About 14.7 million American children under age 6 have all their parents working, so most spend their days outside the home, usually in child care. These settings have an environmental impact that many parents never notice, including diapers, food waste, cleaning products, art supplies, packaging, and the indoor air children breathe for hours each day.

Daycare is one of the most important places in a young child’s life. The habits children learn there, like how they deal with waste, connect with nature, and what they expect from their food, often come home with them. This means a daycare’s approach to sustainability matters for families, not just for the center itself. The good news is that about 70% of a typical preschool’s waste can be reused, recycled, or composted, so most centers can make big improvements without spending a lot.

This guide explains what to look for in a daycare, how to encourage changes at your child’s current center, and which areas—like diapers, food, indoor air, and outdoor time—parents can influence most.

The Footprint Nobody Talks About

Diapers are a huge part of the problem. Americans throw away about 20 billion disposable diapers each year, adding up to around 3.5 million tons of landfill waste. They are the third most common consumer item in U.S. landfills. The EPA says each diaper can take up to 500 years to break down and releases methane as it decomposes.

Food waste is also a big issue in early childhood settings. One U.S. study found that childcare programs throw away about 43% of the food they serve. A Finnish study showed that childcare centers waste more food per meal than restaurants or schools. When you add this up across thousands of centers, the loss of resources like carbon, water, and money is huge.

The largest U.S. study to measure environmental contaminants in childcare facilities found formaldehyde levels exceeded California’s chronic exposure guideline in 87% of centers tested, and indoor particulate matter exceeded 24-hour standards in nearly half. Sources include cleaning products, air fresheners, off-gassing furniture, art supplies, and pesticides used inside the building. Children, who breathe more air per pound of body weight than adults do, absorb more of the toxins they inhale. Most daycares have limited budgets and staff who are already busy. Still, small changes across many centers can make a big difference. Parents who notice these problems can help centers that want to improve but need support.ds an ally.

If You’re Still Choosing a Center

A center’s commitment to sustainability during licensing often shows how they operate every day. When you visit, ask clear questions. For example, “Do you compost food scraps?” gives you more information than asking, “Are you eco-friendly?”

Questions worth asking on a tour:

• How is food waste handled — composted, donated, or trashed?
• What cleaning products do you use, and are they third-party certified?
• How much time do children spend each day outdoors, and in what conditions?
• How are art supplies, books, and toys sourced — new each year, or rotated and shared?
• Do you have a recycling system the children participate in?
• What’s your policy on pest control and air freshening?

One credible signal to look for is the Eco-Healthy Child Care endorsement, a national program from the Children’s Environmental Health Network that has endorsed more than 1,500 facilities across the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Endorsed centers comply with at least 24 of 30 best practices covering pesticides, lead, art supplies, plastics, cleaning chemicals, and outdoor exposure. The program’s standards have been adopted by the National Association for the Education of Young Children as part of its accreditation criteria, and several states (Maryland, Pennsylvania, Utah) recognize it within their quality rating systems.

If a center can’t give specific answers to your sustainability questions, that tells you something. It doesn’t mean you should rule them out, but it suggests that any green changes may need to start with parents.

If Your Child Is Already Enrolled

Begin by talking to the director, not the classroom teacher. Directors make decisions about purchases, vendors, and staff training. Bring specific suggestions instead of general concerns. For example, asking, “Would you consider switching to a third-party-certified cleaning product?” is helpful, while “Can you be greener?” is too vague.

It helps to assume the director wants to improve but faces real limits. Offer to help with the work. Most centers will accept support that they don’t have time to organize on their own.

Rethinking the Diaper Question

If your center only allows disposable diapers, ask for the reason. Some states have strict rules about cloth diapers in group care, but many centers use disposables simply out of habit, not because of regulations.

Cloth diaper services, which handle laundry and delivery in bulk, address most of the staffing and hygiene worries that make centers choose disposables. More centers now accept plant-based or biodegradable disposables, which use less plastic but still go to landfills. These are better, but not a complete solution.

If your center won’t change its diaper policy, try suggesting a diaper recycling program if one is available nearby. Industrial diaper recycling is still uncommon in the U.S., but it exists in some parts of Europe and is growing.

Food Waste and What Kids Actually Eat

Food waste reduction is the single most effective change centers can make. It saves money, lowers methane emissions from food in landfills, and, when done openly, teaches children about food sources and the meaning of waste. Centers usually overestimate how much children eat and underestimate how much is thrown away. Simply starting to measure food wasted each day alone tends to drive a 20–30% reduction. A few tips can help:

• Serve family-style. Children who serve themselves take less and eat more of what they take, compared to pre-portioned meals.
• Compost on-site or partner with a local hauler. Many municipalities now have small-business composting service.
• Source from local farms when seasonal and affordable. CACFP-funded programs have flexibility here that many directors don’t realize.

When packing food from home, stick to the basics: whole fruit is better than packaged slices, reusable containers are better than single-use bags, and a thermos of water is better than a juice box. The goal isn’t perfection, but to cut down on single-use packaging, which makes up a big part of a center’s daily waste.

The Indoor Air Conversation

Improving indoor air is where parent advocacy can make the biggest difference for children’s health. Most directors are open to change once they understand the issue. Children spend over 90% of their time indoors, and the air quality depends on choices about cleaning products, furniture, art supplies, and pest control.

Concrete requests that work:

• Switch to Green Seal- or EPA Safer Choice-certified cleaning products. They cost roughly the same as conventional products and dramatically reduce exposure to volatile organic compounds.
• Eliminate air fresheners and scented plug-ins. “Fragrance” can include hundreds of undisclosed chemicals, and the underlying odor problem is almost always solved better by ventilation.
• Adopt integrated pest management instead of routine pesticide spraying. IPM uses traps, sealing, and sanitation first; pesticides are a last resort.
• Choose water-based, low-VOC paints and finishes during any renovation.
• Open windows when the weather allows. Mechanical ventilation in older buildings is often inadequate; outdoor air, even in mild urban areas, is usually cleaner than indoor air, which is often laden with cleaning residues and off-gassing from furniture.

These changes are inexpensive, easy to implement, and directly improve children’s breathing health. They also usually lower the number of sick days, which directors appreciate.

The case for getting children outside has shifted from a wellness argument to a developmental one. A 2022 review of nature-based early childhood education found consistent positive associations with self-regulation, social-emotional development, nature-relatedness, and play interaction. A 2024 study at the University of Minnesota Duluth found that nature-based preschool practices supported self-regulation development, particularly for children from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

This is important because outdoor time is often the first thing dropped when schedules get busy. Speaking up for outdoor time and helping make it easier for the center supports both sustainability and better education.

Practical contributions parents can make:

• Help build raised garden beds. Children who grow food eat more of it and waste less.
• Donate weather gear. Many centers cite “the kids don’t have rain boots” as a real barrier.
• Organize a parent work day. Remove invasive plants and add native species to outdoor play areas.
• Source loose parts for playgrounds. Logs, stumps, and large stones support unstructured nature play.

What You Can Pack from Home

What you do as a parent may not have as much impact as center-wide changes, but you can control it. The goal is to reduce single-use packaging in your child’s daily routine.

• Stainless steel or silicone snack containers. They survive being dropped, kicked, and chewed.
• A reusable water bottle. The juice-box equivalent in landfill waste over a daycare year is striking.
• Whole fruit instead of pre-cut packaged fruit cups.
• Cloth napkins or beeswax wraps in lunchboxes.
• Send clearly labeled hand-me-down clothes. Daycares go through clothing faster than almost anywhere else.

Helping the Center Help Itself

Most U.S. daycares are small, independent, and have limited funding. The average child care worker earns about $14.60 an hour. Free help and materials are not just appreciated; they are often the only way a center can start a sustainability project.

Donations that make the biggest difference include:

• Children’s books about nature, recycling, and food systems for the classroom library.
• Clean recyclable materials — cardboard tubes, egg cartons, glass jars — for art projects and sorting activities.
• Compost bins, indoor recycling stations, or rain barrels.
• Native plant starts from your own garden in spring.

But don’t forget to donate time:

• A Saturday building or repairing outdoor play structures.
• Running a parent fundraiser specifically for a sustainability upgrades, such as air purifiers, a compost system, and raised beds.
• Connecting the director with your municipal recycling or composting program.

When the Center Pushes Back

Some directors will see your interest as helpful, while others may feel it questions their judgment. Both responses are understandable. How you frame the conversation often decides whether it is productive or not. What tends to work is an offer, not a demand: “I’d love to help with this — what would make it easier for you?

If a center keeps refusing to discuss sustainability and it’s important to your family, that tells you something about whether it’s the right fit. Choosing a daycare is a major decision about your values, so it’s worth careful thought.

No single parent or center can solve the issue of daycare sustainability alone. But when parents ask good questions, offer real help, and choose centers that care, it adds up. This is already changing the industry.

Editor’s Note: Originally published on May 21, 2021, this article was substantially updated in May 2026.

The post How To Help Your Child’s Daycare Be More Sustainable  appeared first on Earth911.

40 pounds of paper towels per American per year. The United States is the world’s most committed buyer of single-use towels, by a margin no other country approaches. Americans alone consume nearly half of all paper towels produced globally, and Europeans use roughly 50 percent fewer than we do.

Paper towels, facial tissues, toilet paper, and napkins together make up a quietly enormous share of American household disposable spending and a startlingly large share of global forest pulp demand. The U.S. uses about 13 billion pounds of paper towels each year, and producing them consumes roughly 110 million trees and 130 billion gallons of water.

The financial cost lands quietly on households, in $5 four-packs and $20 jumbo packs that add up to hundreds of dollars annually. The environmental cost lands somewhere else entirely: the boreal forest of Canada.

What 13 Billion Pounds Looks Like at Home

The average American household spends meaningfully more than the headline average suggests. Statista’s 2022 data put per-consumer-unit spending on cleansing and toilet tissue, paper towels, and napkins at $114.41. Paper towel users spend closer to $200 per year on disposable towels alone, with many families spending $400 or more. Toilet paper adds another $182 per year on average per household, with that figure rising during and after the pandemic.

Add facial tissues, napkins, and the kitchen-roll runs that don’t show up in pantry inventory, and a typical American family is spending $400 to $700 a year on products designed to be used once and thrown away. Over an adult lifetime, the math compounds: roughly $10,500 on paper towels and $9,500 on tissues per person. Think about that in relation to your monthly salary the next time you shop.

The volume side is just as striking. Americans throw out roughly 3,000 tons of paper towels every single day. Used paper towels can’t be recycled because they’re contaminated with food, grease, cleaning chemicals, or simply too short-fibered after one use, so essentially all of that volume goes to landfill or incineration. EPA’s most recent breakdown shows tissue paper and towels accounting for 3.8 million tons of municipal solid waste, or about 1.3 percent of total MSW generation. While that is a small percentage of total trash, it is a large percentage of single-use, single-purpose throwaway products.

