Plastic Recycling Does Not Work
For many materials like metals or paper, recycling drives down costs, saves energy, and substitutes for resource extraction. Plastics, however, are not conducive to large-scale recycling.
Recycling is a daily fixture in the lives of consumers in wealthy countries. In developed nations, most urban areas and effectively all leading cities run municipal recycling programs. A 2021 survey estimated that 60% of the U.S. population lives in areas with curbside recycling pickup and 93% live in areas with either that or a drop-off recycling program.1 These recycling programs are extremely popular. Per Pew Research, 46% of U.S. adults said in 2014 that they recycle or reduce waste to protect the environment “whenever possible,” compared to only 4% who said they never do.2 Recycling is a major source of raw materials, providing from roughly 25% to up to 60% of the world’s supply of critical commodity metals like steel, aluminum, and lead, with similar proportions for other materials like paper and glass. But household recycling contributes little to this compared to industrial recycling, and recycling of plastics is currently ineffective to the point that incinerating them would be a superior method of disposal.
While recycling is often thought of as a project of environmentalist ideology, undertaken at personal or social cost in order to benefit the planet, it is notable that metal recycling occurs on a far greater scale than any other type of recycling, purely on the basis of cost-competitiveness. Large-scale metal recycling is far older than modern environmentalism, and has been a constant practice since antiquity.3 With the notable exception of aluminum beverage cans, metal recycling occurs in industrial contexts which are out of sight and out of mind for most people. It is not considered “recycling” at all in the public mind, instead going by the dysphemism “scrap.”
The main environmental benefit of recycling comes from reducing the amount of environmentally-harmful mining, forestry, smelting, and manufacturing necessary to produce the same amount of materials. This is a significant effect on both local and global scales. Advocates of recycling also hold it up as a means of preventing waste from contaminating pristine wilderness, but this is anachronistic in the developed countries which run municipal recycling programs because modern practices can cheaply and effectively contain waste in well-engineered landfills or destroy waste in advanced incinerators with minimal effects on the local environment. Sorting one’s household trash is often regarded as a civic duty, but it plays only a modest role in the lifecycle of materials. The popularity of household recycling and its role in the public imagination is a result of its psychological effects on the participants more than a result of its physical effects on the wastes involved.
Metal Recycling is Competitive with Mining
Recyclable waste is bought by companies which process it into usable raw materials, which they then sell at a profit. The difficulty of this varies immensely based on the type of waste. Household recycling in most municipalities is mixed together and is very expensive to sort before processing, whereas wastes like steel shavings from a factory do not require sorting. Further, recycling materials like copper or aluminum, which are composed of a single element and are usually close to pure, is a relatively simple process which produces materials of the same quality as virgin manufacturing.
At the other end of the spectrum, the term “plastic” refers to many different materials with different properties, some of which can be recycled only with difficulty and will generally produce inferior materials, and some of which effectively cannot be recycled at all. In fact, there is so little demand for plastic waste that much of the plastic collected in recycling bins is incinerated or dumped in landfills for lack of a buyer. Some nations, especially in Europe, mandate the use of recycled plastic as an environmentalist measure.
Mining ores from the earth, and smelting ore to separate the useful metal from rock and impurities, is generally more expensive, complex, and energy-intensive than melting down and reusing metals which have already been refined. Metal waste destined for reuse is usually referred to as “recycling” when it is collected from consumers and households, and as “scrap” when it is collected from industrial processes or from junkyards, but once the metal is collected, there is little practical difference. The demand for metals mostly comes from industry, which means bulk collection of waste and scrap is simple and profitable, and as a result a large fraction of the possible scrap is collected.
