In 2014, some of the same companies that were part of EPA’s dialogue funded two new, unprecedented initiatives, which provide, in one case, more than $1 million in grants and, in the other, $100 million in low- or zero-interest loans to cities looking to improve their recycling programs. This is the first time private companies have coordinated their efforts to invest in cities’ recycling infrastructure at this scale. But product stewardship advocates say that’s not nearly enough — that companies should be footing the bill for the whole system.

Who Is Responsible for Our Trash?

Not so long ago, the trash that cities dealt with was simpler. But corporate America has done wonders with metals, chemicals and plastics, sold those wonders to us, and convinced us to quickly discard them. In just the last 15 years, the volume of packaging that ends up in the waste stream has grown by millions of tons.

The promise of recycling is that these materials are not worthless. Gather them together, and they can be resurrected — live a second life, and then a third, a fourth and, for some materials, onto infinity. Recycled aluminum is essentially identical to newly extracted aluminum, which costs so much that recycling makes economic sense. For most products, though, the economic case for recycling is less clear.

“If you were to go out and buy a box of Cheerios today at Walmart, you’d pay $2.50 a box. You’re buying that box, and you’re eating the Cheerios and getting that value. Hopefully everyone upstream has made a profit,” says North Carolina’s Mouw. “When the box is empty, you’re looking at a material that’s probably worth less than a penny. They have a value stream that supports distribution. But the value stream is different backwards. There’s not an inherent value in that box.”

Recycling glass, for instance, is simple on a technical level, but difficult to profit from. Picture the piles of glass bottles that collect behind restaurants and bars. That glass, Mouw says, is worth something like “negative $300 a ton.” That doesn’t mean it should be thrown away. But if it’s to be recycled, “someone has to pay for the reverse distribution process to happen.”

Producers have worked hard to ensure that someone is not them. In the 1970s, the environmental movement, waxing in power, began pressuring companies to reduce the amount of future-waste they were selling or to take responsibility for it. In response, some industry groups started backing a select group of recycling campaigns — the ones that put the burden of doing the work on either volunteer groups or city governments — as Samantha MacBride, a former deputy director for recycling in New York City, recounts in her book Recycling Reconsidered. (MacBride is currently an assistant professor at CUNY’s Baruch College.)

In the ’70s, consumer goods companies pushed these campaigns with “the explicit intent” of heading off more restrictive legislation, MacBride writes; in the ’80s, some container and paper companies began supporting curbside recycling “to keep the costs of negative externalities squarely on the public.” Industry representatives were often quite explicit about this position. In a 1993 article about recycling, for instance, a representative of the American Plastics Council told the New York Times, “If I buy a product, I’m the polluter … I should be responsible for the disposal of the package.”

Two decades later, though, companies that make packaged consumer goods still don’t want to be financially responsible for recycling. But they need the end product: the plastic or paper with the tri-arrow twist that symbolizes green. Many have pledged to use more recycled content in their packaging: This plays well with eco-minded customers and also makes business sense. “We know that our feedstock to make the bottles is a finite resource. We know that feedstock has increased in cost significantly over the last couple of decades,” says Jeffrey Meyers, who manages sustainable packaging at Coca-Cola. “So the company is thinking about alternative supplies and materials.”

For companies to depend on recyclables, cities need to be producing a steady, high-quality stream of not-so-raw materials. In the past, Coca-Cola and companies like it have funded piecemeal efforts to increase recycling — giving a grant to a town for the purchase of roll carts, or another to start a program to put recycling bins out in theaters or stadiums. But more recently they worked to coordinate their efforts.

“There have been several of these public-private initiatives,” says Keefe Harrison, who’s worked in the recycling industry for decades and became executive director of the Curbside Value Partnership in 2014. After the 2010 EPA dialogue, for instance, Alcoa, the largest producer of aluminum in America, convened its own meeting and associated initiative —“the Action to Accelerate Recycling.” “That one had a lot of interest, but they couldn’t get people to put money on the table,” says Harrison. “It’s always really difficult.”

In 2014, though, two industry-funded initiatives — the Recycling Partnership, which is run by Harrison’s organization, and the Closed Loop Fund, backed first by Walmart — actually came together.

Coca-Cola is backing both. (It’s the only company to do so.) “Coke’s clearly trying to evaluate the options that are out there, including EPR. We want to be active participants and discuss what EPR could look like. But it’s still early,” says Meyers. “For now our focus is going to be on other programs, like the Closed Loop Fund and the Recycling [Partnership].”

And if those programs succeed in boosting recycling rates, it’ll give companies a stronger argument that a mandatory program like EPR won’t be necessary.

One Piece of the Puzzle

The Recycling Partnership grew out of a push by the Southeast Recycling Development Council (SERDC), an industry-backed group, to identify key ways that robust recycling programs worked, with the aim of fixing up floundering ones. The places in America that do best at recycling are exactly the ones you’d imagine. California’s long been a leader; Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, where land is more scarce and landfilling more expensive, tend to have higher recycling rates.

“You see relatively weaker programs in the Southeast,” says Karen Bandhauer, the Curbside Value Partnership’s project director. But there’s actually a strong regional demand there for recycled material — a potential market for cities’ waste. During the SERDC project, which both Harrison and Bandhauer worked on as consultants, they’d put together a list of cities that could be grant candidates — about 20 altogether. They called those cities and said, essentially, give us your wish list. If you could radically change your recycling program, what would it look like?