The Boreal Forest Connection

Most of the trees used to make American at-home tissue products come from the Canadian boreal forest, one of the largest intact forest ecosystems on Earth and a globally significant carbon sink. Clear-cut logging for tissue manufacturing now consumes more than one million acres of boreal forest each year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

These forests store roughly twice as much carbon per acre as tropical rainforests. Each clear-cut releases that carbon and degrades habitat for boreal caribou, billions of migratory birds, and Indigenous communities whose traditional territories overlap with logging concessions.

The NRDC has tracked the paper products supply chain for six years through its Issue with Tissue scorecard, and the 2024 edition shows real movement at the top of the rankings — and continued failure at the bottom.

P&G’s continued reliance on virgin pulp for its flagship at-home brands matters because Charmin, Bounty, and Puffs together command a substantial share of the U.S. retail market. The grade isn’t an abstraction; it tracks the proportion of each brand’s fiber that comes from intact, climate-critical forests rather than recycled content or alternative sources like wheat straw.

Why “Tree-Free” Doesn’t Always Mean “Impact-Free”

Bamboo tissue has become the most visible alternative to virgin pulp in U.S. retail, and it is meaningfully better than virgin forest fiber on most environmental metrics. It is not, however, the most sustainable option available — recycled content is.

NRDC’s hierarchy puts 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper at the top: it requires no new fiber, diverts paper from landfills, uses about 15 gallons of water per roll, and has the lowest carbon footprint. Bamboo uses about 25 gallons of water per roll, requires more processing, and carries a real risk of being grown on land that was previously primary forest, a problem the FSC certification system is meant to address, but which still requires consumers to read labels carefully.

Recycled-content paper towels are widely available, including from Seventh Generation, Marcal, and Trader Joe’s, and they perform competitively with virgin towels for most household uses. The case for switching is straightforward: same function, lower cost over time when bought in bulk, and dramatically lower environmental impact.

What You Can Do

The interventions here are unusually high-leverage at the household level, because per-capita consumption in the U.S. is so far above the baseline of comparable countries.

Replace the highest-volume product first:

• Switch out paper towels for washable cloth towels, microfiber rags, or bar mops for an estimated 80 percent of household uses. Keep a small roll of recycled-content paper towels for genuinely unpleasant tasks ( like wiping up after raw meat, pet accidents, or automotive work.
• Choose 100 percent post-consumer recycled toilet paper brands when available (Seventh Generation, Marcal, Who Gives A Crap recycled line, ARIA). If recycled isn’t available, FSC-certified bamboo is a strong second choice.
• Replace paper napkins with cloth. A set of 12 cotton napkins costs roughly the equivalent of two months of paper napkin spending and lasts for years.

The math on switching is more favorable than the sticker price suggests. Who Gives A Crap’s recycled toilet paper subscription runs roughly $1.03 to $1.29 per double-length roll, comparable to or below mainstream supermarket pricing per sheet. The premium framing of “eco-friendly” tissue products often reflects packaging and marketing more than per-use cost.

Push retailers and manufacturers:

• The NRDC tissue scorecard is updated annually and is the single best public reference for which brands deserve which share of the market.
• Retailer pressure has worked: the 2024 scorecard shows movement at Kimberly-Clark and Georgia-Pacific in direct response to consumer and shareholder advocacy.
• For the cardboard tubes and outer packaging, Earth911’s recycling search tool confirms local acceptance; most curbside programs take them, but not all.

Don’t flush, rinse

A modest bidet attachment costs $30 to $80, installs without a plumber on most U.S. toilets, and reduces toilet paper consumption by an estimated 75% or more in households that use it consistently. The water cost of a bidet is roughly an eighth of a gallon per use, vastly less than the embedded water in the toilet paper it replaces.

Paper-product consumption is one of the few household waste categories where a typical American family can cut its environmental and financial footprint by half or more with relatively small behavior changes. The leverage is unusually direct.

The post Paper Towels, Tissues, and Napkins: America’s 13 Billion-Pound Waste Habit appeared first on Earth911.

A solar panel installed this spring will likely still be generating electricity when today’s kindergartners graduate from college. Panels are built to last 25 to 30 years, and the earliest rooftop and utility installations from the 2000s solar boom are now reaching the end of that run.

That first wave of end-of-life panels is the leading edge of a much larger, ongoing challenge, to recover and reuse the materials that convert the sun’s energy into electricity. Nearly everything inside those panels can be recovered and sold back into the supply chain. Today, very little of it is. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) projects that global solar panel waste could reach 78 million tons by 2050.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expects the United States to generate as much as one million tons of panel waste by 2030 and up to 10 million tons by 2050, the second-largest national total in the world. IRENA estimated in 2016 that the raw materials reclaimable from end-of-life panels will be worth about $450 million globally by 2030 — enough to build some 60 million new panels — and will grow to $15 billion and roughly 2 billion panels’ worth of material by 2050.

What’s In a Solar Panel

Strip a crystalline-silicon module, the type that dominates the solar panel market, down to its components and most of what you find is glass. A panel is roughly 75 percent glass by weight, framed in aluminum and built with copper wiring, polymer layers, a plastic backsheet, the silicon cells themselves, and a junction box. The greatest value sits in the small fraction of these materials: silver, copper, high-purity silicon, plus tin and antimony, and in thin-film panels, tellurium and indium.

Older panels also carry trace lead in their solder, which the reason some are classified as hazardous waste when they break down, as Inside Climate News has reported. Thin-film modules from First Solar and a few others use cadmium telluride, which is stable in the panel but adds its own end-of-life handling requirements. Thin-film remains a small share of the market, under 5 percent globally, so crystalline silicon is the focus of most recycling efforts.

Recovering these materials matters well beyond saving landfill space. Recycled aluminum takes roughly 95 percent less energy to produce than aluminum smelted from ore, and recovered silver and silicon reduce the mining and refining that go into every new panel.

Several of those metals also sit on the U.S. critical-minerals list. The EPA notes that panels can contain aluminum, tin, tellurium, and antimony, with gallium and indium in some thin-film modules, much of which the country currently imports. Recovering them at home converts a disposal headache into a small but genuine piece of supply-chain resilience, and it does so close to where new panels are increasingly being manufactured.

Why So Few Panels Actually Get Recycled

The first obstacle is economics. Sending a panel to a landfill costs about $1 to $5; recycling the same panel runs roughly $15 to $45, according to National Renewable Energy Laboratory figures cited by Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN). Arizona State University researcher Meng Tao, who studies PV recycling, has put the gap plainly to MIT Climate: recycling a panel costs around $20 and yields about $10 to $12 in recovered materials. For a single rooftop system, the math today rarely favors recycling without subsidies.

The technical challenge compounds the financial one. The EPA describes recycling as three escalating steps: remove the aluminum frame and junction box; separate the glass from the silicon wafer using thermal, mechanical, or chemical methods; then purify the silver, silicon, copper, and other metals. Removing the frame is straightforward, and a lot of recycling stops there and the rest gets shredded and sold as low-value glass cullet, C&EN notes. Teasing the glass from the cells and then separating the silver and silicon is far harder, and no single commercial process yet recovers all of it cleanly.

Consequently, the United States currently recycles only about 10 percent of decommissioned panels, while the European Union recovers around 85 percent, according to Public Citizen. The encouraging counter-trend is the rapidly decreasing cost of panel recycling: one industry analysis from Solar Power World reports that the true-recycling costs declined by 42 percent over the past three years, and the most advanced facilities now recover up to 95 percent of a panel’s value.

Reuse offers a partial release valve. Panels that fail early or get swapped out during a system upgrade often still work, and a growing secondhand market resells them at a discount for off-grid, agricultural, and overseas projects. Keeping a working panel in service, or passing it to someone who will, sidesteps the cost-and-complexity problem entirely, which is why reuse remains a bigger share of outcomes compared to recycling.

Public investment is starting to bend the curve, too. The U.S. Department of Energy has funded a slate of PV recycling projects aimed at closing the gap, even as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has projected that, without faster action, the country would still recycle only about a tenth of its panels by mid-century. The first matters because the second is not inevitable.

The Companies Building a Recycling Industry

A recent market map from MarketsandMarkets lists more than a dozen leading players in solar panel recycling, and reading it closely shows how young and mixed the field still is. It blends three kinds of company: panel manufacturers with their own take-back programs, dedicated PV recyclers, and global waste-management firms moving into the category.

First Solar anchors the first group. The U.S. thin-film manufacturer has run a closed-loop process since 2005, recovering more than 90 percent of each module’s materials in its panels, including the semiconductor itself, for reuse.

Among dedicated recyclers, SOLARCYCLE opened a high-throughput facility in Georgia in 2026 that recovers about 96 percent of a panel’s value — silver, copper, aluminum, and glass — and is scaling toward processing up to 5 gigawatts of panels a year, Solar Washington reports. We Recycle Solar runs a utility-scale plant in Yuma, Arizona, and plans to roughly quadruple its capacity by 2028. In Europe, ROSI, a French company, uses a thermal-and-chemical process to recover high-purity silicon and silver — the toughest materials to reclaim — and recently raised more than $20 million to build a 10,000-ton-per-year facility in Spain. Veolia and Germany’s Reiling round out the European side as larger waste and glass recyclers expanding into PV.

The arrival of so many well-capitalized firms signals that the waste stream is finally large enough to support an industry. The catch is that most of this capacity sits in Europe or at the utility scale, where project owners can absorb the cost, which leaves rooftop owners with fewer easy options for now.

Solar Recycling Companies in 2026

The Policy Gap

Much of the distance between 10 percent and 85 percent comes down to rules. The EU’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive requires panel producers to finance the collection and recycling of every panel they sell in Europe. The United States has no equivalent federal framework.

That is beginning to change, slowly. In October 2023, the EPA announced it would add retired solar panels to its “universal waste” rules, a streamlined category for widely generated hazardous materials such as batteries and pesticides. The proposed rule was originally due in 2025; the agency’s current timeline pushed the proposal to February 2026 and a final rule to August 2027. Until it takes effect, panels can be landfilled as ordinary trash in most states.

A handful of states have moved on their own. Washington created a manufacturer-funded stewardship program that requires producers to take back panels at no cost to the owner, and California classifies end-of-life panels as universal waste requiring specialized handling, as Earth911 has documented. Texas and North Carolina have begun restricting panel disposal as well. For now, what happens to a retired panel depends heavily on where it was installed.

Federal law already reaches panels through the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Whoever discards one is technically responsible for determining whether it qualifies as hazardous waste — a determination that hinges on whether metals such as lead leach above regulatory limits in a standardized test. Many intact silicon panels pass and are not hazardous; some, especially older modules with lead-based solder, do not.