Steel is the world’s most important metal. Nearly 2 billion metric tons were manufactured in 2021.4 Steel is composed mostly of iron, alloyed with carbon and other elements, such as chromium for stainless steel, combined in an endless variety of different mixes to achieve different material properties. As a result, different steels cannot be recycled by simply melting, mixing, and pouring them like non-alloy metals such as aluminum or copper, but must be resmelted to the correct specifications, most especially the correct carbon content. This resmelting is done at electric arc furnaces, which use electricity as a source of heat. This is a simpler process than producing iron from ore at a blast furnace and making it into steel by blowing oxygen through it. Industrial steel recycling is one of the great successes of recycling on an economic scale. Approximately a quarter of the world’s steel production comes from recycling at electric arc furnaces.5
Aluminum is the second-most manufactured metal in the world, after iron. Aluminum is refined from ore by electrolysis, in which a strong electric current is used to break apart aluminum atoms from oxygen atoms in naturally-occurring aluminum oxide. This is a very energy-intensive process, which accounted for about 3% of the entire world’s electricity consumption in 2023.6 The massive quantities of electricity are expensive, and according to one estimate account for about 45% of the cost of aluminum produced in China, which single-handedly produces slightly over half of the world’s aluminum.7 Aluminum smelters are often built near power plants to secure power supplies. Countries with natural access to cheap electricity from hydroelectric power or geothermal power, such as Norway or Iceland, are often exporters of refined aluminum, as this effectively lets them “export” energy which cannot be directly stored or transported. The United Arab Emirates is also a major aluminum exporter for this reason.
Recycling aluminum requires about 95% less energy than refining it from ore, avoiding this major expense. In 2019, 63 million metric tons of aluminum were produced from ore, and 20 million tons were produced from recycled material, or 24% of the total.8 The majority of recycled aluminum comes from industrial sources such as shavings and trimmings from aluminum manufacturing, worn-out industrial equipment, and junked cars. However, most people are familiar with aluminum recycling through the common practice of collecting and recycling aluminum beverage cans, which accounts for a substantial minority of recycled aluminum. In 2018, the U.S. and Canada produced 5 million tons of recycled aluminum, of which 835,000 tons, about 17% of the total, were recovered from aluminum beverage cans.9 If this ratio holds roughly the same for the rest of the world, that would mean 4% of the world’s total aluminum supply comes from recycled cans alone. This is apparently the most significant contribution of household recycling to the total amount of recycling.
Copper is another key metal used in a wide variety of applications in industry, construction, and agriculture, but which is especially important in electronics and electrical wiring due to its conductivity. Total refined copper output in 2022 was about 25 million tons and the price of the commodity has doubled since 2020 on the back of rising demand, despite increased mining in countries like Chile.10 According to one estimate, 25% to 30% of global copper is refined from scrap.11 Copper recycling enters the public consciousness mainly as a result of copper theft, when thieves strip copper which is still in use such as wiring or plumbing in order to sell it as scrap. While this accounts for a very small share of copper recycling, it can cause massive disruptions in lawless areas such as South Africa.12 Other commodity metals have even higher shares of recycling. In 2020, the world’s total refined lead output was about 11.5 million tons, of which about 7 million, or 60%, were from recycled lead.13 Lead is used in everything from batteries to ammunition.
In addition to metals, there is also demand for recycling other materials with the right mix of purity, reusability, and difficulty of extraction and manufacturing. Paper is composed of cellulose fiber obtained from wood pulp. According to one estimate, over half of the world’s 417 million metric tonnes of paper pulp came from recycled material in 2023.14 When paper is recycled, it is once again pulped and then made into paper anew. This damages the cellulose fibers somewhat, but they can nevertheless be used several times for the most common applications, especially cardboard, which is highly amenable to recycling.15
Of the recycled paper used in the U.S. in 2022, over half went into containerboard, or corrugated cardboard, the material used for shipping boxes.16 Local fluctuations in price can sometimes make the cost of processing cardboard for recycling greater than its value as raw material, and sometimes drive the price of cardboard scrap to temporary highs.17 In the U.S., reportedly over 90% of wood and paper products source wood from private tree farms rather than natural forests.18 Counterintuitively, this means paper recycling does not directly save forests, but energy, and may even reduce the number of trees that exist by reducing the necessary supply of private tree farms.
Glass recycling by one estimate accounted for 27 million tons in 2018, or 21% of the world’s glass.19 This can be cheaper than manufacturing glass in a furnace. However, different types of glass cannot be mixed together. About 90% of the world’s glass is soda-lime glass, used for containers, windows, and other purposes. Other glasses, like the borosilicate glass used for heat-resistant cookware, are generally not recycled and must be filtered out. It is impractical to remove colorings from glass, so they must also be separated by color or the result will be unsightly and not fit for use in consumer products. While the chemical structure of glass can be remelted and reformed indefinitely, this is not always practical logistically. As a result, while some glass is recycled for high-quality applications like bottles, a good amount of glass is also recycled into low-grade applications like aggregate in concrete or asphalt.
