Can one size fit all?

Can a national standardized recycling program exist in the United States?

It’s a question recyclers, brand owners and legislators, among others, have attempted to answer. But with so many moving parts, the solution hasn’t always been straightforward.

“This is a system in flux,” Scott Mouw, senior director of strategy and research, The Recycling Partnership (TRP), said at the Paper & Plastics Recycling Conference (PPRC) last October in Chicago. “It’s moving all the time. Brands are making choices around … the kinds of packaging they want to use [and] they’re designing that packaging in different ways. ... Recyclability is not always necessarily their first consideration, maybe not even their second.”

Mouw spoke on a PPRC panel called How Recycling Could Benefit from Standardization, along with moderator Resa Dimino, managing partner at Signalfire Group, a subsidiary of Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Resource Recycling Systems Inc., and fellow panelist Mitch Hedlund, founder and executive director of Minneapolis-based nonprofit Recycle Across America (RAA).

“One of the issues of standardization, and this occurred in the wake of [China’s] National Sword [policy], is it has tended to be more reductionist,” Mouw said. “It tends to be, like, ‘Let’s get down to the basics. … There’s a little bit of this instinct to go that direction. It’s understandable. We want people to be very clear about what’s recyclable—simple messages really seem to work. But … the recycling system is extremely complex [and] it’s in motion all the time. So, how do we reconcile that?”

Improving recyclability

Standardization is integrated with recyclability, Mouw said, noting the industry must determine what’s recyclable to effectively communicate what can be put in bins, though it’s complicated by the fact that many ongoing variables affect the answer to that question.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports the national recycling rate at 32 percent, based on data from 2018. The agency wants to increase the rate to 50 percent by 2030.

However, Mouw said, the many collection programs and material recovery facilities (MRFs) around the U.S. have varying attitudes, experiences and connections to markets. “They all have their own knowledge of what’s going on,” he said, adding that can be a recipe for disaster when it comes to standardization. “We have to have a standardization process that’s dynamic,” Mouw said. “That’s the key. These constituencies have to really be brought forward and educated in a robust way so that opportunity for national standardization is feasible.”

Washington-based TRP uses its national database to analyze the basket of potential recyclables accepted in residential collection programs—PET bottles, old corrugated containers, etc.—and has found strong variability from state to state in terms of acceptance.

“What the MRF is willing to accept today is the information that should be presented on recycling bins today.” – Mitch Hedlund, RAA

The goal is to expand the number of materials on collection lists over time, Mouw said, “because the alternative is not great. We don’t want all that embodied energy in these materials to go into a landfill.

“There [also] has to be some dedication on the brand side to recyclability, and it’s clear that we need to bring more industry resources into the picture.”

TRP works to address these variables with its Residential Recyclability Framework as part of its Pathway to Circularity. The framework defines five building blocks “critical to progressing packaging design for recyclability.” They are design for recyclability, recyclability prevalence, access and adoption, capture journey and packaging fate.

Mouw noted the evolution of MRFs also plays a role in recyclability. As new technology is implemented, acceptable materials can change, but because those changes are not consistent across all MRFs, it can cause further confusion.

“It might seem very straightforward to pull together a nice, basic list that everybody could use, but … there are a lot of things that are not on the list everywhere but arguably should be,” he said.

Mouw cited plastic caps and lids as an example. The Association of Plastic Recyclers (APR), Washington, says to keep caps on when recycling bottles, cartons or other items, but, Mouw said, communities have provided their own guidance that doesn’t necessarily reflect that. “It’s something we need to work on.”

Standardization strategies

RAA and TRP take different approaches to standardizing recycling or, at the very least, making it easier for consumers.

“One of the reasons we have a mess when it comes to education and standardization is because local education programs around recycling are highly variably funded [and] some aren’t even funded at all,” Mouw said.

He noted two strategies that could lead to more dynamic ways of standardizing, the first of which is a system intervention, using TRP’s Polypropylene Recycling Coalition as an example. “This is material that’s clearly highly marketable,” Mouw said. “It deserves its position in the pantheon of recyclable plastics along with PET [polyethylene terephthalate] and HDPE [high-density polyethylene]. [There are] strong domestic markets; it doesn’t have to go overseas anymore. … We’ve really focused that work on working directly with MRFs and getting polypropylene acceptance widely established.”

Mouw described standardization as a “process” rather than “a point-in-time.” He credited Oregon for its approach to recyclability in enacting its EPR legislation. Producer responsibility organizations must come up with a plan to present to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to add acceptable materials to a statewide list. “Again, the theme here is a dynamic process,” Mouw said. “The list the DEQ announces in a month will be different two years from now.”

“Consumers are confused about recycling and they need clear information, so we just accept that as a given,” Mouw said. “Now, the challenge is how do we build some really robust education systems that evolve over time [and] that are clear.”

One educational tool he referenced is TRP’s Recycle Check platform—an interactive tool that provides localized recycling information about specific packaging. Users scan a QR code or click a link to get up-to-date information about the recyclability of a certain package.

“This is a work in progress,” he said of Recycle Check. “But we think this is important and connects, in turn, into a dynamic database behind it that’s looking at how communities themselves are describing recyclability and what’s on the list.”

RAA advocates for a standardized labeling system. The group created such a system in 2008, and it is now used on more than 10 million recycling and compost bins, carts and dumpsters in the U.S. The labels are designed to accommodate recycling systems across the country, using standardized colors, fonts and layouts to communicate acceptable materials.

“We had to create … essentially a methodology for addressing all the unique sorting systems in the U.S. and to have something that can work for any program,” Hedlund said. “We’ve got a complex recycling system, as Scott pointed out, but it doesn’t mean the solution needs to be complex.

“What the MRF is willing to accept today is the information that should be presented on recycling bins today, and that information should be presented to the public in a standardized format.”

Hedlund cited the city of Orlando, Florida, as a standardized labeling success story. About 9,000 kindergarten through 12th grade schools as well as universities in the city are employing RAA’s standardized labeling system and, she said. In the first two years of implementation, the district saved $1.37 million in trash hauling fees because of a reduction in contamination in its recyclables.

Another example Hedlund noted is U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. When the stadium hosted the Super Bowl in 2018, it achieved zero waste by diverting more than 90 percent of discarded material from landfills, using the labels as one of several tools to encourage recycling.

She added, “[Standardized labels] can fix recycling as it is right now and be the vehicle for communicating changes and the evolution of recycling coming in the future.”

“We support the idea of standardization,” Mouw said of TRP. “We support the idea of very clear communication, but, obviously, clear communication that has to accommodate all the changes, all the stakeholder activity around recyclability, all those efforts the industry is making to make things more recyclable—it has to be part of that picture.”

“I think there’s also a human perspective to this,” Dimino added. “I always have to remind myself that we are all human. We have human feelings [and] human emotions. We’ve invested in things, we care about things, and that leads to some differences from one place to another.

“We still estimate there’s only about half the households in the country that have automatic access to curbside recycling,” she continued. “So, we have a long way to go to get the access in place and then the participation on top of that [and] the education to engage people, but we can totally get there.”

The author is managing editor of Recycling Today and can be reached at mmcnees@gie.net.