Kickstart: Ups and downs of America Recycles Day

Today is America Recycles Day, so we're giving you an all-recycling edition of Kickstart.

Let's start granular. For those in the business of plastics recycling, there's good news in the form of higher prices for recycled resins, as documented in this Nov. 1 report from the Solid Waste Association of North America.

SWANA notes markets seeing near-record prices as consumer brand companies announce plans to use a lot more recycled plastic. That point gets echoed at recycling industry events where the talk is on high prices, elevated demand and a long-sought decoupling of pricing for recycled plastic and virgin plastic.

Our newsroom certainly gets announcements on a daily basis from companies investing in plastics recycling.

But our pages are also filled with companies facing big challenges and even with the new investments, falling rates for plastic recycling. In spite of the money coming in, plastics recycling in the U.S. is not healthy.

What's needed is investment in the public end of packaging recycling — the city-side collection — in addition to companies building factories. But society hasn't yet figured out who pays for that (our taxes vs. extended producer responsibility) and whether local governments see enough permanent change in markets to trust them.

There's a lot of challenges. This report from the Consumer Brands Association, released a few days before America Recycles Day, notes that there's only 6 percent of the recycled material available to meet the long-term demands companies have for more sustainable packaging.

As part of the government's road map, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to release its updated National Recycling Strategy this month, and CBA wants the agency to focus on national standards to reduce the consumer confusion from the 9,800 separate, locally-run recycling systems around the country.

"We are on the clock to fix recycling in America and by America Recycles Day 2022 hope to be having a fundamentally different conversation about recycling," said Geoff Freeman, CBA's president and CEO.

Environmental discussions around plastics will get broader. Climate change is elevating the need to make the material much more circular and creating another reason for big improvements in our recycling.

And at EPA, new Administrator Michael Regan plans, on America Recycles Day, to kick off a weeklong environmental justice tour through Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. On Tuesday, he'll be in St. James Parish, La., where residents have been fighting Formosa Group's plans for a large plastics plant.

Finally, we're going to end on a local note.

Shoppers who bring their plastic bags to the drop-off at a Meijer store in Holland, Mich., won't have to wonder where the bags go — they walked on them on the way in.

The company said Nov. 11 that it used 944,000 plastic bags recycled in its stores to help pave the parking lot, in a project with Dow Inc. That amounts to 12,500 pounds of recycled plastic.

The retailer said it worked with recycling company Padnos in Michigan to turn the bags back into post-consumer pellets, which were then mixed with asphalt and a binding agent from Dow to repave the parking lot.

Meijer said it expects to recycle 6 million pounds of plastics from its store drop-offs this year.

Dow said it's not the first recycled plastic parking lot project it's worked on. It said it's been involved in similar efforts at its facilities in Michigan and Texas, with a street repaving project at the University of Missouri, and in Indonesia.