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The hidden economic and environmental costs of eliminating kerb-side recycling

Nature Sustainability volume 6, pages 919–928 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Local governments provide household collection of garbage and recyclables on a routine schedule, and these recycling programmes represent the most visible opportunity for everyday citizens to engage in sustainable practices. In the face of unprecedented challenges, and citing costs as the major driver, many US communities are shrinking or eliminating kerb-side recycling. Here we show that when recycling commodity markets were most lucrative in 2011, net US recycling costs were as little as US$3 per household annually, and when markets reached a minimum (in 2018–2020), the annual recycling-programme costs ranged from US$34 to US$42 per household. This investment offsets the greenhouse gas emissions from non-recycled household waste buried in landfills. If local governments restructure recycling programmes to target higher value and embodied carbon-intensive materials, recycling can pay for itself and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Our analysis highlights that kerb-side recycling provides communities a return on investment similar to or better than climate change mitigation strategies such as voluntary green power purchases and transitioning to electric vehicles. Eliminating recycling squanders one of the easiest opportunities for communities and citizens to mitigate climate change and reduce natural resources demands.

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Fig. 1: Comparison of the annual net household costs associated with the waste management of an average US residential household in 2020 with and without recycling.
Fig. 2: The costs associated with separately collecting, processing and marketing recyclables compared to the total costs of collecting and managing household waste for the United States and four regions.
Fig. 3: Annual GHG emissions associated with the waste management of an average US residential household in 2020.
Fig. 4: Annual net household costs and net GHG footprints associated with the waste management of an average US residential household under six scenarios.

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Data availability

All data used to produce the results of our analysis are available in the Supplementary Information.

Code availability

The custom computer code used to generate the missing recycling market value prices in this study can be made available to researchers upon request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the Hinkley Center for Solid and Hazardous Waste Management in Gainesville, Florida. We thank N. Robey for her review of the Methods and manuscript. We acknowledge the Florida Recycling Partnership Foundation for comments and discussion on the planning and analysis of the paper. We appreciate the data for the recycling commodity markets provided by Recycling Markets Limited and the access to the life-cycle assessment models, Solid Waste Optimization Framework (SWOLF) and Municipal Solid Waste Decision Support Tool (MSW-DST), provided by North Carolina State University and RTI International, respectively. We thank our colleagues from multiple Florida counties (for example, Alachua County, Indian River County, Palm Beach County, Hillsborough County, Sarasota County, Orange County, Lee County) who supported our analysis through their data-collection efforts on solid waste-management costs used in the analysis. The authors are responsible for the content of the paper, and the findings do not represent the views of the funding agencies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Engineering, Florida Polytechnic University, Lakeland, FL, USA

    Malak Anshassi

  2. Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Timothy G. Townsend

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  1. Malak Anshassi
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  2. Timothy G. Townsend
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M.A. performed the research and analysed the data. T.G.T. conceived the idea and designed the study. Both authors wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Timothy G. Townsend.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Costas Velis, Eleni Iacovidou, Matthew Franchetti, and George F. Banias for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Methods, Figs. 1–11 and Tables 1–23.

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Supplementary Data (download XLSX )

Supplementary data spreadsheet that includes commodity price data, landfill and incineration cost data, detailed costs and greenhouse gas emissions footprints for the alternative recycling programmes and historic household-added costs of recycling and waste management.

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Anshassi, M., Townsend, T.G. The hidden economic and environmental costs of eliminating kerb-side recycling. Nat Sustain 6, 919–928 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01122-8

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