2023: New Laws, New Markets & Recycling’s Moral Halo

2022 was an odd year for recycling. Legislators were aggressive, but markets were cold.  In spite of a surge of new laws, the very idea of recycling continued to be undermined by anti-plastics polemicists. 

Let’s start with the new laws. Congress, as usual, did little. Oh, it held hearings. But only two bills, the Recycling Infrastructure and Accessibility Act and the Recycling and Composting Accountability Act had any traction. The former provided grants to increase accessibility to recycling while the latter was concerned with better recycling data. The Senate passed both with bipartisan support. They are not groundbreaking in scope but still went nowhere in the House. 

In addition, the Omnibus Budget bill included negative language on “chemical” recycling. EPA is in the process of potential rulemaking covering that new plastic recycling technology. Congress urged it to consider emissions and disproportionate impacts in its rulemaking. 

State legislatures were far more active than the Hill. Legislators established new EPR programs, recycled content requirements, organics mandates, and updated deposit laws. Michigan now has a set of eight new laws that are a sweeping update of its waste and recycling laws.

EPR activity included carpets in New York State, mattresses in Oregon, updates to South Carolina’s electronics law and adding embedded batteries to California’s battery law. In addition, California and Colorado enacted EPR for packaging. 

New Jersey passed a packaging recycled content law.  Deposit laws In California, Iowa and Oregon were updated and in two cases, expanded to cover more types of beverages. Washington passed a comprehensive organics management law with a 2030 goal to reduce organic waste disposal by 75 percent. Later in the year, California’s legislature delayed enforcement penalties for its mandated organic waste diversion law.  

I don’t expect much out of Congress in 2023. Recycling is not the most pressing issue facing a Congress riven by partisan division. New laws are more likely at the state level. Legislators will be looking at bills that passed in other states in previous years. 

At this point it is hard to say what will pass. Waste and recycling legislation used to be non-partisan. Bills would pass or fail on their merits not their partisan backing. That has changed. With the exception of two updates of existing laws and the Michigan laws, all of the legislation mentioned above was enacted in blue states. 

Only 33 states have any kind of an EPR bill. Most of those concern electronics or mercury-containing products. That means one third of the states have shown no interest in EPR. I expect some EPR bills will pass in 2023, including packaging EPR. I also expect at least one of the four states with a packaging EPR law will fail to meet its implementation date. These laws are staggeringly complicated and are without U.S. precedents. More cautious states are likely to wait and see how this new concept works in practice. They will prefer to learn from the inevitable missteps of a newly built program.

Finally, expect legislation covering recyclability claims. In December, the Federal Trade Commission requested comments on how it should update its “Green Guides” on environmental marketing claims. This is your chance to tell the FTC what to do about recycling labels.

As for markets, 2022 was a tough year. With one exception, curbside recycling markets were lower at the end of 2022 than at the beginning of the year. Paper (“cardboard” boxes and mixed paper) stayed strong until August when markets for both grades fell dramatically. Both steel and aluminum cans, PET, PP and colored HDPE plastics also ended the year lower than they started. 

Only natural HDPE ended up in a better place on December 31. Its lack of color makes it highly versatile because it can be dyed and used for a wide array of products. Natural HDPE can also be in tight supply because it is used to package a small number of products (milk, waste and juice bottles). If demand is calling, that supply problem will increase prices.

2022’s downward recycling markets were largely caused by the weakness of the U.S. and global economies. Additionally, retail companies found themselves with excess inventory early in the summer. To clear out their warehouses, they cut back on orders for new products which also meant fewer new boxes were needed. Paper mills began taking downtime as orders dropped and additional recycled content capacity was coming on-line. Plastic markets suffered from a slowdown in construction and the weaker economy. The Northeast Recycling Council’s Quarterly Recycling Markets Value Reports summed up current markets when its third quarter showed a $62.20 drop in the average value of a ton from a year ago. 

I’m at a loss to predict how markets will be doing at the end of this year. We are in unusual economic times. If you can successfully predict the state of the economy throughout 2023, you can also predict recycling markets. I expect prices will slowly increase for most of the curbside recyclables. Most have stabilized and a few have started to go back up. Plastic markets should benefit when the Infrastructure Act’s impacts are felt. But we need to remember that recyclables are simply raw materials looking for a market.  A strong economy is the best guarantee of good recycling markets. 

Finally, the disinformation campaign against plastic recycling is starting to drag down all recycling. A December 15 opinion piece in The New York Times stated “the moral halo around recycling is largely a result of a decades-long disinformation campaign by plastic manufacturers”. This is a preposterous misstatement of fact.

Curbside recycling was launched by Garden State Paper and the new recycled newspaper industry in the late 60’s. Paper remains the primary material collected in recycling programs. Metal cans and glass bottles began to be collected curbside in the mid 70’s. Plastic packaging didn’t get collected at the curbside until the late 80’s, largely because it is a product of the late 70’s and the 80’s.  Anyone who believes the “moral halo”, the reality that recycling has a positive environmental impact, was created by the plastics industry probably also believes the moon is made of green cheese. Yet this “illusory truth”, constantly repeated by people who should know better, continues to gain currency in the popular press. 

That more recycling laws will be passed in 2023 is an easy prediction. As for markets, they should improve a bit. If the economy regains strength, markets will improve even more. 

But what about recycling’s “moral halo”. Will Americans lose interest in recycling as it continues to be pounded by anti-plastics activists and lazy journalists? Recycling won’t save the world nor is it the best way to lower greenhouse gas emissions. But it is an invaluable way to conserve materials and, like it or not, recycling, including plastics recycling, lowers greenhouse gas emissions. We must continue to promote what recycling accomplishes while continuing to improve it. 2023 will be a crucial year to bring back public confidence in recycling. Let’s not miss this opportunity.