,400
8,946,800
19,192,200
Metals
577,900
709,700
1,287,700
Glass
2,977,300
3,363,300
6,340,600
Plastic*
1,611,200
3,878,700
5,489,900
15,411,800
16,898,600
32,310,400
Total
* I ncludes 2 million tons of film and flexible material facilitated by capital investments in collection and processing of that material.
Continued annual investment in recycling education will be critical to maintain these high levels of material recovery. In addition to reducing the overall system contamination rate (from 17% to a projected 12% in the model), a consistently high level of education and outreach will allow strong progress to be made on participation and recycling behavior, combining with infrastructure investment to more than double residential recovery in the U.S.
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PAYING IT FORWARD: HOW INVESTMENT IN RECYCLING WILL PAY DIVIDENDS