For a homeowner, the EPA’s guidance is more straightforward in the meantime: contact your installer or state environmental agency rather than guess.

What You Can Do

Whether you own a single rooftop array or manage a portfolio of sites, end-of-life options are improving. A few practical steps:

For homeowners and individuals

• Keep panels in service as long as they perform. Most modules keep producing well past their warranty period; replacing them early creates waste with little benefit.
• Reuse or resell working panels. A secondhand market exists for functioning modules, often sold at a discount. Reuse outperforms recycling on both cost and environmental impact.
• Let your installer handle logistics. If you are replacing panels, ask whether your installer offers take-back; many will palletize and ship modules to a recycler.
• Find a qualified recycler. Look for a dedicated PV recycler or an electronics recycler certified to the R2 or e-Stewards standard, which the EPA recommends.
• Know your state’s rules. Washington and California have formal programs; elsewhere, contact your state environmental agency before disposing of panels.

For businesses, installers, and project owners

• Build decommissioning and recycling into project contracts and budgets from the start, rather than treating end-of-life as an afterthought.
• Choose recyclers certified to SERI’s R2 or e-Stewards standards, and favor those that recover high-value materials over operations that simply downcycle the glass.

For communities and policymakers

• Support extended producer responsibility and universal-waste rules, and weigh in during the EPA’s public comment period on its proposed solar panel rule.

The materials inside a solar panel were mined, refined, and assembled at a real environmental cost. Recovering them closes the loop on an energy source designed to be clean from start to finish, and the infrastructure, companies, and rules to do it are finally catching up to the wave.

The post Recycling Solar Panels In 2026: Investments Paying Off appeared first on Earth911.

Forty thousand miles of plastic waste wash through the global ocean every year, enough to wrap the Earth at the equator. But walk into the right store, and you can personally shorten that pipeline by a few feet, returning a pair of worn sneakers, a dead laptop, or a piece of furniture destined for the dumpster.

Some retailers have built genuine end-of-life infrastructure for the products they sell — not just a PR line, but real systems with documented results. The seven below have the numbers to back it up, updated for 2026.

Patagonia

Patagonia’s Worn Wear program remains one of the most comprehensive take-back systems in retail apparel. In 2025, customers made more than 137,000 trade-ins — almost 71,000 of them from return and warranty claims — and the online Shop Used feature launched in September 2024 has expanded the secondhand market significantly. Items deemed wearable are cleaned, repaired, and resold through Worn Wear; those beyond repair enter a recycling pipeline.

On the material innovation side, Patagonia partnered with Eastman in 2024 to process 8,000 pounds of pre- and post-consumer clothing waste through molecular recycling — breaking apparel down to chemical building blocks for reuse as new fiber. The brand has also moved aggressively on materials: by fall 2025, over 90 percent of Patagonia’s fabrics were recycled, organic, or traceable. Its 2025 Work in Progress Report disclosed that reducing hang tags by over 40 million pieces has avoided 170,000 pounds of packaging waste. The structural challenge — mechanically recycling blended fabrics — remains unsolved at industrial scale, and Patagonia acknowledges it openly.

Apple

Apple’s trade-in and recycling program sent 15.9 million devices to new owners through refurbishment schemes in 2024 alone. Devices that cannot be refurbished are processed by Daisy, Apple’s disassembly robot, which can now break down 36 models of iPhone into discrete components to recover aluminum, copper, rare earth elements, and other materials. A second robot, Dave, disassembles Taptic Engines to recover rare earth magnets, tungsten, and steel.

The material-recovery numbers are striking. In 2024, 24 percent of all materials shipped in Apple products came from recycled or renewable sources, up from 10 percent in 2019. Recycled aluminum accounted for 71 percent of the aluminum Apple purchased. The company avoided 6.2 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by using recycled and low-carbon materials in 2024, according to its 2025 Environmental Progress Report. Apple has also surpassed 99 percent on its 2025 goal to use 100 percent recycled rare earth elements in all magnets and 100 percent recycled cobalt in all Apple-designed batteries. Customers can drop devices off at any Apple Store or ship for free.

Best Buy

Best Buy has collected 2.7 billion pounds of electronics and appliances since launching its recycling program in 2009, making it the nation’s largest retail collector of e-waste. The program accepts most consumer electronics at more than 1,000 stores regardless of where items were purchased, collecting more than 400 pounds of product every minute stores are open.

The program has expanded: a mail-in recycling service now lets customers without easy store access ship old tech in purpose-built boxes. A home haul-away service launched for customers who cannot transport large items. Best Buy requires all recycling partners to comply with rigorous environmental management standards and holds them to regulatory compliance and responsible workforce practices. TVs and monitors carry a $25 fee; most other electronics — phones, laptops, tablets, cables — are accepted free.

Nike

Nike’s original Reuse-a-Shoe program launched in 1995 to recycle worn athletic footwear into Nike Grind material for surfaces and new products has evolved into the Recycling + Donation (RAD) service, now available globally.

The program accepts athletic footwear and apparel from any brand and inspects each item to determine donation or recycling eligibility. Wearable items go to nonprofit partners including Soles4Souls for redistribution to communities in need; worn-out footwear is ground down into Nike Grind, which goes into playground surfaces, running tracks, and new Nike products.

Part of Nike’s Move to Zero initiative, targeting zero carbon and zero waste across the supply chain, the  Participating stores accept shoes of any brand — athletic footwear only; no cleats, boots, or sandals. Nike also runs Nike Refurbished, which cleans and resells gently worn or slightly imperfect footwear and apparel at select factory and community stores, extending product life before material recovery.

Staples

Staples pioneered national retail recycling in 2007 as the first U.S. retailer to offer a universal e-waste takeback program. Today the program accepts over 50 types of materials including computers, printers, phones, cables, batteries, crayons, and coffee machines from any brand. Since 2021, Staples has recycled 7,000 tons of e-waste and 19 million ink and toner cartridges, helping HP reach a milestone of 1 billion cartridges recycled.

Staples’ Easy Rewards program currently gives members 500 points (equivalent to $5 back) per month for tech recycling. Ink and toner cartridge recycling earns $2 per cartridge for members spending at least $30 on ink over the previous 180 days, up to a monthly limit. Staples uses certified recyclers whenever possible, and recycled toner material gets routed into road construction aggregate. The company accepts electronics in-store at customer service desks at all U.S. Staples locations.

IKEA

Furniture is the United States’ largest category of discarded household goods, with Americans throwing away approximately 12 million tons of it each year. IKEA’s Buyback & Resell program addresses the problem at the point of sale: customers fill out an online form, receive a value estimate, and bring gently used IKEA furniture to any participating store in exchange for store credit. Items that pass inspection enter the As-Is section for resale; those that cannot be resold are recycled under IKEA’s zero-waste-to-landfill policy.

The U.S. program now runs in 33 stores and, as of 2025, accepts more than 5,000 product types, including tables, chairs, storage units, lamps, and kids’ furniture among many. Globally, IKEA’s circular initiatives contributed to a 24.3 percent reduction in the company’s climate footprint while revenue grew 30.9 percent. Sofas, mattresses, and modified products are not accepted. IKEA Family members currently receive 50 percent more in store credit through May 2026.

REI

REI’s Re/Supply program sold nearly 1.4 million items of used outdoor gear in 2024, double the volume from 2019. The program accepts trade-ins of gently used REI-brand and name-brand gear including backpacks, sleeping bags, tents, and apparel. Members receive store credit; items are inspected, cleaned, and resold at a discount. Selling a used item through Re/Supply emits at least 50 percent less carbon than selling a new equivalent, even accounting for shipping, cleaning, and remerchandising.

REI also became the first major U.S. retailer to reach 90 percent operational waste diversion, achieving zero-waste certification in 2024 that audited and independently verified — ahead of Walmart and Target. Three of its distribution centers hold TRUE Zero Waste certification. In 2024, about 52 percent of the polyester and 45 percent of the nylon in REI Co-op products came from recycled sources. REI also charges brand partners a recycling fee to discourage individual plastic poly bags, and the majority of brands it carries have eliminated them as standard practice.

Related Reading

• Where Is the Circular Packaging Economy in 2026?
• How to Recycle Ink Cartridges
• Close the Loop: A Primer on Circular Economy
• How Patagonia Is Recycling Bottles into Jackets

Editor’s Note: Originally written by Sarah Lozanova on April 10, 2017, this article was substantially updated in April 2026.

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The late, renowned scientist and conservationist Jane Goodall reminds us that we all have an impact on the world, but it’s up to us to choose if our impact is positive or negative. Goodall said, “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” Let’s cooperate for the health of our planet and those who call Earth home.

Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click the poster to get a larger image.

This poster was originally published on March 20, 2020.

The post Earth911 Inspiration: What Kind of Difference Will You Make? appeared first on Earth911.

Paper is one of the easiest materials to recycle, and Americans are still pretty good at it. We are also still throwing away tens of millions of tons of it every year.

Paper and paperboard make up roughly a quarter of municipal solid waste in the United States, it is the single largest category by weight. Eliminating paper waste entirely would take a Herculean effort for most households, but whether you want to do good, better, or best, you can cut what you use and recycle more of what you don’t.

The Numbers

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s last comprehensive accounting of municipal solid waste, released in 2020 with 2018 data, pegged total MSW generation at 292.4 million tons — about 4.9 pounds per person per day. Paper and paperboard accounted for 23.1% of that total, or 67.4 million tons. (EPA has not published an updated edition of the Facts and Figures report since.)

More recent data comes from the paper industry itself. The American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA) reported that about 46 million tons of paper were recycled in the United States in 2024 — roughly 125,000 tons every day — which resulted in a paper recycling rate of 60% to 64% and a cardboard recycling rate of 69% to 74%. Both figures slipped compared to 2023, primarily because exports to Asia softened. Domestic mills, meanwhile, used 1.29 million more tons of recycled paper than the year before, and recycled fiber’s share of all fiber used at U.S. mills reached 44.4%, its highest in two decades.

AF&PA changed its methodology in 2024 to report rates as ranges rather than single numbers and to factor in recycled fiber that arrives in the country inside imported packaging. That makes year-over-year comparisons messier than they used to be, but it also makes the numbers more honest. The headline takeaway has not changed: paper is still one of the most recycled materials in the United States, and overall paper waste has been declining since around 2000 as digitization eats into print volumes.

With paper still filling roughly a quarter of our garbage cans, there is plenty of room to do better.

Good

You can take simple steps to reduce the paper you use, and curbside paper recycling remains widely available across most U.S. communities. AF&PA reports that 79% of Americans have access to community residential-curbside recycling for paper and cardboard. Recycling clean paper takes almost no effort and makes a meaningful difference.

