While incineration is sometimes used to produce energy,. California Management Review is a major academic management journal published at the University of California at Berkeley By Christian Blanco, Calvin Spanbauer and Sara Stienecker America's outdated approach to recycling is also bad for the environment. Approximately 1.8 million acres of land in the U.S. UU. Recycling diverts waste from these landfills, but currently only 32.1% of U.S.
waste is recycled or composted.4 The recycling market has many opportunities to create more financial value and conserve our natural resources. The recycling market has five critical deficiencies. Before delving into the details of these deficiencies, it's helpful to see a quick overview of how the industry works. The waste management process begins when a municipality selects a material recovery facility to serve its region. The material recovery facility is a public or private company that classifies recyclable materials into clean streams of products that can be sold for remanufacturing.
The recovery facility makes decisions about what products it will accept based on (the market for recyclable materials), (the equipment and labor it has) and (the scale) of the possible materials that can be collected. A logistics company (which is sometimes owned by the same parent company as the material recovery facility) is responsible for collecting waste on the sidewalk. The logistics company collects household recyclable materials and delivers the loaded trucks to a material recovery facility to be sorted into individual groups. Processing the raw recyclable waste that comes from logistics companies will cost less if there is little or no pollution.
5 At the recovery facility, the logistics vehicle is weighed on a scale and a visual inspection is performed. The inspection aims to evaluate the quality of unprocessed recyclable waste and determine if contamination will affect the processing capabilities of the recovery facility. If the contamination exceeds the tolerable threshold, the cargo is rejected and taken to the landfill. Once the recyclable materials are classified, individual products can be sold for remanufacturing.
The material recovery market is divided into six U.S. regions. The market is similar to that of other commodity markets where the price is determined using a bidding system. There are also long-term contracts, although they are less popular because they can be more expensive for the processor.
The cost that a material recovery facility pays to collect, sort, compact and rescue recyclable materials is still fixed, but the demand and price they can charge for their products fluctuate. This means that sometimes recovery facilities are cost-effective and sometimes they are not. 7 Manufacturers interested in closing the circle can commit to using non-virgin materials as inputs for their production. However, they will only do this if they find that buying recycled material is more cost-effective or cost-effective.
To close the circle, the recycling industry needs to scale up and be more efficient in collecting, segregating and reselling recycled material. We included 25 articles in our survey. We purposely chose some products that were deposited in landfills in the nine cities, others that were recycled in the nine cities and others with municipal variations in terms of practices at the end of their useful life. The following sections use the results of our survey to characterize the five major deficiencies of the U.S.
Some products, such as corrugated cardboard and rinsed plastic jars, have predictable processing costs, stable demand from manufacturers, and a stable supply from consumer waste streams. This is good for all companies in the recycling supply chain. These products provide a consistent return on investment for processing facilities and reliable availability for manufacturers. Unfortunately, market stability is not the reality for most recycled products. The volatility of supply is due to the fact that recycling practices vary widely from region to region and over time.
For example, our study included nine products that were accepted in some cities and not in others, including glass jars, plastic shells, and laminated cartons. This variation is due to regional recovery facilities making autonomous decisions about which products to accept based on the expected return on investment, introducing geographical differences in the availability of supplies. Processing facilities can also change the products they accept over time, introducing temporary volatility in supply. There are also inconsistencies in the classification of grade or quality. A manufacturer can pay for non-virgin material of a certain quality, measured taking into account the weight of the recyclable content relative to the total weight of the bale, but receive lower quality material.
In some cases, the quality of a bale isn't guaranteed before shipping, and buyers are aware of these risks when buying from processors. When manufacturers buy in batches, demand volatility can occur in the short term. For example, if a paper manufacturer commits to using 50% recycled paper in its products, that 50% is an annual average. This means they can choose not to buy recycled material when prices are high and buy in bulk later in the same year if prices fall.
Consumers who participate in recycling play the critical role of sorting recyclable materials at the point of disposal. The accuracy of consumer decisions about waste disposal directly influences the performance of the recycling system. In a survey, 94% of U.S. residents The U.S. said they supported recycling8, reflecting a strong will to participate, but a surprising mismatch with the real recycling rate, which is 32 to 34%.
In another study, approximately one in four items (or 25%) is incorrectly placed in the recycle bin 10. The results of this study indicate that the error rate in recycling is even higher than these two studies suggest. The precision with which consumers correctly dispose of items that are recycled has a dramatic impact on the efficiency and cost of the recycling system. When it comes to waste disposal, not all errors are the same. There are two types of errors that consumers can make when classifying their waste: false negatives and false positives. A false negative refers to the situation in which a consumer throws a recyclable product in the trash.
This represents another leak in the recycling system, in which an item that could have been recycled is not recycled. A false positive, also called “contamination”, occurs when a consumer places a non-recyclable product in their recycle bin. The cost of pollution is much greater than the cost of throwing a recyclable product in the trash. We will return to this cost argument in the next subsection.
The geographical coherence of recycling practices helps consumers to know with greater certainty which products are recyclable. Our results show that geographical consistency in which products are accepted for recycling is a key factor in improving classification accuracy. Our data shows that recyclable products in all nine cities had a very low error rate of 8%. Products that were not accepted in any of the nine cities had a higher elimination error rate of 33.7%, but it was still lower than the 52% error rate of products that were accepted in some cities but not in others (see figure).