Most wanted basic upgrades: new trucks, roll carts to replace bins. And, often, they needed a lot of money to make that happen. The Recycling Partnership had told the cities to match the private dollars on offer with as large a public contribution as possible. Still, “we got back relatively large asks,” says Bandhauer. “It was in the multimillions for some of them, an order of magnitude larger than what we were looking to put in.”

“No one wants to pay for recycling.”

The aim of the partnership is not to fund recycling programs — it’s to use a small amount of private money to convince cities to put up much larger amounts of public money, seven to eight times as much as they’re getting from the private sector. Harrison has raised $1.2 million from corporate partners including Alcoa, Coca-Cola, Sonoco and the American Chemistry Council, and the program’s first three grantees — Columbia, South Carolina, Florence, Alabama, and Richmond, Virginia — announced last fall, are each getting around $300,000 of that money.

“We have to recognize there’s a cost involved, and government has taken the brunt of the cost,” says Harrison. “That’s not necessarily bad.”

Columbia, for instance, plans on using the money from the Recycling Partnership to buy carts. Even as neighboring counties switched over to using 96-gallon roll carts for recycling, Columbia, the state’s capital and largest city, has been stuck with 18-gallon bins, the kind that’s awkward to haul down to the end of the driveway.

“I get calls every day,” says Samantha Yager, the city’s recycling coordinator. “When am I getting my roll cart? When am I getting my roll cart?”

Carts, though, are expensive: They cost a city about $45 to $50 each, Harrison says. When you’re buying them for tens of thousands of households, the cost adds up quickly. Cities with carts usually end up spending less per ton on recycling and can save money overall. But switching all of Columbia over, Yager’s department estimates, will take $2 million. Even with the grant from the Recycling Partnership, the city doesn’t have that money to spend; the city’s hoping to partner with a regional or local recycling business to cover the rest of the costs.

“The financial challenge is still there, but having this grant we’re able to start this program right now,” she says. “It’s been the catalyst to change our program.”

That $300,000 catalyst is a significant chunk of financing — last fiscal year, the city’s working budget for recycling was $1.1 million. The Recycling Partnership hopes that its investment will set off an even greater reaction around the region. The theory, essentially, is that cities respond to peer pressure. Columbia wants to be seen as a leader, a modern city, with up-to-date amenities; it needs carts partially because its neighbors have them. The grants serve as demonstration projects, a model for other municipalities to copy, even without extra funding.

The Closed Loop Fund, although it’s a separate effort, with separate funders, and a different strategy, has a similar goal. The fund grew out of a Walmart-run meeting in 2013, and the “aspirational goal” Walmart says, is to divert valuable raw materials from the landfill — and to help retailers and consumers goods manufacturers secure access to more recycled materials. To this end, the Closed Loop Fund is offering loans to cities at extremely favorable terms — some zero interest — and looking to invest in projects like upgrades to carts or materials recovery facilities. (“MRFs,” pronounced to rhyme with “surfs,” are where recyclables are sorted and baled.) Cities are supposed to repay the loans, over about five years, with the money they save.

“EPR is one lever that can be pulled to influence suppliers’, manufacturers’ and municipalities’ approach to recycling,” a Walmart spokesperson told me. But, the company says, the issue is “more systemic” and one approach is not enough to solve. “This is why the Closed Loop Fund loans can provide financial support to a range of projects that help increase recovery,” the Walmart spokesperson said.

The private companies involved in this project (which include not just Walmart, but PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Unilever) are investing significantly more money — $100 million in total — than the Recycling Partnership has raised.

“What we hope is that when we invest in different types of projects and show they can be successful, that cities do those projects on their own without waiting for our financing,” says Ron Gonen, the project’s director, who, previously, ran New York City’s recycling program.

But even these loans support a variety of projects. Gonen says that they are not going to solve the recycling program problem in the country. They’re one piece of the puzzle.

“I think the first thing is, you have to go to companies and say: Are you willing to come to the table with a solution? If they say yes, then great. If they say no, or just put something for show, then there’s a need for regulation,” he says. “In the case of the companies in the Closed Loop Fund, they’ve stepped up.”

EPR advocates are not so impressed, though, with these voluntary efforts.

“They feel like programs that are designed as perception management — let’s throw some money at this, we want to show policymakers that we’re doing something,” says Matt Prindiville, the associate director of Upstream, a Maine-based nonprofit that’s part of a loose coalition of product stewardship organizations. On his side, Prindiville says, “We don’t want to wait around and see what the grant program or what the loan can do. $100 million is not that much money when you’re talking about billions across the counties to run these recycling programs.”

What his group wants, Prindiville says, is for companies to commit to green design and to reducing the waste they create. To fund pollution mitigation. And to support policies like EPR.

The Life Cycle of Stuff

“Extended producer responsibility” was first proposed at the end of the 1980s by Thomas Lindhqvist, a Swedish environmental policy researcher. The idea was to decrease the environmental impact of consumer products “by making the manufacturer of the product responsible for the entire life cycle of the product and especially for the take-back, recycling and final disposal of the products,” Lindhqvist later wrote.

The goal of EPR isn’t to stick companies with the bill for waste disposal out of anti-corporate spite; it’s to shift the work of dealing with disposable products from governments, who can’t do much to change them for the better, to companies, which can. “Stuff that has no value at the end of its life or that’s toxic — those are design problems,” says Upstream’s Prindiville. “You can’t fix those problems by having local governments say, ‘Hey, how do we deal with these things?’ You have to go to the source and get them to be responsible in designing products with sustainable materials.”