Here is how to be good about paper waste:

• Recycle paper through your curbside program. It is the simplest single thing you can do.
• Recycle only clean paper. Wishcycling of food-soiled paper can contaminate an entire load.
• Cancel print subscriptions you no longer read and switch to digital editions of newspapers and magazines.
• Set your printer to two-sided printing by default, and reuse paper as scratch paper before recycling it.
• Choose paper products made with post-consumer recycled content. Recycled-content packaging now makes up nearly half the fiber used at U.S. paper mills.

Better

If you want to do better than good — or if your community has limited curbside service — a little extra effort goes a long way. Contact your local solid waste utility to let them know you value recycling (your garbage bill should tell you whom to call). To do better, you’ll need to recycle more types of paper and start replacing single-use paper with reusable alternatives:

• Use the Earth911 recycling locator to find drop-off options for paper your curbside program won’t take, such as paperback books, gable-top cartons, aseptic drink boxes, shredded paper, and more.
• Compost what you can’t recycle. Dirty paper towels, disposable napkins, paper plates, and pizza boxes don’t belong in the recycling bin, but they break down well in commercial composting or a home compost bin.
• Skip the paper-or-plastic dilemma at checkout with reusable shopping and tote bags.
• Replace paper-bag lunches with a lunchbox or furoshiki wrap, which doubles as reusable gift wrap.
• Digitize what you reasonably can. Use note-taking apps and electronic calendars in place of notebooks, and sign up for electronic billing and digital magazine subscriptions.
• Cut the junk mail at the source. Register your mail preferences with DMAchoice, which is now operated by the Association of National Advertisers, for a small fee that covers a 10-year listing. To stop prescreened credit and insurance offers, use the credit bureaus’ OptOutPrescreen service or call 1-888-567-8688.

Best

Because paper is one of the more easily recyclable materials, paper products are often the greener choice in head-to-head comparisons with plastic. So while plastic-free is a popular goal, almost no one seriously attempts a paper-free lifestyle, and you don’t need to.

To get to zero waste, do what you can to eliminate avoidable paper and recycle the rest. If you have already worked through the Good and Better tiers, you’ll notice that food packaging accounts for most of the paper waste you have left.

• Zero waste grocery shopping requires a real shift — seeking out bulk stores, carrying reusable containers, and cooking more from scratch. The payoff is a dramatic reduction in paperboard packaging.
• Cutting pizza boxes and takeout containers means cooking more meals at home. The packaging savings are significant; the takeout habit is harder to break.
• Rethink napkins, tissues, and paper towels. Cloth napkins are the easiest swap; handkerchiefs take more getting used to. Breaking the paper towel habit usually means buying a stack of cloth shop towels or microfiber cloths and learning to grab those instead.
• Toilet paper is a tougher ask. Bidets, including affordable seat attachments, are the most effective way to cut household toilet paper use. If that’s a stretch, switching to bamboo or recycled-content toilet paper is a meaningful step down from virgin tree fiber.

What You Can Do This Week

• Audit your recycling bin once. If half of what’s in there isn’t paper or cardboard, your sorting habits are leaving easy wins on the table.
• Spend ten minutes registering with DMAchoice and OptOutPrescreen. Junk mail volumes drop within two to three months.
• Use the Earth911 recycling search to find a drop-off for the paper categories your curbside program rejects — shredded paper and gable-top cartons are the two most commonly missed.
• Replace one disposable paper product in your kitchen with a reusable alternative this month. Cloth napkins or shop towels are the lowest-friction starting points.

Editor’s note: This article was originally authored by Gemma Alexander on April 6, 2020, and was substantially updated in May 2026.

The post Good, Better, Best — Cutting Down Paper Waste appeared first on Earth911.

On August 26, 2009, an Australian biologist’s audio detector picked up a single bat working its way through the rainforest canopy on Christmas Island. The recording captured the last echolocation call of the Christmas Island pipistrelle. After that night, no detector ever heard another.

This is the strange feature of extinction in the 21st century: a lot of it happens on the record. We have audio of a bat’s last call. We have photographs of the last individual. We know the names of endangered individuals   — Lonesome George, Sudan, Toughie — and in many cases, we knew years in advance that we were going to lose them.

Since 2000, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has formally moved dozens of species into its Extinct or Extinct in the Wild categories, and hundreds more sit one rung above, in Critically Endangered (Possibly Extinct). The species described below are not the longest list. They are the clearest cases of losses that played out as they were documented, with causes nobody had to guess at.

The question is whether humans will learn from past losses to prevent future ones.

The pipistrelle that nobody caught in time

The Christmas Island pipistrelle was a microbat the size of a thumb. Its population had been collapsing for two decades when, in 2006, scientists estimated only a few dozen remained. The Australian government authorized a captive-breeding rescue in mid-2009. By the time crews reached the island, only one bat could be found. Four weeks of trapping failed to catch it. The IUCN declared the species extinct in 2017.

The cause was not climate change or habitat loss in the usual sense. It was a cascade of invasive species, including yellow crazy ants, feral cats, and an introduced wolf snake, combined with a slow government response. The pipistrelle is the kind of extinction that makes the policy lesson uncomfortably clear, showing that the science was correct and that a rescue plan existed, but that the action came roughly two years too late.

Lonesome George and the end of a lineage

On June 24, 2012, Lonesome George died on Santa Cruz Island in the Galápagos. He was the last known Pinta Island tortoise (Chelonoidis abingdonii), a subspecies hunted to functional extinction by 19th-century whalers who used them as food, then finished off by goats introduced on the island. Decades of mating attempts with related subspecies failed to produce viable offspring.

George’s death loss was foreseeable for forty years before it happened. Conservationists found him in 1971 and immediately understood what he was: a subspecies of one. Yet, every year of his life was a year the question “what would it take to save this lineage?” had a clear answer (nothing, in the end) and a public audience. He is one of the most-watched extinctions in history.

The western black rhinoceros: poached out

The western black rhinoceros was declared extinct by the IUCN in 2011, following a 2006 survey of its last range in Cameroon that found none. Its disappearance was not driven by habitat conversion or climate buy by horn prices that, at peak, exceeded $50,000 per kilogram on illegal markets. Sophisticated poaching operations that anti-poaching units could not match ran the western black rhino to oblivion.

The northern white rhinoceros is now traveling the same road in slow motion. Sudan, the last male, was euthanized on March 19, 2018, and only two females remain, both past breeding age. An IVF and stem-cell program, BioRescue, is attempting to revive the subspecies using stored gametes, the half of a species’ DNA contributed by the male and female parent. Whether that succeeds or not, the wild northern white rhino is gone.

The baiji: a dolphin lost in plain sight

The baiji, or Yangtze river dolphin, was an evolutionary outlier. Its lineage diverged from other cetaceans roughly 20 million years ago. After a six-week 2006 expedition failed to find a single individual along the entire Yangtze, scientists declared it functionally extinct. It was the first cetacean species lost to human activity.

The baiji was killed by an combination of human factors. It was frequently gillnet bycatch, caught up when fishermen netted other species. Its range was constrained by dam construction. Ship strikes and pollution from the industrial corridor running through the most densely populated river basin on Earth killed many.

No single act caused the extinction. That is part of why nothing stopped it. The Yangtze finless porpoise, the only remaining freshwater cetacean in China, now faces the same pressures.

The Bramble Cay melomys: the first mammal climate extinction

The Bramble Cay melomys was a small rodent that lived on a single five-acre coral cay at the northern tip of the Great Barrier Reef. As sea levels rose and storm surges intensified, the cay’s vegetated area collapsed, taking the melomys’ food supply and burrows with it. The species was last seen in 2009, declared extinct by the IUCN in 2015, and by the Australian government in February 2019, the first mammal extinction explicitly attributed to anthropogenic climate change.

The melomys had nowhere else to go. That is the feature low-elevation island endemics share, and it is a feature thousands of species share with them.

The po’ouli: an extinction due to an absent partner

The po’ouli was a Hawaiian bird discovered in 1973, the first new honeycreeper species described in 50 years. By 2003, only three individuals could be located. In September 2004, biologists captured the last known male and brought him to the Maui Bird Conservation Center, hoping to find him a mate. None could be found before he died on November 26, 2004.

Hawaii has lost more bird species than any other U.S. state, primarily to avian malaria carried by introduced mosquitoes. As global warming pushes mosquitoes to higher elevations, the remaining honeycreepers are running out of altitude they can flee to.

Tissue samples from the last po’ouli are stored at the San Diego Zoo’s Frozen Zoo. Whether they can be restored through cloning is a 22nd-century question.

Beyond species, lost knowledge and connections

It is tempting to count extinctions as a tally as more species are discovered: species in, species out. That undercounts what is gone, even as science finds new species, many of which are also at risk. Each of these losses is also the loss of:

• Evolutionary time. The baiji represented 20 million years of independent evolution. That information is not retrievable.
• Ecosystem function. The melomys was a seed disperser; the pipistrelle ate insects that no other Christmas Island species had eaten; the rhino moved nutrients across savanna landscapes.
• Cultural meaning. Lonesome George became a global symbol; the po’ouli had a Hawaiian name before it had a scientific one. Extinction erases human relationships with nature, not just specimens.
• Possibility space. We do not know what the baiji’s hearing system, the rhino’s microbial gut community, or the melomys’s heat tolerance might have taught medicine, materials science, or conservation.

Extinctions share patterns

Six of the seven species above had clearly identified causes years before they disappeared. The interventions that might have saved them, such as captive breeding, habitat protection, anti-poaching enforcement, gillnet bans, and mosquito suppression,  were known. In each case, the intervention either started too late, was funded at a fraction of what would have been required, or ran into political and economic interests that outweighed the species’ remaining time.

This is the harder lesson of the post-2000 extinctions. We are not, on the whole, losing species we did not know about. We are losing species we documented, named, photographed, and in some cases captured on audio in their final hours. The bottleneck is not knowledge.

The vaquita, a porpoise native to Mexico’s Upper Gulf of California, is a live test of what we have learned. The 2025 monitoring effort confirmed 7 to 10 surviving individuals, including new calves — slightly above 2024’s record-low count of eight vaquita.

The decline is due to their becoming bycatch in illegal totoaba gillnets. Whether the vaquita follows the baiji is, at this point, a question about fishing practices enforcement and political will, not science.

What you can do

Individual action alone does not stop extinction. But the drivers behind the species above are not unreachable. The most useful interventions are policy- and supply-chain-level, and they require the kind of sustained constituency that individual choices feed:

• Support habitat protection at scale. Donate to or volunteer with organizations that buy, defend, or restore habitat: The Nature Conservancy, Rainforest Trust, American Bird Conservancy, and regional land trusts. Habitat preservation is the highest-leverage intervention against extinction.
• Push for stronger enforcement of wildlife trade law. Contact your congressional and state representatives in support of full funding for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Office of Law Enforcement and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). The western black rhino was lost to an openly operating market across borders.
• Cut your climate footprint where it actually moves the needle. For most U.S. households, that is home heating fuel, vehicle miles, and air travel, in roughly that order.
• Buy seafood from sources that audit gear, not just species. Bycatch, which resulted in the loss of the baiji and threatens to be the vaquita’s killer, is a gear problem. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch rates fisheries on bycatch as well as stock health.
• Vote on conservation budgets at every level. Most of the species rescues that worked in the past 25 years — the California condor, the black-footed ferret, the island fox — were funded through the Endangered Species Act and matching state programs. The species rescues that failed were generally underfunded earlier in the curve.

