Recycling is broken. Should I even care?

Recycling can have major environmental benefits. First, it keeps unwanted items out of landfills or incinerators, where they can produce powerful greenhouse gases and potentially dangerous pollutants.

More importantly, recycling reduces the amount of raw materials we need to mine. For example, the amount of energy needed to recycle aluminum is less than 5 percent of the energy needed to mine virgin ore. And the more paper we recycle, the fewer trees we cut down.

But recycling rates in the United States have been stubbornly flat for years. And in some cases they are sad. 10 percent of plastics are actually recycled. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of tons of recyclable waste are exported, often to developing countries.

It’s no wonder that many readers have asked us whether individual efforts make any difference at all. To answer that question, it helps to understand how the system works and how people use it.

Why is recycling struggling?

The way the system is set up, recycling is a business, and our recyclables – metals, paper and plastics – are raw materials.

When you put something in the blue bin, whether it’s recyclable or not, it’s taken to a sorting plant where it runs along a conveyor belt and is grouped with similar items. The recyclables are then bundled. The process is labor intensive.

One of the biggest challenges is that companies don’t want their materials to be contaminated with things they don’t recycle or can’t recycle. The more random stuff that ends up in a sorting plant, the more work facilities have to do to get it out. And that increases costs.

Once that’s done and the factory can find a buyer at a reasonable price, the bundles are sent to a recycling facility. Sometimes local, and sometimes as far away as Africa or Southeast Asia. If they can’t, everything goes to a landfill or is burned.

Some items are easy. Others not so much.

Recycling metals makes a lot of economic sense, for the reasons explained above. It’s simply a lot cheaper than scraping ore out of the ground. And metals like aluminum can be recycled infinitely.

It also makes environmental sense. Mining pollutes soil and waterways. Recycling aluminum cans requires only a fraction of the energy and water that mining requires.

And recycling paper helps keep forests intact. According to the forest conservation group Canopy, paper packaging is responsible for about 10 percent of global logging. We save water power and greenhouse gas emissions when we recycle, compared to products made from virgin pulp.