Plastics Should Be Incinerated Not Recycled
Fossil fuels are composed of hydrocarbons—molecules made from hydrogen and carbon atoms—which are mostly used to burn for fuel, but can also be used as raw material for the large hydrocarbon molecules that make up plastic. A 2016 estimate found that 6% of the world’s oil production went to producing plastics.20 That year, 400 million tons of plastic were produced worldwide. By 2019 the figure rose to 459 million tons.21 In 2019, 94% of plastic was produced from fossil fuels, such as petroleum or natural gas, and a mere 6%, or 29 million tons, was produced from recycled plastic.22 This is a much smaller fraction than any other widely-recycled material. Even this modest quantity was produced only with large government efforts to support and streamline plastic recycling—efforts which are unnecessary for materials like steel or cardboard, where the waste is more useful and there is a natural economic demand.
Much of the plastic collected for recycling is not actually recycled, but disposed of in other ways. There is a steady stream of media stories from reporters placing GPS tracking devices in their recycling, and following them to landfills or incinerators.23 Some environmentalist groups are now pushing against plastic recycling on the grounds that it lulls people into falsely believing their waste is being recycled.24 A report from the OECD found that, in 2019, 9% of plastic waste was recycled, but only 6% of plastic was produced from recycled material.25 This suggests that only about two thirds of plastic collected for recycling is actually recycled in reality. This is economically inevitable, even if city residents are frequently scandalized to learn that their household waste is being disposed of in this manner.26 There is simply not enough demand for plastic waste from manufacturers to recycle everything that is put in the bins.
A wide variety of plastics are made with different chemical structures, which give them a range of physical properties. For example, plastic beverage bottles are usually made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), while plastic shopping bags are usually made from low-density polyethylene (LDPE). Many plastic items are made with a resin identification code, a symbol with a number from 1 through 7 which indicates the type of plastic they are made from, to aid in sorting waste. Because of the different chemical structures of different plastics, some are far more recyclable than others, and the rates of recycling are very different. A 2017 report found that, in the U.S., 18.2% of PET plastic was recycled, compared with 4.2% of LDPE plastic, and 0.6% of polypropylene plastic.27
Most of the world’s plastic is thermoplastic, plastics which can be melted or molded with heat, which makes them relatively easier to reuse as raw materials. Others are thermosetting plastic, which irreversibly harden and so are much less reusable than thermoplastics. Even in thermoplastics, however, the remelting and cooling involved in most recycling processes degrades the plastic’s chemical bonds, producing a weaker end product. Recycled plastic is almost never used again for the same purpose, but instead is used as raw material for different products which can accept lower-quality raw materials, a process sometimes known as “downcycling.” For example, the plastic from a disposable water bottle, once processed, is generally too low quality to be used in another water bottle. Instead the bottle might be shredded into pellets which are then melted together to make synthetic insulation to stuff the inside of a jacket.
There are several other reasons for the low recycling rate of plastic waste. For one, the different types of plastic must be sorted apart before they can be recycled. This is an expensive and labor-intensive process, often prohibitively so. For another, unlike other frequently-recycled materials, making most plastics from recycled materials is usually not cost-competitive with manufacturing virgin plastic from scratch, especially if quality standards are high. The decision to use recycled plastic is justified on environmental grounds, whether sincere or in an effort to appeal to customers, rather than for reasons of profit and efficiency.
Until recently, the wealthiest nations exported a sizable amount of plastic waste to poorer nations, especially China, ostensibly for recycling. In 2011, China imported about 8 million tons of waste plastic.28 In theory, with their lower labor costs, these nations would be better able to manually sort the different types of plastic for recycling. In practice, China had lax environmental standards at the time, and after sorting, manufacturers could keep and reuse the easier-to-recycle plastics like PET, then simply discard the rest.29 However, the Chinese government became less willing to make this bargain as the nation became richer, and in 2017 banned the import of most plastics, abruptly halting the process. In 2019, the Basel Convention treaty was amended to mostly ban the export of plastic waste from rich to poor nations.30 The practice has mostly ended since then.
