Lee Zeldin should trash EPA’s national recycling plan 

Like other Cabinet members in the Trump administration, new Environmental Protection Agency chief Lee Zeldin has hit the ground running, canceling ideology-driven contracts for diversity, equity and “environmental justice.”

But it’s not just these progressive favorites through which the agency has strayed far from its mandate to clean the environment.

One of its less controversial core goals — and one popular with municipalities and corporations across the country — is the vehicle for spreading environmental damage across the world. To reverse that trend, Zeldin should roll back an EPA edict aimed at every city and town in the country: the national recycling goal.

Instead of putting plastic in those blue bins, we should establish systems to recover valuable “e-waste,” the rare earth elements and metals found in cellphones and other electronics — in other words, the very same things the Trump administration is working to get from Ukraine.

Per the EPA, the goal is to increase trash recycling to 50 percent of solid waste by 2030, with the aim of “managing materials more sustainably.” Think here of the plastic, glass and paper piled in the ubiquitous blue bins found on curbsides. It sounds like an admirable goal — but what seems like an unobjectionable practice turns out to be both uneconomical and damaging. 

The picture of just how that works is painted brilliantly in Alexander Clapp’s forthcoming new book, “Waste Wars.” Based on astounding on-the-ground reporting across the globe, "Waste Wars" shines a spotlight on how plastic travels from rich countries to poor, where it is not recycled but dumped or burned.  

Clapp lifts the veil on the “wishcycling” ongoing across the U.S. “The waste that travels across the globe and often inflicts irreversible environmental damage is not the trash that — to much chagrin — goes into the garbage bin and then into the local landfill. It’s the stuff that you place in the recycling bin in the conviction that doing so is helping the planet.”

That’s because the installed capacity to recycle those plastic bottles and other containers is both limited and domestically unprofitable. 

There is no current realistic market for recycled plastic. It’s simply far less expensive to make new plastic than to refine existing stock. “Virgin plastics” are made from byproducts of oil and gas refining, which occurs anyway, and are of higher quality. Markets tend to reward products that are cheaper and better. Only 9 percent of U.S. plastic is nominally recycled at all.  

Internationally, where the rate is higher, this eco-friendly practice relies on the lowest paid workers to do the required cleaning and sorting. U.S. plastic, long shipped to China before it closed its doors in 2017, is likely to wind up in what Clapp describes as a shadowy, informal market of those paid to send “recyclables” in shipping containers bound for countries such as Ghana. It’s what increasingly passes for industry in poor nations. 

This is the environmentally damaging supply chain, which the EPA’s national recycling goal is helping to stock, by pressuring local municipalities to divert plastic to those blue bins and not to send it to dumps or incinerators. As hard as it is to believe, absent a breakthrough in technology and markets, localities would be doing the environment a favor by sending plastic to sanitary landfills or burning it.

As I have described in my report on trends in recycling for the American Enterprise Institute, a new generation of “waste-to-energy” incinerators holds the promise of mining the ash produced for valuable rare earth elements found in electronics, which are not separated at curbside, despite their high value. A February 2020 analysis by Purdue University of the e-waste stream finds 56 elements in electronic devices are routinely sent to dumps.

The current system which the EPA’s broadbrush national goal encourages also does damage to local government finances. It is costly to run separate trucks to pick up what’s in those blue bins — especially when the contents may well have to be sent to landfills anyway, for lack of an existing market. This is not to say that everything placed in the curbside bins is done so foolishly. Per the EPA, some 80 percent of paper and cardboard is actually recycled. This points toward how a pragmatic EPA can lead — encouraging municipalities to separate and sell those materials for which there is a market, while disposing of those for which there is not. 

Those who believe they are saving the earth by not sending plastic to the landfill are currently doing the opposite, as rogue shippers dump “microplastics,” some of which wind up in the water, poison sea life and pollute beaches. Nor is shipping plastic to Third World landfills, far less likely to be safely managed, an act of environmentalism. Just as we should strive to reshore some manufacturing, so should we do so with the disposal of all those Coke and water bottles. 

 Memo to Lee Zeldin: drop the misleading recycling goal. 

Howard Husock is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.