EPA Waste Study 2006
The Big Picture on Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) and Where Recycling Fits In
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did its last comprehensive analysis of the trends in solid waste in 2006. Here are some graphics showing trends. In terms of waste, we continue to dispose of massive amounts...251 million short tons of "stuff". It works out to 4.6 pounds per person PER day. Recycling efforts have led to about 82 million tons of waste being diverted from landfill in 2006.
It is interesting to look at the various rates of recycling amongst representative materials and speculate as to why some materials have achieved greater or lesser success in being recycled.
Auto batteries- this is a good example where government, industry and the retail sectors got alignment early and made some tough decisions to deal with the core issue of lead disposal. Now, it's standard operating procedure for consumers and industrial users to exchange their obsolete
batteries for new ones along with payment of a disposal fee (not unlike what's imposed on spent tires). The fact that batteries aren't the most "portable" items also makes it more likely that people will do the right thing and dispose of them properly rather than chuck them into their
garbage cans.
Steel/Aluminum cans- the earliest pioneers in recycling, but both containers suffer from collection convenience these days......which is why various new hybrid schemes for curbside collection are being looked at. Aluminum remains the champion of residual market value amongst all products.
Plastics- also suffering from convenience of collection. Rapidly evolving technologies to re-use PET in usable food grade applications is a good news story here which bodes well for the commercial value of spent PET.
Glass- one of the big struggles for glass is the wholesale lack of commercial value of the recycling material and its difficulty in processing in single stream recylcing streams.
Greg Wittbecker