Editor’s Note: The next installment of Environmental Losses looks at the ecosystems that have collapsed or substantially restructured since 2000 — coral reefs, kelp forests, and freshwater systems — and what their loss takes with it.

The post The Extinctions We Watched Happen appeared first on Earth911.

The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970 — 56 years ago — and, goodness, how the world has changed since then. We’ve come a long way since the days of burning our trash and pumping our gas guzzlers with leaded gasoline. In honor of those 56 years, here are 56 important changes and milestones since the first Earth Day.

Legislation

The U.S. government has led much of the environmental charge, starting with the implementation of the EPA (1) in July 1970. Later that year, the Clean Air Act (2) targeted air pollutants, followed by the Clean Water Act (3) in 1972 and the Endangered Species Act (4) in 1973.

Some lesser-known national laws included the Safe Water Drinking Act (5) in 1974, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (6) in 1976, the Toxic Substances Control Act (7) in 1976, the National Energy Act (8) in 1978, and the Medical Waste Tracking Act (9) in 1988.

In some cases, states have led the charge. Oregon passed the first bottle bill (10) in 1971, Minnesota’s Clean Indoor Air Act (11) was the first law to restrict smoking in public places (1975), and Massachusetts required low-flush toilets (12) for construction and remodeling in 1988.

Green Innovations: The Early Years

In order to comply with all the laws from the 1970s, we needed new technology to ensure consumers could adhere to the new standards. Consider:

• The “Crying Indian” PSA debuts in 1971 (13)
• Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) gets banned in 1972 (14)
• The energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulb launches in 1973 (15)
• Cars begin displaying fuel economy labels in the mid-1970s (16)
• In 1975, all cars are manufactured with catalytic converters to limit exhaust emissions (17)
• Chlorofluorocarbons are banned from aerosol cans starting in 1978 (18)
• The first curbside recycling program begins in New Jersey in 1980 (19)
• In 1986, McDonald’s switches from foam to paper food containers (20)
• Mercury is removed from latex paint in 1990, providing a viable alternative to banned lead paint (21)
• Earth911 launches the first U.S. recycling directory in 1991 (22)
• Energy Star certification debuts in 1992 for appliances and electronics (23)
• The U.S. Green Building Council begins in 1993 (24)

The Political Movement

The Green Party (25) launched in 1984, which was just the beginning of green issues entering the mainstream. One Percent for the Planet (26) was founded in 2002 to challenge businesses to donate to environmental causes, and the ISO 14001 standard (27) established environmental management. Companies are now facing pressure to allow employee telecommuting (28).

Things really developed after the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (29) in 2006. NBC debuted Green Week (30) in 2007. Carbon offsets (31) alleviated corporate green guilt. Bisphenol A (32) made us all question plastic purchases. Hybrid vehicles (33) generated tax credits and gas savings. Plastic bag bans gave rise to a reusable bag (34) craze. Fracking (35) and the Dakota Access Pipeline (36) were two of the most hotly contested news stories of the decade, at least until the 2016 election.

Green Tech: The Next Wave

In the past 10 years, emerging green tech has made eco-friendly a way of life, including:

• LED light bulbs (37)
• Portable solar panels on backpacks and watches (38)
• Plant-based plastics (39)
• Motion sensor lighting (40)
• Faucets with automatic shut-off (41)
• Low volatile organic compound (VOC) paint (42)
• Recycled plastic clothing (43)
• Ride-sharing mobile applications (44)
• Natural cleaning products (45)
• Biodiesel engine vehicles (46)
• Food waste composting (47)
• Portable air purifiers (48)
• Europe’s Green Deal introduced global recyclables shipping regulations to reduce pollution in low-income nations (49)
• Corporate borrowers headed toward $500 billion in bond financings for the renewables transition (50)
• President Biden rejoins the Paris Climate Accord on his first day in office. (51)

The Latest Five: 2022–2026

The pace of innovation has not slowed. Five more milestones have reshaped the environmental landscape since that 51st Earth Day:

• The Inflation Reduction Act (52), signed into law in August 2022, became the largest climate investment in U.S. history, directing roughly $370 billion toward clean energy tax credits, EV incentives, methane reduction, and domestic clean manufacturing. Analysts projected it will drive more than $4 trillion in cumulative capital investment over a decade and put the U.S. on track for a 40% emissions reduction by 2030. Sadly, many of its key provisions have been defunded or eliminated by the Trump Administration.
• The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (53), adopted by 188 governments in December 2022, set the most ambitious biodiversity protection commitment in history. Its headline “30×30” target calls for conserving 30% of the planet’s land, freshwater, and ocean areas by 2030, a goal that would require doubling current protected land coverage and quadrupling marine protections.
• America’s first commercial direct air capture plant (54), opened by Heirloom Carbon Technologies in Tracy, California in November 2023, marked the arrival of atmospheric carbon removal at commercial scale on U.S. soil. The plant uses limestone to absorb CO₂ directly from the air, with the captured carbon injected into concrete for permanent storage. In May 2024, Climeworks activated the world’s largest direct air capture facility, the Mammoth plant in Iceland, with a design capacity to remove 36,000 tons of CO₂ per year.
• Solid-state batteries (55), a next-generation alternative to conventional lithium-ion technology, moved from laboratory promise toward commercial reality between 2022 and 2026. Unlike liquid-electrolyte batteries, solid-state versions are less flammable, achieve higher energy density, and degrade more slowly. In early 2025, Mercedes-Benz began road-testing a prototype EV powered by a lithium-metal solid-state cell that extended driving range 25% over comparable liquid-battery models. Multiple automakers and cell manufacturers now target commercial production between 2027 and 2030.
• Perovskite and tandem solar cells (56), a new photovoltaic technology that pairs conventional silicon with thin perovskite layers, pushed solar efficiency into territory once considered theoretical. By 2024, tandem cells in laboratory settings exceeded 34% efficiency — well above the roughly 22% ceiling of standard silicon panels only a few years ago. manufacturers in Asia and Europe began scaling pilot production lines. Because perovskite cells can be printed on flexible substrates, they open the door to solar surfaces on buildings, vehicles, and everyday objects that conventional panels cannot reach.

The past 56 years have been huge when it comes to saving the environment. Expect more to come, including a resurgent EV industry, nuclear fusion, regenerative agriculture, restorative forestry, and more, as costs and the cool factor improve.

Editor’s Note: Originally published on April 18, 2018, this article was most recently updated in April 2026.

The post 56 Environmental Innovations in the 56 Years Since Earth Day Began appeared first on Earth911.

The bag your potato chips come in is seven layers deep. Metalized polyester, a plastic coated with a thin layer of metal, keeps out light. Polyethylene, a common plastic, holds the seal. A printed film provides the label. An oxygen barrier, a layer that blocks oxygen, helps prevent spoilage. There’s another sealant (a layer that helps bond the package), another structural layer for strength, and a food-contact inner skin that directly touches the chips. Each of those layers solves a problem for the manufacturer: preserving freshness, supporting branding, and extending shelf life. Together, these layers are a package no U.S. recycling system can recover for future use.

To put the potato chip bag problem in context, consider American packaging waste as a whole. Americans generated roughly 82.2 million tons of containers and packaging in 2018, about 28 percent of all municipal solid waste, according to the EPA’s most recent national accounting. Plastic packaging contributed more than 14.5 million tons of the total. Those figures are now seven years old. EPA has not issued an updated Facts and Figures report since, even as e-commerce shipments and single-serve formats keep multiplying the number of small, lightweight, hard-to-recycle packages moving through American homes.

The freshest picture comes from California, which is now doing what the federal government has stopped doing. CalRecycle’s SB 54 Material Characterization Study, conducted by Cascadia Consulting Group at 16 landfills in early 2025, found that about 8.5 million tons of single-use packaging and foodware were buried in California landfills in 2024, roughly 21 percent of everything the state landfilled that year. Plastic accounted for about 3.1 million tons of that covered material. Flexible and film plastics — the category that includes chip bags — turned up across all sampling sectors, from single-family curbside collection to commercial routes and self-haul loads. One state, one year, and the composite pouch is everywhere the waste auditors looked.

While composite pouches present a recycling challenge, some rigid plastics fare better. The rigid side of the plastic waste stream — PET water bottles, HDPE milk jugs, some polypropylene tubs — has a functioning recovery system. NAPCOR’s 2024 PET Recycling Report put the U.S. PET bottle collection rate at 30.2 percent; over 70 percent of bottles that reach a curbside bin actually are sorted, baled, and reprocessed into new material.

The situation shifts again when looking at flexible packaging specifically. Flexible bags, pouches, wrappers, and refill sacks that have quietly taken over the grocery aisle are a different story. The U.S. Plastics Pact’s most recent impact report reported a combined U.S. plastic packaging recycling rate of 13.3 percent. Flexibles within that number are a rounding error. Most estimates put flexible-packaging recycling in the United States below 2 percent.

Greenpeace’s 2022 assessment concluded that no type of U.S. plastic packaging meets the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s definition of ‘recyclable,’ a 30 percent recycling rate across a region of 400 million people.

Why does the material resist recovery

Three things make flexible plastic packaging structurally hard to recycle:

• Flexible plastic packaging is not made of a single resin but is often three to nine layers of different plastics and metals bonded together. Mechanical recycling requires a clean, mono-material feedstock, and these laminates cannot be separated into their constituent materials.
• Flexible bags are too light for materials recovery facilities (MRFs) to sort effectively. They tangle in screens intended for separating paper from containers, and often jam equipment, prompting shutdowns for removal.
• It has no domestic end market. Before China’s 2018 National Sword policy, a ban on imports of many types of foreign waste, much of the U.S. flexible-packaging stream was exported. That relief valve closed. Domestic reprocessing capacity (U.S.-based facilities to clean and reuse the material) for multi-layer flexibles has not been built because no private processor can make the economics work at the price a commodity market will pay for the bale (a compressed block of collected plastic packaging).

Composite film is what industry insiders call a “residual cost material”—meaning the combined cost of collecting, transporting, and processing it exceeds what any buyer will pay for the recovered commodity. The private market will not recycle it.

