What A Waste

Everyone knows how recycling works, right? When you toss a bottle into a bin, it goes to a plant and gets sorted into piles with similar refuse. Someone buys that trash, processes it, and creates reuse items. (Fleeces! Notebooks! Backpacks!) This is an example of a “closed-loop economy,” in which a product is used and then made into something new.

The truth, though, is that recycling isn’t always so straightforward. Sorting waste is pretty difficult, and finding takers for it is even harder. In years past, the United States shipped many of our recyclables to China for remanufacturing, but in 2018, that country effectively banned most of those materials due to excessive contamination (i.e., poor sorting and food residue). As a result, some