Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff, Lauren Vogue bomb here. In the nineteen seventies, Americans first started embracing a new idea intended to help protect the environment and reduce our squandering of natural resources. Instead of just throwing their garbage away, people began separating materials such as glass, metal, and paper that potentially could be processed and reused, and started leaving them by the curbside in
bins to be collected and transported to recycling plants. Back then, recycling seemed like a revolutionary step toward a less wasteful society. But not quite half a century later, that revolution seems to be stuck in neutral, which leaves us wondering whether there is a peak recycling point and whether we may
have already reached it. Thanks to population growth, we continue to generate an ever increasing amount of trash, two hundred and sixty two million tons of it in the US loan in the most recent year for which the Environmental Protection Agency has data. That's up from two hundred and eight million tons in nineteen ninety, and it works out to about four point five pounds or around two kilograms per American each day. Over thirty percent more trash than
Americans generated individually back in nineteen seventy. Of that mountain of refuse, in fifteen, slightly more than a third was either recycled sixty eight million tons or composted twenty three million tons. That might seem pretty impressive, but it's not. As of seventeen, the US ranked just twenty five among
the world's industrialized nations in recycling. Germany, in contrast, recycles or composts about two thirds of its garbage, and ten other countries in Europe and Asia achieve a fifty percent rate or higher. Even more troublingly, U s recycling rates have pretty much stalled in recent years. As a result, we're still burying more than half of the trash we generated landfills and burning the remainder. One challenge to recyclers
is that the waste stream has evolved. In prior times, there were more glass bottles and aluminum cans, plus a lot more discarded newspaper, which was heavy and accounted for
a lot of the volume. These days, in contrast, recyclers have to deal with more plastic bottles and e commerce packaging, as well as a new generation of complex materials that are more difficult to process, metal cans made with blends of metals that would have to be extracted from one another, and cans and paper products that are coded in plastic. Both the base and the coating are technically recyclable, but
separating them is tricky, and tricky means expensive. Also, although what we're discarding has changed rapidly, it's not so easy for recycling plants to adjust. These are costly facilities that were built to handle the old mix of trash. New equipment could cost millions. While the typical person who puts bottles in cardboard packaging in the curbside been for pickup may think of it as just another government service, recycling actually is an industry that has to generate income to
be sustainable. Bowl sure, they're technically selling your stuff, but they have to pay for drivers, trucks, insurance, the facility, the equipment to sort it, and shipping to the processor that will actually break it down and sell the material. And it's a volatile market. Recently, the industry was thrown into disarray by China's decision to stop importing twenty four categories of recycled materials, including plastic and paper from the
US and other countries. The ban is causing materials to pile up without buyers at sorting centers across the United States, forcing many communities to either bury them in landfills or burn them. Even where China is still willing to accept recyclables, they insist on materials with extremely low contamination rates. That's a big problem for the U S, where many communities, in an effort to encourage recycling, no longer require residents
to separate and clean recyclable materials. As a result, about of recyclables collected turn out to be contaminated and unusable. A stuff like food waste stuck in con hainters can be too difficult to clean, meaning that the recycling plant may wind up sorting these containers out and throwing them away. But there are potential solutions to the problems that are
hindering recycling. Makers of packaging could help, for example, by thinking more about the reality that the stuff has to go somewhere at the end of its brief useful life and designing it to be more easily broken down and recycled, and US manufacturers of products could strive harder to find new and innovative uses for recycled materials that can be reused multiple times, what the US Environmental Protection Agency calls
sustainable materials management that would improve the market for recyclables. Additionally, nearly fifty years after the recycling movement began, there are still places across the US, most notably Indianapolis, that still haven't even started curbside recycling programs. That suggests there's still potential for growth. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Keiger and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeartMedia and How
Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other topics, visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com.