What store drop-off actually does

For a decade, the polite answer to “what do I do with this bag?” has been: take it to the front of your grocery store. The bins marked for plastic bags and film — operated by the Wrap Recycling Action Program (WRAP) and branded by retailers including Walmart, Kroger, and Target — accept clean polyethylene films: grocery bags, bread bags, dry-cleaning bags, produce bags, and some case-pack overwrap, but not chip bags and other packaging made with composites that combine plastics, paper, and metals.

Most of the polyethylene that does get captured at drop-off goes into composite lumber — Trex decking is the dominant end market, which is a form of downcycling rather than a closed-loop system. It’s a better outcome than landfill. It is also not what the word “recyclable” on the package implies.

Advanced recycling: real, overstated, and controversial

When mechanical recycling cannot process a feedstock, industry increasingly points to “advanced” or “chemical” recycling, which includes pyrolysis, gasification, and solvent-based depolymerization, as the solution for films and flexibles. The promise: break the polymer down to monomer or fuel-feedstock molecules that can be re-polymerized or combusted.

The promise is technically real, though many critics question its promised results. The scale is not yet. Most operating U.S. pyrolysis facilities produce pyrolysis oil sold as fuel, which, from a climate perspective, is combustion with extra steps. A 2023 NRDC analysis found most “advanced recycling” projects in the U.S. are either producing fuel rather than new plastic or operating at a pilot scale. Facilities designed for polymer-to-polymer chemical recycling, such as Eastman’s Kingsport, Tennessee, plant, and Alterra’s Akron facility, process a small fraction of national flexible-packaging generation.

Twenty-five states have now classified advanced recycling as “manufacturing” rather than waste management, easing permitting requirements and exempting the facilities from solid-waste oversight (regulatory supervision for handling waste). Environmental-justice advocates (groups focused on pollution impacts on vulnerable communities) argue the reclassification moves emissions and solid-residue handling out from under the permitting regime designed to protect fenceline communities (neighborhoods directly next to industrial sites). The argument is not settled.

The EPR turn

The meaningful change in the flexible-packaging story over the past eighteen months has not come from new recycling technology. It has come from policy: seven U.S. states now implement Extended Producer Responsibility laws for packaging.

Oregon’s program went operational on July 1, 2025, with the Circular Action Alliance serving as the producer responsibility organization (PRO) that manages the program, supported by roughly $200 million in producer funding for the first year. The state plans to build out 144 PRO-operated recycling collection centers across the state. Colorado, California, Minnesota, Maryland, Washington, and Maine are at various stages behind Oregon, with California’s SB 54 program — the most expansive of the group — scheduled to be fully activated in 2027.

What EPR changes, in plain terms, is that the producer — the brand that chose the seven-layer laminate for branding and shelf life reasons — now pays for the collection and recovery of the package after a consumer uses it. The fees are eco-modulated: simpler, mono-material, more-recyclable packaging pays less; hard-to-recycle multi-layer flexibles pay more. Over time, the fee differential is intended to push producers toward redesigning packaging.

Why we’re paying for the old ways

The externalities the household pays for without seeing them, from flexible packaging specifically:

• Landfill tipping fees. At the Environmental Research & Education Foundation’s 2024 weighted-average U.S. tipping fee of $62.63 per ton, the flexible-packaging share of the ~14 million tons of plastic packaging generated annually represents hundreds of millions of dollars in direct municipal disposal cost funded through utility bills and solid-waste budgets.
• MRF fire risk. Flexible packaging is the stream that most commonly carries lithium-ion batteries — from disposable vapes, earbud cases, and lithium cells — into the recycling system. Fire Rover’s 2024 annual review reported that publicly tracked MRF and transfer-station fires rose roughly 20 percent year over year, with total damage and operational impact estimated at $1.2 billion annually. Much of that cost is passed through to municipalities in the form of higher processing fees.
• Marine and microplastic pollution. Lightweight flexible packaging is disproportionately represented in litter and marine-debris inventories because it is light enough to blow out of collection vehicles, bins, and landfills. Microplastic shedding from degrading film is a growing concern for surface waters and the food chain.
• Incinerator air quality. When flexibles are combusted in waste-to-energy plants, the emissions include PM2.5 particles, hydrogen chloride from chlorinated layers, and metals from inks and lamination, which disproportionately fall on the communities that host those plants. Sixteen of the twenty largest U.S. incinerators operate in majority or above-average communities of color.

None of these costs appear on the grocery receipt. Yet, you’re paying these fees until EPR programs force producers to do so.

What You Can Do

For individuals and households, you can make these choices:

1. Buy the format that’s actually recyclable where you live. Rigid containers — a jar, a bottle, a tub — can be recycled; flexible pouches in most places cannot. When the product is available in both formats, the rigid is the better environmental choice, even when weight is accounted for.
2. Separate clean polyethylene film for store drop-off. Grocery bags, bread bags, dry-cleaning bags, produce bags, and case-pack overwrap are the films that the WRAP system actually handles. Anything with foil, zippers, or mixed layers should not go in the drop-off bin.
3. Do not put flexible packaging in your curbside bin. In most municipal systems, composite packaging is treated as contamination that reduces the value of the entire load.

At the community and policy level, you can get involved:

1. Support packaging EPR in your state. Seven states have laws; a dozen more have active bills. The programs work only when constituents push, and they push when the programs pass.
2. Ask brands directly. Eco-modulated EPR fees move producers toward better design only if producers perceive consumer pressure alongside the fee. Social-media and direct-contact campaigns targeting specific CPG brands have moved packaging decisions before and will again.
3. Be skeptical of “chemical recycling” claims. When a brand points to a pyrolysis partnership as evidence of circular packaging, ask which facility, what output, and at what scale relative to the package volume the brand puts into the market.

The post The Chip Bag Problem: America’s Least Recycled Material Is Also Its Fastest-Growing appeared first on Earth911.

Just over half the country is officially in drought, and about 155.7 million Americans—almost seven million more than last week—are now affected. The U.S. Drought Monitor’s April 23 report shows that 52.46% of the United States and Puerto Rico, and 62.78% of the Lower 48, are experiencing moderate drought or worse. According to NOAA, this is the worst spring drought on record for the continental United States.

This drought is not limited to one region. The Southeast just had its driest September-through-March since records began in 1895. The Colorado River system is only 36% full. Texas is 77% in drought, and Corpus Christi’s reservoirs have dropped to nearly 9%. Nebraska experienced its largest wildfire ever, fueled by dry grasslands. Oregon’s snowpack reached zero on April 1. In California, Tahoe City Cross melted completely by March 8, 40 days earlier than usual, after a record-breaking March heat wave caused rapid melting of an already low snowpack across most of the West.

The common factor is that from January through March, precipitation was below 70% of average across the lower 48 states, setting a new record. As a result, water restrictions are now broader and, in many places, more severe than usual.

The National Picture

The headline numbers come from the U.S. Drought Monitor, which is jointly produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center, USDA, and NOAA. As of April 21, drought conditions had worsened across the South, Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, High Plains, and West, with a 2.9% increase in coverage over the past week and an 11.7% increase over the past month. The Northeast and parts of Texas and the eastern Plains saw modest improvement; everywhere else trended drier.

Two main climate factors have caused this record drought. First, La Niña led to less rainfall from January to March, with totals below 70% of average—the lowest since records began in 1895, just surpassing the previous low in 1910. Second, spring temperatures in the Central Plains, Midwest, Northeast, and Mid-Atlantic were 5 to 10 degrees above normal, which sped up soil moisture loss and increased evaporation. This drought is not just about low rainfall; high temperatures are also drying out what little moisture remains.

The effects of the drought are already clear in the number of wildfires. By mid-April, over 1.7 million acres had burned across the country, nearly double the 10-year average. Nebraska’s Morrill Fire, which burned more than 640,000 acres in March, was the largest in the state’s history. In southeastern Georgia, the Highway 82 Fire destroyed at least 54 structures in Brantley County, which was the first county in the Southeast to reach exceptional drought (“D4”).

Southwest: The Colorado River Approaches a Threshold

The Colorado River Basin is facing water shortages not seen in modern times. The Bureau of Reclamation says the system is at about 36% of capacity. Lake Powell is only 23% full, and Lake Mead is about one-third full. Spring runoff into Lake Powell is expected to be just 22% of average. If this continues, 2026 could be one of the driest years in over sixty years, possibly even drier than 2002, which was the previous record.

In response, the Bureau of Reclamation announced in April that it plans to cut Lake Powell releases to 6 million acre-feet, the lowest in decades. They will also move water from Flaming Gorge to keep Lake Powell high enough for Glen Canyon Dam to generate hydropower. The dam provides electricity to about five million people, but water levels could drop too low by December if things do not improve. The seven states that share the Colorado River have not agreed on new rules for after 2026, when current guidelines expire. The Interior Department has said it may set new rules on its own if no agreement is reached this summer. Western states could be heading toward a conflict over water.

Local water restrictions are getting stricter. In March 2026, Erie, Colorado, moved to a Level 4 Emergency, the highest stage, which bans all residential sprinkler use. Aurora has completely banned new turf lawns. Denver Water started Stage 1 restrictions, asking residents to cut both indoor and outdoor water use by 20% until October 1. Along the Rio Grande, Elephant Butte is at 12.6% capacity, Falcon at 19.2%, and Amistad at 31.4%.

California: Permanent Rules Meet a Fourth Dry Year

California’s situation is more complex than just being in drought or not. In January 2026, the Drought Monitor showed no part of California in drought for the first time in 25 years. By April, Southern California was facing its fourth straight year of below-average rainfall. The statewide snowpack was only 18% of normal, and the State Water Project will limit water releases to 30% of normal.

What’s notable is that California’s restrictions no longer depend on whether a drought is officially declared. After the 2012-2017 drought, the state moved to a permanent year-round conservation framework codified by state law AB 1572 and the State Water Resources Control Board’s “Making Conservation a California Way of Life” rules.

Statewide baseline rules apply every year, regardless of conditions: no hosing down driveways or hardscape; no irrigation within 48 hours of rainfall; no irrigation runoff into streets or storm drains; mandatory shutoff nozzles on hoses; and recirculation requirements for fountains and decorative water features.

On top of these restrictions, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves 19 million people, issued a Level 1 conservation notice in March 2026 to all 26 city and county agency members. State enforcement of the new water-budget rules is paused until 2027 to give utilities time to adjust.

California is in for a dry summer this year.

Southeast: A Recharge Season That Failed

The Southeast, usually a humid region, is now facing a record drought. Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina all had their driest September-through-March since 1895. Normally, the region relies on December through March to restore soil moisture, streamflows, and groundwater, but this year, that recharge mostly did not occur.