In addition, our study shows that the more cities recycle a particular item, the lower the error rate. The correlation between disposal accuracy and the number of cities that recycle an item is 0.63, supporting the idea of a more uniform recycling practice in the U.S. Department of State could reduce disposal errors. When a consumer throws a recyclable item in the trash, it translates into an opportunity cost: an item whose value could have been obtained through recycling and, instead, will end up in a landfill. Disposal of recyclable materials also involves landfill costs, but landfill costs are considerably lower than the cost of processing a supply chain of contaminated recycling.
The cost of pollution is the cost when a consumer throws a non-recyclable product into their recycling bin. The cost of pollution is higher than the opportunity cost and the cost of the landfill combined. Pollution is costly for logistics companies. Recycled materials collected on the sidewalk are examined at the recovery facility.
If the inspection reveals excessive contamination, the entire cargo is sent to the landfill. This creates another leak in the recycling system, so large volumes of recyclable materials are not recycled. Unfortunately, previous research shows that contamination (false positives) is a much more common removal error than false negatives. This is due to the “wish cycle”, a phenomenon in which well-intentioned consumers find an item they don't know how to classify and end up throwing it in the recycle bin with the hope that it can be recycled.
In our study, within the group of recyclable items accepted in some cities but not in others, the overall error rate was 52% (the central bar graph in the figure). Of those errors, 87% were false positives (or contamination). When people aren't sure how to dispose of something, they usually try to recycle it. Our study also sheds light on a possible solution to pollution. Although there are still a significant number of disposal errors among products that are not recycled in any of the cities, the false positive rate for this product category is 12% lower than the false positive rate among products that are accepted in some cities and not in others (see the product group located further to the right and in the center of the figure).
This conclusion suggests that more uniform policies on what is accepted and what is not accepted could reduce pollution costs. Contaminated and low-quality recycling materials are pre-competitive challenges. These problems affect the profitability of all companies in the recycling industry, including logistics companies, material recovery facilities and manufacturers, and reduce the competitiveness of the United States. Recycling industry on an international scale.
However, very little data is available and the sharing of best practices to improve collective performance is minimal. During our study, our team discovered an extreme lack of data on fundamental issues, such as what products are accepted in each municipality. The only way to find this data was to examine each municipality's website individually. There is even less data available related to contamination rates of raw or processed materials. Reporting and accessing this data is the first step in understanding what processes cause and prevent pollution and for disseminating these best practices nationwide.
Cost estimates, the volume of recyclable materials traded, and contamination rates are difficult to compare, making it very difficult to conclude what works and what doesn't. These leaks are so important that currently only 32.1% of U.S. waste is recycled or converted to compost 18. These leaks harm the EE. From a financial point of view, as companies lose the opportunity to derive financial value from waste.
Other hidden costs of landfills are difficult to quantify, such as greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change, the release of toxic and eternal chemicals that pose health problems, and the deterioration of property and land values, 19,20 Leaks also harm the U.S. environment. In the United States, as recyclable materials end up in landfills unnecessarily. There are so many opportunities to repair leaks in the American recycling system, so that we can create value and conserve our natural resources.
Repairing leaks will require a market that is able to carefully and efficiently balance supply and demand and radically reduce the costs of pollution. In the second article, we analyze the possible role of a national recycling standard in strengthening American strategies for reconfiguring value on online platforms. Berkeley-Haas's leading management journal, published at Berkeley Haas for more than sixty years, seeks to share knowledge that challenges conventions and shows a better way of doing business. University of California Haas Business School, Berkeley.
California Management Review is a major academic management journal published at the University of California at Berkeley By Christian Blanco, Calvin Spanbauer and Sara Stienecker America's outdated approach to recycling is also bad for the environment. From a recycling bin, plastics are sent by rail or truck to waste sorting facilities, also called material recovery facilities (MRF). Here, plastics are usually classified by similar types (for example, films and bags, bottles, foams) and packaged (crushed into cubes that save space and are easily transported). It is then loaded back onto a train or truck, or onto a cargo ship, for the next leg of his trip.
That message has been difficult for the public to assimilate, as there are so many different containers in public spaces and their own communities tell them to put their plastic in recycling bins. If recycling processors have a market where they can sell their material, they will be motivated to invest in better equipment that can sort materials to minimize contamination, and expanding recycling programs will make economic sense. Greenpeace discovered that no plastic, not even soda bottles, one of the most prolific items thrown into recycling bins, meets the requirements to be considered recyclable under the standards established by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's New Plastics Economy Initiative. Industry lobbyists say they plan to recycle every piece of plastic they make to turn it into something new before 2040.
Plastic must have a 30% recycling rate to reach that standard; no plastic has ever been recycled and reused close to that rate. In the United States, recycling is the process of collecting and processing materials (that would otherwise be thrown away) and remanufacturing them into new products. For decades, China recycled nearly half of the world's discarded materials, because its manufacturing sector was booming and needed these materials to feed it. These classification errors are costly, especially when a non-recyclable product is introduced into the recycling process, which is called contamination.
Oregon-based Agilyx breaks down contaminated and hard-to-recycle plastics to their molecular level; then, it can be converted into high-quality synthetic oils, chemicals and other plastics. Recycling can be a powerful tool for keeping waste out of landfills and even converting it into cost-effective manufacturing inputs. Nowadays, however, only 29 percent of PET bottles are collected for recycling and, of this amount, only 21 percent of the bottles are actually converted to recycled materials due to contamination. I am a first-year university student researching the concept of recycling and all the positive and negative aspects that it entails.
The mixing and compaction of various types of recyclable materials, together with the inevitable mixing of non-recyclable materials, means that the separation into quality materials that factories need makes final products difficult and expensive. However, each recycling process has costs that include the use of water and energy and various forms of pollution and use of the earth.