There are a few promising technologies that might make some forms of plastic recycling viable. An example of this is chemical recycling, in which plastics are chemically converted into fuels or into fresh plastic molecules without the degradation that comes from remelting. Several companies pursuing such projects have failed in recent years.31 The theory is sound and researchers will probably continue making progress in the lab.32 However, it is unlikely to be economically relevant in the foreseeable future.
Perhaps surprisingly, the easiest way to convert the hydrocarbons in unwanted plastic into economically valuable output is to burn the plastic for fuel in a “waste-to-energy” incinerator, something that needs no new technological advances. Burning plastics for energy is a more environmentally friendly and resource-efficient solution than it might appear at first glance or even what is currently done with plastic, since it amounts to first using fossil fuels as materials before we burn them as fuel.
This eliminates most of the mass of waste before the remaining ash is dumped in landfills. Organic matter like paper and food waste is combustible. Plastics also burn because they are composed of hydrocarbons, even if they burn less readily and at higher temperatures than the fossil fuels they are made from, and so can be a source of energy. If done indiscriminately, incineration pollutes the air with ash particles and toxic chemicals. The health and environmental impact is minimal if relatively capital-intensive modern methods are used to destroy, filter, and contain the toxic byproducts.
Incinerators generally operate at 1000°C or more, and use an afterburner at an even higher temperature. This breaks down most toxic molecules that would otherwise be released, most notably polychlorinated dibenzodioxins, or “dioxins,” the most important toxin released by unspecialized incineration. Various filters and “scrubbers” are used to remove other toxic particles from the resulting gas before it is released into the atmosphere. These practices are effective when implemented. According to a 2005 report from the German Environmental Ministry, “because of stringent regulations, waste incineration plants [in Germany] are no longer significant in terms of emissions of dioxins, dust, and heavy metals.”33 Most dramatically, dioxin emissions from waste incineration had dropped to one one-thousandth of its 1990 level. However, like any large-scale burning operation, incineration releases carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas.
The heat from incineration can be used as a source of electricity in “waste-to-energy” plants, which is the norm in newer incinerators. In Europe, where there are strong regulations that limit the use of landfills, these are especially common. For example, in Denmark, which relies especially heavily on incineration, incineration provided “a fifth of district heating and about 5 percent of its electricity in 2020.”34 These Danish waste-to-energy plants are clean enough that they are often built adjacent to upscale residential areas.35 Complex chemical treatments for recycling plastic will have difficulty outcompeting such a simple and readily-available method even if that technology advances further.
The Environmental Challenges of Waste Disposal Are Solvable Without Recycling
The most common justification given for recycling is not that it can be an efficient and cost-competitive source of useful materials. Rather, the usual justification is that all materials which are not recycled will damage the environment. There are many cases of casually dumped consumer or industrial wastes causing great harm to wildlife, ecosystems, and human health. The idea is that recycling will prevent materials from entering this stream of harmful waste.
However, otherwise-inefficient recycling is not a cost-effective way to achieve this goal. Since the mid-20th century, improved technology has been developed which can safely destroy or contain waste with little or no damage to the ecosystem or to human health. These practices have been widely and successfully deployed throughout the developed world, effectively mitigating the damage from waste. The environmental improvements since the mid-20th century are very real, but they were caused by air pollution scrubbers, landfill construction techniques, and changes in norms around littering, not by curbside recycling programs. Health and environmental damage from waste remains a serious problem in many poorer nations which lack the funds or the government organization to implement waste disposal best practices. Solid waste which is not reused must be disposed of in some other way. In practice, this means waste is either dumped in landfills, or else burned and the resulting ash, which has a much smaller volume, is then dumped in landfills.
