We're coming up on America Recycles Day on Nov. 15, and that means the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will release the latest official U.S. recycling numbers.
For plastics, it's probably not going to look great. Sorry to be a downer, but given the trend lines, that's a fair estimate. The recycling rate for all plastics in the municipal solid waste stream has been dropping, from 9.5 percent in 2014 to 8.4 percent in 2017, the last year we have statistics.
One estimate says the new EPA numbers, which will be for 2018, will be in the range of 7 percent. An analyst who studies it predicts the drop will be a casualty of China's National Sword program that limited imports of recycled scrap, and other countries following suit.
That specific calculation comes from Jan Dell of The Last Beach Cleanup, which publishes a monthly deep dive analysis of recycling data.
Specifically, Dell thinks the new EPA figures coming out will show that the U.S. had an overall recycling rate for plastics in municipal solid waste (MSW) stream of 7.2 percent in 2018. Because of lags in data, EPA reports the rate two years later.
She also calculates that 2020's rate will continue falling, to an estimated 6.6 percent.
These are just educated guesses, and we'll likely find out the real figures on Nov. 17, when EPA hosts its third annual recycling summit. It's also hosting a virtual innovation fair the day before. EPA is continuing its stepped-up focus on recycling.
As far as the rate estimates, I'm not suggesting they are gospel, but it seems likely rates will go down.
The other thing that intrigued me about Dell's analysis is it breaks down the recycling rate into a domestic and an export component.
The Last Beach Cleanup takes U.S. government export data for plastic scrap and uses that to break out the amount of plastic shipped overseas for recycling in a way that the EPA official statistics do not. (The EPA recycling rate counts both material exported for recycling and material recycled domestically in the U.S. rate.)
For 2017, using export data, Dell calculates that of all the plastic waste in the MSW stream, 5.2 percent was exported for recycling and 3.2 percent was processed domestically, giving us our overall plastic recycling rate of 8.4 percent.
But using that government export data for 2018, she notes a 30 percent drop in plastics scrap shipped overseas for recycling. That causes her to estimate that the export recycling rate for 2018 will fall to 4.1 percent while the domestic rate will hold steady at 3.1 percent. So 7.2 percent overall.
Again, these are estimates but they illustrate an unpleasant fact about how much we've become dependent — overly dependent — on exports to support plastics recycling in the U.S.
It's sobering to see that of all the plastics in the MSW stream, we're only domestically recycling a low single-digit amount.
It's important to stop here for a second and note a definition. The overall MSW rate that Dell is working with includes things like plastic cutlery and polymer fabric clothing. But even if you look at only plastics containers and other packaging, the U.S. rate was only 13 percent in 2017, and it's been falling, too. It was 14.7 percent in 2016.
Of course, the data looks better for certain plastic products. The National Association for PET Container Resources, for example, estimates that the amount of PET containers recycled domestically for 2018 — again, the last year we have stats for — increased 16 percent. PET bottles are the superstar of U.S. plastics recycling, with a recycling rate of about 30 percent.
But for hard-to-recycle plastic packaging like yogurt containers and clamshells, 2018 was rougher.
Another industry report, from the American Chemistry Council, said domestic recycling of those kinds of plastic packaging only rose 4 percent while exports fell 35 percent in 2018.
There's a lot of talk about recycling and investment these days. ACC points to several billion dollars of announced plastic recycling investments in the U.S. since 2017, which is a positive that we should hope we see more of.
But these EPA recycling rate numbers, particularly if they keep falling, also show how far up we've got to climb.
I wonder when the billions of dollars in announced investments will start to translate to more recycling on the ground and we will be able to measure increases in plastic recycling rates. That may be a harder figure to estimate, but I think it's an important question.
Toloken is a Plastics News assistant managing editor. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Toloken.
Plastics News editorial cartoon by Rich Williams. Cartoons are available for purchase at www.plasticsnews.com/data-lists/cartoons