Recycling alone can't fix plastics' problems, municipal recyclers say

Busan, South Korea — Several non-profit groups that operate U.S. curbside recycling programs have a simple message to diplomats trying to write a global plastics treaty: Be skeptical about seeing recycling as a cure-all for all problems with plastics.

"There's just too much plastic and it's overburdening our systems," said Katie Drews, CEO of Eureka Recycling in Minneapolis and national director of the Alliance for Mission-Based Recycling, a coalition of non-profit materials recovery facilities in four states.

AMBR organized a Nov. 26 event on the sidelines of the latest round of the plastics treaty talks in Busan where they argued that the agreement should limit the use of hard-to-recycle plastics, as well as cut back on plastics production and prioritize reuse and redesign.

It also called for countries to avoid chemical recycling, which it said in a statement "repackages dirty old 20th-century petrochemical processes under the guise of recycling."

Drews said Eureka, which operates residential curbside recycling services, spent $12 million in 2024 upgrading its Minneapolis operation to handle the "new kinds of plastic and new kinds of packaging that are hitting the market and that we are kind of on the hook to help clean up."

"That kind of investment is unsustainable," she said. "We can't keep doing that at each of our facilities because the cost really lies back with our residents who are paying taxes and recycling fees."

One of the more contentious points for countries at the talks has been whether the treaty should include lists or criteria that would restrict plastic products that are hard-to-recycle or prone to leak into the environment.

But for AMBR, which represents municipal recycling operators and MRFs in California, Colorado, Michigan and Minnesota, it's an easy question to answer.

Its members argued at the side event and in other meetings that the treaty should support reuse and refill systems to replace single-use packaging.

They also called for distinctions between plastics that are good and those that are "problematic" in packaging, at least as far as their end-of-life recycling impacts.

High density polyethylene bottles and PET bottles and thermoforms are in the "should be recycled" category, although Alex Danovitch, director of business development at Michigan-based Recycle Ann Arbor, said the U.S. PET bottle recycling rate of about 30 percent is too low and the treaty should support bottle bills to get the rate to at least 80 percent nationally.

AMBR also urged treaty writers to give the agreement space to dive into the nuances of packaging design to make recycling systems operate better.

"There's opportunities for redesign," Danovitch said. "Colors of PET certainly cause problems and certainly reducing any chemicals of concern that may be added to PET is really, really critical."

For polypropylene, AMBR said its classification depends on the type of package and where in the U.S. it's recycled, based on the strength of end markets.

But for other plastics in packaging, like PVC, polystyrene, low density PE films and flexible packaging — particularly multilayer flexibles — Danovitch said the treaty should consider them examples of "problematic" packaging to avoid.

AMBR also argued that the treaty should look at chemicals used in plastic packaging, both for impacts on frontline communities where the plastics are made and for the potential for toxic chemicals in plastics to accumulate in the recycling process.

"Toxicity is a huge issue that needs to be addressed because the reality is, recycling isn't going to be successful if people don't feel safe using those products that we're producing," Danovitch said.

Martin Bourque, executive director of the Ecology Center in Berkley, Calif., also told diplomats that the treaty should adopt a "can we, should we" test for which materials to collect.

He said efforts funded by the American Chemistry Council in the early 2000s to encourage U.S. cities to "collect all plastics" proved detrimental, contributing to too much plastic of little value being collected, until China's national sword and the Basel plastic waste amendments cut back on exports of low-value materials.

That increased public skepticism of recycling, and he argued that municipal collection programs like his "ended up bearing the brunt of this public relations nightmare … where people say, 'Is it really getting recycled, is recycling worth it?'"

"We're the ones bearing the brunt of that pushback, not the manufacturers of the packaging and certainly not the American Chemistry Council, who is doing all the marketing and promotion of collect all plastics," Bourque said.

He said recyclers in AMBR have similar concerns about what the industry says now about flexible plastic packaging — that it will be widely recycled, when included with chemical recycling. It's a point AMBR argues in a video as well.

"We're seeing today a new push around flexible pouches," he said. "So much product is moving into pouches and other soft and flexible packaging that we can't sort, that we can't process and that there are no markets for.

"What we're hearing from the producers of the pouches is don't worry," Bourque said. "But you know, we're not going to sit here and believe the marketing and the hype that all these pouches are somehow going to become recyclable and be valuable material."