When waste is simply dumped in piles or in pits, the results can damage local human and environmental health, as wastes decompose and chemicals leach out into the surrounding soil and groundwater. Modern landfills are constructed to contain the pollutants instead, especially since the mid-20th century. The landfill is first lined with one or more layers of impermeable clay or synthetic materials, often several meters thick. As the waste decomposes and contaminated liquids accumulate, they are collected and treated rather than left to disperse into the environment. The most important pollutant which escapes from modern landfills is methane, which does not harm the immediate environment, but is a greenhouse gas which contributes to global warming. Methane is not captured by systems designed to contain solids and liquids. Some landfills also collect and burn the escaping methane, either to eliminate the gas or to use it as fuel, but this practice is not yet ubiquitous. In the U.S., landfills accounted for 17% of methane gas emissions in 2022.36
In practice, modern containment practices reduce local environmental damage from landfills to a low level. When the landfill reaches capacity, it is “capped” with an impermeable layer, usually of clay and soil. In the U.S., the site is then monitored for a default period of thirty years to detect any contamination of the environment or groundwater.37 Capped landfills are often turned to “green” uses like public parks. For example, the Fresh Kills Landfill, once the largest landfill in the world and the main destination of waste from New York City, is now partly developed into Freshkills Park, a wilderness area open to the public.38
As of 2018, there were 1269 municipal waste landfills operating in the U.S.39 Various sensationalist reports have forecast when we will “run out of landfill space,” but these refer only to already-constructed landfills. The largest landfill in the world by far, Apex Regional Landfill in Nevada, is 2200 acres, or less than 4 square miles.40 If all U.S. landfills were as large as Apex, they would still account for only about 0.1% of the country’s land area. There is no feasible prospect that space to construct new landfills will run out in the foreseeable future.
While effective waste disposal is the norm in the developed world, it has not been deployed everywhere. For example, the Philippines is undersupplied with well-built landfills. Many government officers are concerned that the planned closure of the Kalangitan landfill, which receives waste from eight provinces, will lead to difficulty dumping waste.41 The problem is exacerbated because the Philippines prohibited incinerators decades ago, when their older technology could not eliminate toxic dioxins from the exhaust, and the ban remains on the books even as technology has improved.42 Much of the waste is now burned unfiltered in highly-polluting pits and piles, instead.
A better-known consequence of the lack of modern waste disposal is plastic waste in the oceans. While the popular images of densely-packed islands of floating trash are mostly a myth, the amount of plastic in the ocean is immense, perhaps in the tens of millions of tons, even if it is widely dispersed.43 Several studies have estimated that almost all of this plastic comes from rivers in a handful of countries, mostly in East Asia, such as China, Indonesia, and the Philippines.44 These studies are based on rough estimates with wide margins of error rather than empirical measurements at the source, but nevertheless there is widespread agreement that the share of plastic dumped into the ocean from developed countries with reliable waste management, such as the U.S. and Europe, is negligible. Collecting plastic to dispose of in incinerators or landfills prevents it from accumulating in the oceans as well as recycling does.
Consumer Recycling is a Popular Civic Ritual
The actual amount of household waste recycled suggests that although surveys capture positive sentiment towards recycling and most areas have curbside recycling programs, these surveys do not accurately describe people’s real behavior.45 Municipal recycling is popular not because of its material effects on the waste it collects, but because of its psychological effects on the participants. Most people feel comforted to know that a household recycling program is available, and feel good when they participate in it. Due to environmentalist ideas and media, many people feel vaguely bad about consumption. Recycling frequently transforms this guilt into a feeling of responsibility and civic pride. Manufacturers are happy to encourage this, as it deflects what could otherwise be an anti-consumerist impulse, and often trumpet their involvement in recycling.
The material effects of this household recycling have been modest, outside of niches like recycling of aluminum cans, because households are not the relevant economic unit. The vast majority of resource consumption, waste generation, and recycling all occurs during fabrication and transport, before goods reach consumers and households. While this is materially and environmentally more important, because it happens out of sight it is psychologically less compelling than the fate of items that consumers interact with frequently, such as plastic bags.
Many of these environmentalist ideas became influential around the 1960s, when pollution caused much larger problems in the West than it does today. At the time, it was not unusual for toxic emissions from industry to contaminate the land, water, and air, sometimes legally and sometimes due to lax enforcement of the law, in ways that drastically harmed human health. Many landfills were not constructed to modern standards, and could contaminate the nearby groundwater and air with decomposing or toxic materials. A campaign by academic and media elites raised popular concern about these problems and related ideas, creating the modern environmentalist movement in its current populist form. Many people were persuaded that limiting their environmental impact via lower consumption and recycling is a critical part of good citizenship.
