

During my childhood, recycling was an informal, ad-hoc process. We used to buy soda in flip-top bottles that went right back into the crate and got taken back to where we bought them. The bottles were refilled often enough that their painted labels started to wear down. Our newspapers (which were, in fact, paper) got put in the garage until the local Boy Scout troop had a paper drive, where the papers went into a dumpster and were carted off for reprocessing.

But two-liter plastic bottles eventually killed the soda supplier, and a crash in paper prices caused the Boy Scouts to move on to other sources of income. Recycling was a fragile thing, easily broken by forces that had nothing to do with its inherent value.

Fast forward many years, and we're recycling on a massive scale, building centers that perform amazing feats, mechanically separating out a huge array of raw materials. And these materials aren't only valuable in their own right; they save the parties involved significant amounts of money by staying out of landfills. Recycling is a big and growing business, and today it's certain to be a permanent fixture on the global landscape.

So how did we get from Boy Scout pickups to multimillion dollar facilities that handle 15,000 tons of materials per month? Like recycling itself, it's a complicated story, one driven by false starts and historic accidents. And that's in part because recycling is hard, a process driven by lots of critical forces that push in opposite directions.

The crisis that wasn't

If recycling seemed to be dying along with the local soda company back in the 1970s, some of the forces that led to its revival were just beginning to germinate. The EPA was formed to enforce the nation's environmental laws, and the organization was empowered in part by the Clean Water Act. Unexpectedly, this set the EPA on a collision course with what's commonly termed municipal solid waste.

Prior to this point, municipal solid waste was generally governed by local or state laws, and it remained a local issue. Many towns maintained their own dumps or helped support small regional ones. The thought that went into siting, building, and maintaining these dumps, as you might imagine, varied considerably. And that's what brought the EPA into the picture.

Despite the term "solid" in the name, municipal solid waste often contains various liquids or decays into them after time in a landfill. Improperly constructed landfills can also allow ground water into the areas where the trash ends up. These two factors allowed the contents of the waste to mix with groundwater at a number of sites—groundwater that could later be used as drinking water or for agricultural purposes. With mixed standards as to what was allowed into the dumps and little control over whether it stayed there, groundwater contamination became a serious issue.

In the late 1970s, this caught the attention of the EPA. The Agency eventually formulated rules that would handle cases of groundwater contamination by landfills, and it ordered landfills around the country to comply with the new regulations. (Those rules have continued to be updated since.) Doing so, naturally, was expensive. Many of the small, local landfills could not be brought up to the new standards, and they'd need to be closed. (For whatever reason, I've found little indication that "big trash" organized to oppose the regulatory effort, unlike other instances of EPA actions.)

This left communities around the country scrambling to find new homes for their trash. Things looked grim—within a decade, over 60 percent of the nation's dumps closed, and the number of landfills was poised to shrink even further as the EPA's rules were enforced.

The barge to nowhere and the false crisis

As the new EPA rules started to kick in during the mid 1980s, a completely random event came along and captured the public's attention in a way that enhanced the sense that there was a looming landfill crisis. The events started out harmlessly enough. Being blessed with extensive waterfront areas, New York City has (and continues to) handle a lot of its trash by loading it onto barges that carry it to its next destination. That was the plan with one of the many barges loaded up in 1987, one with the catchy name Mobro 4000.

Except, because of documentation issues, the first intended destination refused to take the trash. As did the next. The barge continued to head south along the coast, and media attention grew until entire countries started refusing it entry into their territorial waters. It ended up wandering the Caribbean and got as far south as Belize before trundling back to New York.

If people didn't previously think there was a landfill crisis, they had evidence staring them in the face on the nightly news. Something had to be done about our newly homeless trash.

One option was to simply produce less of it. Places that were otherwise devoid of any sense of environmental consciousness suddenly started looking seriously at recycling.

As it turned out, the sense of crisis was completely overblown. While the number of landfills shrank dramatically, the ones that could afford to meet the new EPA regulations could do so because of economies of scale—they were huge. And new ones opened to meet the demand. Prices did go up a bit, and garbage had to be trucked farther for disposal, but the available landfill space didn't plunge nearly as much as the drop in the total number of landfills suggested it would.

However, by the time all of this became clear, it was too late. The idea of recycling some of our trash had taken hold. But the very early attempts had an ugly run-in with a combination of materials-science and business forces.

Overly raw materials

The basic idea behind recycling is to use our trash as raw materials for new products instead of extracting those raw materials from otherwise finite resources. There is, however, a basic difference in quality between recycled and newly purified materials: we've generally spent anywhere from decades to millennia figuring out how to get newly extracted materials reasonably pure, and we know how to work within the limits of the remaining impurities. It's a completely different problem to clean up something that's already been used in order to get it to that same level of purity, and the end result may have a completely different set of impurities. Even if this cleanup can be done, we haven't always figured out how to run the processes at the same level of efficiency of scale as the ones we use on raw materials.

To provide an easy-to-understand example: it's a well-understood challenge to obtain relatively pure copper from various ores with well-defined chemistries. It's another one entirely to recycle the tiny amounts that are used in computer chips, where they're mixed with a huge array of various other elements.

This becomes a problem when it collides with the intended use of recycled products: manufacturing. Manufacturing is generally a very formalized process, as companies maintain standards for purity in the raw materials used, along with a set of suppliers that are known to meet those standards.

When they first entered the market, recycled materials often failed at one or both of these steps. Even if the level of purity was good enough for the final product, the impurities present were relative unknowns—manufacturers would have to test the recycled material to determine whether it was of sufficient quality (doing the testing at their own expense). To then integrate them into their supply chain, they'd identify providers that could guarantee that quality consistently and provide the material in sufficient quantities.

In the early days of recycling, this was essentially impossible. Both the purity and availability of lots of materials fluctuated as communities adopted and dropped different recycling schemes. As a result, many of the first recycled materials went out to a market that simply wasn't interested in them. Recycling became a struggle for greater purity, one that runs into a bunch of conflicting tensions. There's simply no "right" when it comes to recycling, just a series of compromises that attempt to optimize competing interests.

Listing image by John Timmer