Most Americans have access to some sort of recycling program. However, the rules, practices and community norms around recycling vary considerably from place to place, contributing to dramatically different local recycling levels. People who live in places where social norms strongly encourage recycling are more likely to be aware of recycling rules, say they have more options for recycling, and see more of the waste they generate being recycled rather than landfilled, according to a new聽Pew Research Center survey.
The survey, part of a study covering , found that about three-in-ten Americans (28%) say their local community鈥檚 social norms strongly encourage recycling and re-use. About a fifth (22%) say most people in their communities don鈥檛 really encourage recycling; the remaining half live in places where, they say, norms around recycling are somewhere in the middle.
The study comes as U.S. recycling rates, after rising for decades, have plateaued. The聽 says that in 2013, the most recent year for which it has data, Americans recycled or composted 1.51 pounds of waste per day, a figure that鈥檚 changed little since 2006. On the other hand, Americans are doing better at creating less trash in the first place: Per-capita wastegeneration has fallen from 4.7 pounds per person per day in 2006 to 4.4 pounds in 2013, and total municipal solid waste generation fell by 3 million tons.
A recent聽study conducted for the , an industry group, estimated聽that 94% of the U.S. population has some type of recycling program available to them: About 30% have curbside collection only, 43% have both curbside service and drop-off centers and 21% have drop-off programs only. (This generally aligns with findings from the EPA, which has聽estimated that in 2011, there were more than 9,800 curbside recycling programs throughout the U.S., covering more than 70% of the population.)
Curbside collection is聽more common in larger cities and towns: 93% of the communities in the SPC study with populations greater than 125,000 provided single-family curbside recycling, as opposed to 65% of communities with populations below 50,000. (The Pew Research Center survey, interestingly, found a similar pattern but with lower rates: About seven-in-ten people living in urban and suburban communities said they had curbside recycling, compared with just four-in-ten rural residents, or 40%.)
But just because recycling programs exist doesn鈥檛 mean everyone with access to them actually recycles. According to the EPA, of the 254.1 million tons of municipal solid waste generated in 2013 was recovered through聽recycling or composting; the overall recovery rate has actually slipped a bit聽since peaking at 34.7% in 2011. (鈥淢unicipal solid waste鈥� is the term of art for what most of us think of as trash; it excludes construction and demolition debris, wastewater treatment sludges, and non-hazardous industrial wastes. 鈥淩ecovery鈥� includes recycling and composting, but not burning waste to produce energy.)
Other researchers using different methodologies have come up with higher waste-generation estimates and lower recovery rates. For example, a new report from the聽聽estimates U.S. municipal solid waste generation in 2013 at 347 million tons, with 27% of it being recycled or composted. Columbia University鈥檚 , using a broader definition of municipal solid waste than the EPA, surveyed state and local waste management agencies and came up with an estimate of 389 million tons generated in 2011, with 29% recycled or composted.
Using data from聽the Columbia study, we calculated that California (53.4%), Maine (51.5%) and Washington state (50.1%) had the highest recovery rates for municipal solid waste in the nation in 2011; Oklahoma (3.7%), Alaska (4.5%) and Mississippi (4.8%) had the lowest.
Looking beyond these overall recovery rates, local recycling programs vary considerably in which materials they accept and the degree to which residents must separate different materials. The Pew Research Center survey found that 59% of the public believes that 鈥渕ost types of items鈥� can be recycled in their community; another 26% characterize their options as 鈥渟ome,鈥� and 13% say only a few types of items can be recycled where they live. And the people who live in places that strongly encourage recycling also are more likely to say that most types of items can be recycled there.
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