This resulted in a host of laws and regulations to limit pollution and clean up the worst of the damage. In 1970, President Richard Nixon created the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which by 2024 has an annual budget of $12 billion.46 These laws were successful. Throughout the developed world, industries met the new demands by inventing and installing equipment to filter, destroy, and contain the pollutants created by their factories and by consumer products like cars. For example, in Los Angeles, once famous for its smog, a 2012 study found “levels of some vehicle-related air pollutants have decreased by about 98 percent since the 1960s, even as area residents now burn three times as much gasoline and diesel fuel.”47 Problems like acid rain, or the destruction of the ozone layer due to chlorofluorocarbons, are now historical curiosities. Within wealthy industrialized nations, the only remaining pollution problem of major significance is the emission of greenhouse gasses which cause global warming, mainly carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4).
This midcentury ideology remains widely accepted even as the physical problems it was created to address have largely been solved in the developed world. There was no organized academic or intellectual campaign to update the public-facing narratives, beyond the substitution of “carbon” for “pollution” in much of the rhetoric. However, the approaches which succeeded at limiting the effects of local environmental hazards have limited effectiveness at curbing the emission of greenhouse gasses, whose effects are global.
The environmentalist ideology has traction in the U.S., but is far stronger in Europe. This is visible in their recycling behavior. In the U.S., 32% of municipal solid waste is recycled, compared with 40% in the EU.48 For plastic recycling, which is driven by environmentalist beliefs more than by economics, the difference is even starker. The U.S. recycled 4% of its plastic waste, compared to 14% of the EU countries in the OECD. Additionally, the E.U.’s Single-Use Plastics Directive mandates PET beverage bottles must contain at least 25% recycled plastic by 2025 and at least 30% recycled plastic by 2030.49
Even in the part of the world where it has the strongest cultural and legal support, the rate of plastic recycling lags far behind the rate of recycling steel or cardboard or copper. The physical composition of materials and the industrial logic of how they are made are stronger economic forces than the behavior of households, no matter how strongly they might feel their convictions. Pushing against this industrial logic requires large efforts to achieve modest effects. Recycling, even of plastic, could be done more effectively for both industrial and environmental ends if it works in tandem with this logic rather than against it, for example by incinerating plastic as fuel in specially-designed modern plants rather than mandating its use as a material. But this will require a live player to update the messaging and public understanding of what must be recycled, how, and why.
“2020-2021 Centralized Study on Availability of Recycling”, Sustainable Packaging Coalition, https://sustainablepackaging.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/UPDATED-2020-21-Centralized-Study-on-Availability-of-Recycling-SPC-3-2022.pdf; Nils-Gerrit Wunsch, “Does your community offer curbside trash pick up?”, Statista, November 21, 2022, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1346272/curbside-trash-pick-up-united-states/
Monica Anderson, “For Earth Day 2017, here’s how Americans view environmental issues”, Pew Research, April 20, 2017, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/04/20/for-earth-day-heres-how-americans-view-environmental-issues/
For one of countless examples, see Naama Yahalom-Mack et. al., “Metalworking at Megiddo during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages”, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Volume 76, Number 1, April 2017, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/690635
“World Steel in Figures 2022”, World Steel Association, 2022, https://worldsteel.org/data/world-steel-in-figures-2022/
E. F. Wondris and Edward F. Wente, “Electric-arc steelmaking”, Britannica, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/technology/steel/Electric-arc-steelmaking
“Primary Aluminium Smelting Power Consumption”, International Aluminium Institute, September 2024, https://international-aluminium.org/statistics/primary-aluminium-smelting-power-consumption/;
“Electricity generation worldwide from 1990 to 2023”, Statista, June 2024, https://www.statista.com/statistics/270281/electricity-generation-worldwide/
