The most recent statistics on municipal solid waste generation in the U.S. were released in 2018. At that point, Americans generated 292.4 million tons of waste. Only 69.09 million tons were recycled. What happened to the other 223.31 million tons?
- 34.55 million tons were incinerated with energy recovery.
- 26.99 million tons were composted.
- 137. 61 million tons were sent to landfills.
The remainder went to “Other Food Management,” which means it went to things like livestock feed or was donated to food shelves and similar organizations.
We’ve become dependent on single-use items. Water bottles, plastic utensils, plastic freezer bags, and even the ever-popular closed-cell resin known as Croslite, used in the popular Crocs shoe brand.
Crocs is a great example of how you can recognize the problem and take immediate steps to find solutions, such as recycling and upcycling. It’s just as important to understand what downcycling is and when it’s the best option.
A Close Look at Today’s Waste Problem
Every day, people generate almost five pounds of municipal solid waste per person. That’s 20 pounds in a four-person household. By the end of the week, that’s 140 pounds. It adds up quickly.
Countries with the best recycling rates do things differently from how they’re done in the U.S. It involves a lot of consumer involvement in separating and sorting materials.
To counteract all that waste, it’s important to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Three processes help you do this: recycling, upcycling, and downcycling.
The Industrial Standard: What Is Recycling?
Most people are familiar with recycling. You rinse items like food jars, cardboard boxes, plastic containers, and cans. They go into a curbside container for pickup by your trash and recycling hauler. If you live in an apartment or condo complex, you likely have a room where you deposit those items.
What’s accepted depends on your location and local municipal waste facility, but common recyclables include:
- Cardboard boxes and packaging (Must be clean and dry)
- Electronics
- Glass jars and bottles
- Metal cans
- Paper, magazines, newspapers, and books with the covers removed
- Plastic bottles and containers
Those items go to processing facilities where they’re chopped up or melted to make new manufacturing materials or used in other beneficial ways. For example, crushed glass is often added to stone for paving projects.
Creative Value-Added: What Is Upcycling?
Upcycling is especially useful for items you cannot recycle. It involves finding new ways to use items that are no longer useful for their original purpose. I have a few ways I upcycle items around my home.
One is cardboard boxes. When I have an abundance of boxes, I layer them in raised garden beds or my “lasagna garden beds.” After putting them down, I spray them with the hose and add more compost and garden soil. Worms absolutely love wet cardboard, so I attract them to my garden, and they help provide food for the growing plants.
Do you have a plastic laundry hamper with broken handles or cracks? Before you throw it out, add a few drainable holes to the bottom and grow potatoes. Take your hamper and layer it with mulch, shredded paper, and garden soil. Add some seed potatoes around the edges. Wet that down with a hose.
Continue to layer the mulch, paper, soil, and potatoes until you reach the top. Set it somewhere in the sun to grow all summer. When it’s time to harvest them, you tip the bin over and remove the new potatoes.
Creativity is key to upcycling. Baby food jars are handy for storing small items like screws and bolts. A broken wooden ladder becomes a great outdoor plant rack when you secure terracotta pots to each rung. The possibilities are endless.
Today’s Reality: What Is Downcycling?
To stop the excess waste from single-use items, a circular economy is essential. Buy something, recycle it, and buy new items made from the recycled materials. The more times you use it, the better. The problem is that you can’t reuse materials like plastic and paper indefinitely.
Plastic and paper items can only be recycled so many times before the material is no longer structurally sound. At that point, you have to find a use for them where a lesser-value application is appropriate. Downcycling is a form of recycling that considers what happens to a product downstream of the initial recycling processes.
1. Downcycling Plastic:
Plastic is one of the best examples of how items are downcycled. You can recycle a plastic water bottle, but once those materials have been reused a few times, they’re too weak. Instead, they can be turned into plastic strands to make shoes. After that, you could use them to make truck bed liners.
Downcycling saves money while also reducing waste. Recycling facilities don’t have to sort plastics. You can use all plastic materials in downcycling so that workers can focus attention on other duties. You don’t have to force them to work overtime.
2. Downcycling Paper:
Paper is another item that’s frequently downcycled. The paper fibers lose strength with each recycling. You could recycle a sheet of premium printer paper five times and no longer be able to turn it into more premium paper.
Instead, it’s downcycled into newsprint, then cardboard, and then toilet paper and paper towels. Eventually, the weakened, short fibers that remain can go into a landfill, or, even better, compost.
3. Downcycling Textiles:
Clothing, towels, and linens can all be downcycled. You might be able to repurpose clothing by fixing holes and broken zippers. Once they’re too worn to wear, you can use them to make industrial rags, then carpet padding, and then soundproofing panels.
Nothing has to end up in a landfill when you’re using these materials to make items like insulation. When insulation needs replacing, if it’s in okay shape, it’s usually covered rather than removed.
This is where Crocs has focused. When you no longer need your Crocs, the company takes them back. It doesn’t matter what condition they’re in. If Crocs are in good shape, they go to Soles4Souls, an organization that gives them to people in developing nations so they can repair or clean them and resell them to earn a stable income.
If the clogs and other footwear are too worn to reuse, they’re separated and sorted by material. Those materials are used to make new items.
Crocs’ other promise is that by 2030, at least half of the materials used to make their shoes will include bio-circular content. The company also vows to reduce its carbon footprint by at least 50% by 2030 and aims to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040.
With companies like Crocs making promises to reduce their carbon footprint and keep recyclable materials out of landfills, you can do the same. One of the best ways to do this is by stopping wish-cycling, a very common mistake.
Wish-Cycling: A Common Problem With an Easy Solution
One of the biggest hurdles in recycling is wish-cycling. It happens when people see a recycling symbol and assume the item is recyclable, then toss it into the recycling bin. If the item isn’t recyclable in that district, it contaminates the truckload, forcing workers to stop and remove it.
If there are too many wish-cycled items, the entire truckload of recyclables may end up in the landfill instead. It can take too much time to hand-sort items, which is where AI and robotics come in, but not every district can afford the newer recycling machinery.
Recycling varies so much from one district to the next that it can be challenging to determine what is and isn’t recyclable, especially if your trash company doesn’t have printed guides, which is becoming more common. They direct you to online guides, which don’t always help as they’re too large to print out and stick on a fridge.
If you live on the border of two counties, you might find that one county’s list of accepted recyclables differs from the other’s. The trash hauler may empty the truck mid-route to make room. You won’t know where they’re headed when you move your recycling bin to the curb.
To prevent wish-cycling, it’s often best to put uncertain items in a separate container. Look them up on Recycle Nation’s handy resource to see where you can bring them. Taking the time ensures they’re recycled correctly and don’t end up in truckloads of recyclables sent to the landfill.