The result, as of April: 100% of North Carolina, 99.95% of Virginia, 99.34% of South Carolina, 98.99% of Florida, 98.13% of Georgia, 93.65% of Tennessee, and 88.66% of Alabama are in drought. In Georgia, extreme drought now covers 71% of the state, the highest reading since 2012. Some monitoring stations with 75 or more years of data are recording their driest six-month periods on record. Drought watches are active across Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama, with mandatory rules likely if late-spring rainfall doesn’t materialize.

Texas and the Southern Plains: Cities at the Edge

Texas is 77% in drought as of mid-April. The Coastal Bend story is the one to watch closely. Combined storage at Choke Canyon Reservoir and Lake Corpus Christi has fallen to 8.7% as of April 2026 — among the lowest levels ever recorded. Corpus Christi has been under Stage 3 mandatory restrictions since December 2024, the most severe stage in the city’s standard drought contingency plan, which is triggered when combined reservoir storage drops below 20% capacity. Stage 3 bans all outdoor irrigation, home vehicle washing, and most non-essential outdoor water use; second and subsequent violations carry fines up to $2,000 each.

The bigger concern is what happens next. City models now predict a Level 1 Water Emergency by September 2026, when the water supply could be just 180 days from running out. On April 28, 2026, the City Council postponed a vote on a proposal that would require everyone—residents, businesses, and industry—to cut water use by 25% if Level 1 is declared. Many residents at the meeting said this cut would be impossible unless industrial users reduce even more.

If Corpus Christi runs out of water—a scenario city officials now consider possible—it would be the first modern American city to face this. There is no guidebook for what to do. In the worst case, the city could see rolling water shutoffs by district, water delivered by tanker trucks, and even managed evacuations. The largest industrial users, such as petrochemical refineries, would likely lose access to water first, potentially leading to lawsuits.

In other parts of Texas, Dallas has had a permanent rule since 2001 that only allows watering lawns two days a week, and no irrigation is allowed between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. from April to October. In Oklahoma and Kansas, the Ranger Road Fire—the largest U.S. wildfire of 2026 so far—burned 283,283 acres in February, killed hundreds of livestock, and led to burn bans across central and eastern Oklahoma.

High Plains: Dust, Fire, and Lake Beds

Nebraska is experiencing conditions that one state climatologist said are unlike anything seen before. Fifty-six percent of the state is in extreme drought, similar to 2012 but with warmer temperatures. The Morrill Fire started in March and quickly spread through dry grasslands, burning over 640,000 acres—the largest wildfire in Nebraska’s history. In Sheridan County, some landowners say their private lakes have dried up completely for the first time since 2012.

The Black Hills in South Dakota are now in extreme drought. In southern Nebraska, southwest Kansas, and southeast Colorado, low rainfall combined with high temperatures and evaporation have made spring planting difficult in many areas. The U.S. Geological Survey reports that streamflows are below or much below normal across southwestern South Dakota, southern Nebraska, and central and western Kansas.

Mandatory urban restrictions in this region are still relatively rare, but burn bans are widespread, and ranchers are culling cattle herds rather than feeding them on pastures with no grass.

Pacific Northwest: A Snow Drought, Not a Rain Drought

The Pacific Northwest had more precipitation this winter than the Southwest, but most of it fell as rain instead of snow because of record-warm temperatures. This has caused a snow drought rather than a rain drought. Since the region relies on snowpack for summer water, this is a serious problem.

Across the broader Columbia River Basin, snowpack ranks in the second percentile. On April 8, Washington’s Department of Ecology declared a statewide Drought Emergency, citing snowpack at just 53% of the median and projected summer water supply below 75% of normal in many basins, including the Yakima. Junior water-rights holders in the Yakima Basin are projected to receive only 44% of their allotment. Idaho is facing what could be its fourth consecutive drought year in its northern basins.

For the Northwest, the effects go beyond just this summer. New research from Oregon State University predicts that by the end of the century, water will move from precipitation to streamflow about 18% faster on average. This happens because there is less snow and more rain, so water moves through the system more quickly instead of slowly melting from snowpack. As a result, there could be about 50% less water in rivers, lakes, and reservoirs during the summer growing season.

The shift toward earlier runoff seen in 2026 is not a one-time event. It is a preview of the more severe impacts that climate change could bring.

Where Restrictions Are Active

This is a partial snapshot as of April 27, 2026. Local utilities update stages weekly. Verify before relying on these figures.

What You Can Do

Households use about 10% of all water in the U.S. Agriculture is still the biggest user, but in cities with restrictions, saving water at home can help prevent stricter rules, fines, or limits on businesses. The EPA’s WaterSense program says the average American family uses about 300 gallons a day, and simple upgrades can cut indoor use by 35%.

Indoor (immediate, no cost):

• Check your home for leaks. On average, American homes waste over 11,000 gallons a year from running toilets and dripping faucets. A single toilet leak can waste 200 gallons a day. To test for leaks, put food coloring in the tank—if it shows up in the bowl without flushing, you have a leak.
• Turn off the tap while brushing your teeth or shaving. This can save 8 to 10 gallons per person each day.
• Only run your dishwasher and washing machine when they are full. You can also skip pre-rinsing dishes.
• Take shorter showers. Reducing your shower by two minutes with a standard showerhead can save about 5 gallons of water.

Indoor (small investment):

• Install WaterSense-labeled fixtures. Faucet aerators and showerheads use at least 20% less water and are inexpensive. The average family can save about 3,500 gallons of water and 410 kWh of energy each year just by using these.
• Replace any toilet made before 1992. Older toilets use 4 gallons per flush, while WaterSense models use 1.28 gallons or less.

Outdoor (where most savings can happen):

• Outdoor irrigation uses nearly 9 billion gallons of water a day nationwide. It makes up about 30% of household water use, and up to 70% in dry areas. Water your yard before sunrise or after sunset to reduce evaporation.
• Consider replacing your lawn with drought-tolerant plants that are suited to your region. This type of landscaping uses less than half the water of a traditional lawn. Many cities, such as Aurora, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, offer rebates for replacing turf.
• Install a smart irrigation controller with a rain shutoff or soil moisture sensor. These devices adjust watering based on real conditions instead of following a set schedule.
• Add 2 to 3 inches of wood chips as mulch to your flower beds and vegetable gardens. This helps reduce evaporation and keeps weeds down.

Community and policy:

• Find out your utility’s current drought stage and the rules that apply. Most utilities post this information online and let you report water waste, like irrigation during banned hours or broken sprinklers spraying onto pavement.
• If you’re in an HOA, know your rights. California’s AB 1572 and Texas Property Code §202.007 prohibit HOAs from fining residents for brown lawns during active water restrictions. Other states are following this example.
• Pay attention to how agriculture and industry use water in your area. While homes use only about 10% of water, decisions about the other 90%—used by farms and businesses—will shape whether household conservation efforts make a lasting difference.

The Big Climate Picture

Some may see the 2026 drought as just a mix of La Niña, a warm winter, and early snowmelt, with rain expected to return as conditions change and an El Niño watch begins for late summer. While this is partly true, the bigger pattern—record warmth, snow falling as rain, earlier and faster runoff, and reservoirs unable to keep up as demand rises during hotter, longer summers—is what climate science has predicted for nearly twenty years.

Lake Powell is at 23%. Oregon’s snowpack is gone. North Carolina is completely in drought. Corpus Christi is preparing for the chance of running out of water. These are not separate stories. They are all part of the same story, showing what aridification looks like when it becomes a daily reality instead of just a forecast.

Editor’s note: Drought conditions are evolving weekly. Statistics in this piece are current as of the U.S. Drought Monitor release dated April 21–23, 2026. Local water restrictions change frequently — verify with your utility before relying on the figures cited here.

The post The 2026 Drought, Region by Region appeared first on Earth911.

About one in four items Americans put in recycling bins does not belong there. This good-intentioned mistake leads to equipment damage, higher processing costs, contaminated bales that buyers reject, and injuries to workers who have to remove these items from conveyor belts.

Recyclers call this hopeful but mistaken behavior wishcycling. This means putting a questionable item in the blue bin and hoping the facility will sort it out. Most facilities cannot do this, and the cost of trying has gone up sharply. An August 2024 EPA assessment estimates that the country needs $36.5 to $43.4 billion in investment by 2030 to modernize a recycling system strained by contamination. Understanding what wishcycling actually costs, and who pays for it, is the first step to stopping it.

What is Wishcycling?

Wishcycling is the practice of putting items into a recycling bin when you’re not sure they’re accepted, hoping the system will sort it out.

The term appeared around 2015 and is attributed to Bill Keegan, president of Dem-Con Companies, a Shakopee, Minnesota waste and recycling operator. Star Tribune columnist Eric Roper revisited the term in a 2017 follow-up documenting industry efforts to coordinate recycling education across haulers and municipalities. The behavior is older than the word. Bowling balls, garden hoses, propane tanks, and Christmas lights have been arriving at material recovery facilities (MRFs) for decades.

The main change has been the cost. In the early 2000s, U.S. MRFs accepted fewer types of materials and sent most contaminated materials overseas in bales.

After China’s National Sword policy took effect in 2018, the global market for dirty recycling collapsed. Research from the University at Buffalo found that the amount of plastic landfilled in the U.S. increased by 23.2% in the year China’s import bans began to take effect. Processors now have to clean material to a much higher standard if they want to export it, or pay to landfill it themselves.

The Contamination Numbers Have Stayed Stubbornly High

National contamination figures vary by methodology and region, but the picture is consistent: a meaningful fraction of every recycling load is material that shouldn’t be there. Industry estimates put the share of items placed in residential bins that are not actually recyclable at around 25%, with municipalities reporting rates from below 10% to above 40% depending on local rules and education. Waste Management, the country’s largest hauler, reported its average inbound contamination at just over 17% in recent years, down from a longer-running 25% average, which represents progress, but is still well above the under-5% threshold most end markets demand.

Capture rates tell the other half of the story. The Recycling Partnership’s 2024 State of Recycling report found that only 21% of U.S. residential recyclable material is actually recycled. Roughly 76% is thrown out by households as ordinary trash, and another 3% is lost at the MRF, where contamination, broken glass, and unsortable mixed material wash out of the system before it can be baled and sold.

In other words, most recyclables never make it to a recycler. The ones that do often come with extra items like pizza grease, plastic bags, garden hoses, food residue, batteries, or propane canisters, which compromise the load.

What Contamination Costs the System

Wishcycling affects the finances of every part of the recycling process.

At the MRF, processing a ton of single-stream mixed recyclables cost $129 per ton in Oregon in 2022, according to a Crowe LLP audit cited in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2025 review of U.S. recycling. The same review says that after the National Sword contamination restrictions, Waste Management’s processing costs went up by about 15%, or roughly $13 per ton, across its 43 single-stream facilities. These costs include extra labor, optical sorters, screens, and slower processing when machines jam.