Natalie Spira, “The Price of Aluminum: What Affects Aluminum Pricing”, Kloeckner Metals, June 14, 2021, https://www.kloecknermetals.com/blog/factors-affecting-aluminum-pricing/
“Primary Aluminium Production”, International Aluminium Institute, September 2024, https://international-aluminium.org/statistics/primary-aluminium-production/;
“Global Metal Flow”, International Aluminium Institute, https://recycling.world-aluminium.org/review/global-metal-flow/
“Industry Statistics”, The Aluminum Association, January 2020, https://www.aluminum.org/sites/default/files/2021-11/FactSheet2018.pdf
Madhumitha Jaganmohan, “Refinery production of copper worldwide from 2000 to 2022”, Statista, October 2023, https://www.statista.com/statistics/254917/total-global-copper-production-since-2006/
“Copper Scrap Market Size & Trends”, Grand View Research, https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/copper-scrap-market-report
Sinegugu Ndlovu and Nompumelelo Magwaza, “Metal theft is crippling industry”, Independent Online, July 24, 2008, https://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/metal-theft-is-crippling-industry-409566
“Production volume of refined lead worldwide from 2011 to 2020”, Statista, April 19, 2024, https://www.statista.com/statistics/264872/world-production-of-lead-metal/;
Madhumitha Jaganmohan, “Market volume of recycled lead worldwide in 2020”, Statista, April 19, 2024, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1266020/market-volume-of-recycled-lead-worldwide/
Faidon Papadimoulis and Jack Lynch, “Paper”, International Energy Agency, July 11, 2023, https://www.iea.org/energy-system/industry/paper
J.Y. Keränen and E. Retulainen, “Changing quality of recycled fiber material”, BioResources, 2016, https://bioresources.cnr.ncsu.edu/resources/changing-quality-of-recycled-fiber-material-part-1-factors-affecting-the-quality-and-an-approach-for-characterisation-of-the-strength-potential/
“Paper & Cardboard Recycling”, American Forest & Paper Association, https://www.afandpa.org/priorities/recycling
Emma Penrod, “Where Exactly Is Your Recycling Going?”, Utah Business, January 16, 2020, https://www.utahbusiness.com/utahs-recycling-industry/;
“Surge in demand for recycled cardboard elevates prices for old corrugated containers in U.S.”, Lesprom, February 2, 2024, https://www.lesprom.com/en/news/Surge_in_demand_for_recycled_cardboard_elevates_prices_for_old_corrugated_containers_in_U_S__111661/
Joachim Harder, “Glass recycling – Current market trends”, Recovery, May 2018, https://www.recovery-worldwide.com/en/artikel/glass-recycling-current-market-trends-3248774.html
“The New Plastics Economy”, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2016, https://emf.thirdlight.com/file/24/_A-BkCs_skP18I_Am1g_JWxFrX/The%20New%20Plastics%20Economy%3A%20Rethinking%20the%20future%20of%20plastics.pdf
“Global plastics production”, Our World In Data, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-plastics-production
“Plastic pollution is growing relentlessly as waste management and recycling fall short, says OECD”, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, February 22, 2022, https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2022/02/plastic-pollution-is-growing-relentlessly-as-waste-management-and-recycling-fall-short.html
For a representative example, see https://abcnews.go.com/US/put-dozens-trackers-plastic-bags-recycling-trashed/story?id=99509422
Laura Sullivan, “Recycling plastic is practically impossible — and the problem is getting worse,” NPR, October 24, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/10/24/1131131088/recycling-plastic-is-practically-impossible-and-the-problem-is-getting-worse
“All these years I have been feeling like I’m doing something responsible,” said Pai, clearly dumbstruck as she walked away with a full bag. “The truth hurts.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/21/us-plastic-recycling-landfills
See here: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Greenpeace-Report-Circular-Claims-Fall-Flat.pdf
John Hocevar, “Circular Claims Fall Flat”, Greenpeace, February 18, 2020, https://www.greenpeace.org/static/planet4-eastasia-stateless/2019/11/27d1dd21-27d1dd21-tfgwm_report_grm_plastic_china_lr.pdf
Ibid; Christopher Joyce, “Where Will Your Plastic Trash Go Now That China Doesn't Want It?”, NPR, March 13, 2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/702501726/where-will-your-plastic-trash-go-now-that-china-doesnt-want-it
Emily Holden, “Nearly all countries agree to stem flow of plastic waste into poor nations”, The Guardian, May 10, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/10/nearly-all-the-worlds-countries-sign-plastic-waste-deal-except-us
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