The Recycling Rant

—By Angela Pan

Sadly, recycling is not looking so good in recent years. Instead of improving, we seem to be backsliding. Since the United States had to stop exporting its plastic waste to China in 2017, the U.S. recycling rate for plastic has dropped from 8-9% in 2017 to less than 5% in 2021. Plastic recovery rate is doing even worse. From 2019 to 2020, the United States saw a decrease of 5.7% of how much plastic is recovered for recycling.

As the world’s plastic superpowers, it is not surprising that the plastic recycling rate between the United States and China is interconnected. The U.S. recycling rate has long been calculated as the sum of its plastic waste exports plus domestically recycled materials. Before 2018, China was the largest importer of U.S. plastic waste, but China’s (then) low recycling rates and high waste mismanagement meant an overblown recycling rate calculation for U.S. plastic waste. On the production side, the United States remains the largest market for Chinese produced plastics. It just goes to show that we are facing a plastic crisis that is flowing between the two giants.

Recycling in China also faces challenges. Not surprisingly, all Chinese cities and regions report they are recycling 30 percent of their waste, which exactly matches the targets in China’s 14th Five-Year Plan. Data on plastic waste collection and recycling has many gaps in China. Moreover, Chinese statistics do not always distinguish between different types of plastic, so it is hard for the government and companies to know the true recycling rates of single-use plastics.