At the end of the process, contaminated bales sell for less, get downgraded, or are rejected completely. When a load is rejected, the MRF has to pay the landfill tipping fee instead of making a sale. The Environmental Research and Education Foundation’s 2024 tipping fee analysis puts the national average at $62.28 per ton, a 10% increase from 2023, which is the biggest year-over-year jump since 2022. In the Northeast, the average is even higher, around $80 per ton.

At the public level, municipalities and producers end up paying the bill. Oregon’s new producer responsibility program, which started in mid-2025, includes a contamination management fee that producers pay to MRFs. The fee is $341 per ton of eligible material for 2025 and 2026, rising to $432 in 2027. This shows that regulators recognize contamination has a cost, and that someone besides the MRF operator should pay for it.

The EPA’s August 2024 Recycling Infrastructure Assessment estimates that bringing U.S. recycling infrastructure up to a level that gives every household access to recycling on par with trash collection would require $36.5 to $43.4 billion in investment by 2030. That figure covers MRFs, packaging-specific recycling facilities, drop-off infrastructure, and composting and anaerobic digestion capacity. Reducing contamination is built into the agency’s assumptions; cleaner inputs are a precondition for the recovery gains the investment is meant to unlock.

The Human Cost: Recycling Workers Are Getting Hurt

Contamination is not just an economic problem. Items that do not belong in the recycling stream, such as propane tanks, lithium-ion batteries, medical sharps, broken glass, and plastic bags that tangle in screens, make sorting recyclables physically dangerous.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data released in January 2026 show that the injury rate for solid waste collection workers rose to 5.0 cases per 100 full-time-equivalent workers in 2024, up from 4.3 in 2023 and 4.7 in 2022. Workers at material recovery facilities were injured at a rate of 5.8 per 100 FTE — the highest the agency has reported for that category since at least 2020. For comparison, the rate across all private industry in 2024 was 2.3 per 100 FTE, the lowest since 2003. Sorting recycling is more than twice as dangerous as the average American job.

Fatalities show an even more serious side. The BLS counted eight MRF deaths in 2024, down from nine the year before, and 32 fatal injuries among solid waste collection workers, with 23 linked to transportation incidents. In 2024, refuse and recyclable material collection was the fifth-deadliest job in the country, behind only logging, fishing and hunting, roofing, and structural ironworking.

Lithium-ion batteries deserve a separate line. They are routinely placed in curbside recycling bins by residents who don’t know where else to put them, and they routinely catch fire when crushed by compactor trucks or sorting equipment. A 2024 report from the National Waste & Recycling Association and Resource Recycling Systems estimates more than 5,000 fires occur annually at U.S. recycling facilities, with the rate of catastrophic losses up 41% over the previous five years. The cost of insuring an MRF has climbed accordingly, driving recycling costs for citizens higher.

Why Wishcycling Persists

Three structural problems keep contamination rates high.

First, recycling rules are set locally, but packaging is made for the whole country. For example, a yogurt cup accepted in Seattle might be sent to landfill in Atlanta. The chasing arrows symbol and resin identification codes 1 through 7 show the type of plastic, not whether it can be recycled locally. According to a 2020 McKinsey survey cited in the National Academies’ 2025 report, two-thirds of U.S. consumers are confused by this difference.

Second, single-stream collection is convenient for residents and trucks, but it results in dirtier loads compared to dual- or multi-stream systems. Most U.S. municipal recycling programs now use single-stream collection, and the convenience that made it popular also allows more contamination.

Third, people often feel a strong moral urge to recycle, which can lead them to ignore instructions. A National Academies survey found that 78% of consumers check product labels to sort products correctly, and 82% trust the information on those labels. When labels are wrong or misleading, good intentions turn into contamination.

What You Can Do

Reducing wishcycling begins with individual choices at the bin, but it is most effective when combined with changes at the system level.

At the household level:

• Look up your local recycling guidelines and post them where you sort. Use the Earth911 recycling search by ZIP code and material to find what’s accepted near you.
• When in doubt, throw it out. One contaminated item can devalue an entire bale. A landfilled item costs the system less than a wishcycled one that has to be pulled out twice and sent to landfill anyway.
• Follow four common-sense rules: keep recyclables empty, clean, dry, and loose. Do not bag recyclables. Do not leave food residue. Avoid putting in items that tangle, such as hoses, cords, string lights, or plastic bags.
• Never put batteries, propane cylinders, electronics, or hazardous waste in curbside bins. Use a dedicated drop-off location. Most counties have hazardous waste collection days, and many retailers accept batteries.
• Treat plastic bags and film separately. Most municipal MRFs can’t process them; grocery stores and big-box retailers often have collection bins for them at the entrance.

At the community and policy level:

• Support extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws that shift the cost of packaging recyclability onto the companies that produce it. Several states have packaging EPR laws on the books; Oregon’s took effect in mid-2025.
• Ask local officials whether your municipality publishes contamination data and whether it audits MRF inbound loads. Cities that measure tend to manage.
• Push back on misleading recyclability labels. The Federal Trade Commission has been reviewing its Green Guides since 2022 but has not yet issued an update; public attention has been one of the main forces keeping the review going.

Wishcycling happens when good intentions meet a system that cannot handle them. The solution is not to try less, but to focus your efforts: learn what your program accepts, follow the rules even if it feels wasteful, and speak up about the policies that decide what gets made and labeled.in place.

The workers who sort our recyclables, the cities that pay for processing, and the bales that decide if material becomes a new product all depend on one thing: what you put in the bin.

Editor’s Note: Originally published on January 11, 2017, this article was substantially updated in June 2026.

The post The Reasons “Wishcycling” Is Always a Bad Idea appeared first on Earth911.

On April 30, a fusion company took a step that would have seemed like science fiction just five years ago. It applied to connect a 400-megawatt fusion power plant directly to the largest electricity grid in the United States. Commonwealth Fusion Systems told the regional grid operator PJM that it plans to supply fusion-generated electricity from its Virginia plant, the Fall Line Fusion Power Station, aiming to deliver power to the grid by the early 2030s.

For fifty years, fusion has been the subject of energy jokes, always said to be 30 years away. Now, that timeline is finally starting to change. Private fusion companies have raised about $9.8 billion so far. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has officially separated fusion from fission in its rules, and at least three U.S. companies are actively seeking permits or building grid-scale plants. This progress does not guarantee that commercial fusion will arrive on time.

Still, by 2026, the policy, funding, and engineering questions are no longer just theoretical. Today’s decisions will shape how the next decade of clean energy develops.

Fusion vs. Fission: Two Opposite Reactions

Both fusion and fission release energy from atomic nuclei, but they do so in opposite ways.

Fission is the reaction in every commercial nuclear plant operating today, which splits a heavy atom (typically uranium-235 or plutonium-239) into lighter fragments, releasing energy and a cascade of neutrons that sustain a chain reaction.

Fusion does the inverse: it forces two light nuclei together to form a heavier one. Most fusion designs use deuterium and tritium, both of which are isotopes of hydrogen. The reaction produces helium plus a high-energy neutron, releasing energy in the process. It is the same reaction that powers the Sun.

The practical differences are important. Fission needs a certain amount of fuel and a controlled chain reaction. If cooling fails, leftover heat can cause a meltdown, as happened at Fukushima and Three Mile Island. Fusion does not require a chain reaction or a critical mass, so it does not melt down. The plasma created by fusion reactions must be kept at about 100 to 200 million degrees Celsius for the reaction to continue. If those conditions change, the reaction stops on its own.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) found that fusion machines do not produce the kind of residual heat that requires emergency cooling. That is why, in 2023, it decided to regulate fusion as a byproduct material rather than as a power reactor.

Environmental Impacts: Where Fusion and Fission Diverge

During normal operation, neither fusion nor fission plants release carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. The main environmental concerns are about waste, managing fuel cycles, and the materials used to build each type of reactor.

Fission’s Long Tail

Spent nuclear fuel from fission reactors contains isotopes that remain hazardous for very long periods. Plutonium-239 has a half-life of roughly 24,100 years; uranium-235, about 700 million years. Cesium-137 and strontium-90 — major radiological contributors in spent fuel — have half-lives near 30 years but require shielded storage for centuries. The global inventory of spent nuclear fuel exceeds 400,000 metric tons, and no country has yet opened a permanent geological repository, although Finland’s Onkalo facility is near operational status.

Fission also requires uranium mining, milling, and enrichment. These are energy-intensive steps that affect land use, water, and create waste. After a plant is built, decades of carbon-free electricity can help balance out those early impacts, but the effects are real and mostly felt near mining communities.

Fusion’s Smaller, Shorter Footprint

A fusion reactor mainly produces helium, a valuable element, as direct waste; it is a non-toxic and non-radioactive gas. The main radiation concerns relate to two other sources: tritium, the radioactive hydrogen isotope used as fuel, and the reactor’s structural materials, which become radioactive over time as they are hit by high-energy neutrons during operation.

Tritium has a half-life of about 12.3 years. This is short for nuclear materials, but still long enough that any release into the environment is a real concern. Tritium can combine with water to form tritiated water, which living things can absorb. The main way to manage this is to contain and recycle tritium within a closed fuel loop. Reactor structures, usually made of special steels and ceramics, become radioactive during use. When removed, they generally become safe to handle within 50 to 100 years, which is much shorter than the thousands of years needed for fission waste.

Fusion also avoids the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation that comes with fission. Fusion systems do not use fissile material, so there is no uranium enrichment, no plutonium production, and no chain reaction that could be used for weapons. This is one reason the NRC decided that fusion’s risks are more like those of particle accelerators and medical isotope facilities than those of traditional nuclear plants.

The Environmental Caveats

Saying fusion is environmentally clean does not mean it has no environmental impact. There are three  concerns that anyone interested in sustainability should consider:

• Tritium is scarce. Worldwide, civilian tritium stocks are only about 25 to 30 kilograms, mostly made as a byproduct of Canada’s CANDU heavy-water fission reactors. Many of these reactors are set to retire this decade. A 1-gigawatt fusion plant would use more than 50 kilograms of tritium each year. The industry plans to make tritium inside the reactor by lining the walls with lithium, but this has never been proven to work at commercial scale.
• Lithium-6 and the Minamata problem. To breed tritium effectively, reactors need lithium enriched in the rare isotope lithium-6, which represents only about 7.6 percent of natural lithium. The old industrial process for separating it, called column exchange or COLEX, uses a lot of mercury and is now banned for new use under the Minamata Convention on Mercury. Right now, only Russia and China are thought to produce enriched lithium-6. Cleaner methods are being developed, but supply chain issues remain a real challenge.
• Neutron damage and decommissioning. The 14-MeV neutrons generated by deuterium-tritium fusion damage reactor materials more than fission neutrons do. Reactor walls and components will need to be replaced from time to time, producing low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste that must be managed. Over a plant’s lifetime, fusion produces more waste by weight than fission, but the radioactivity fades much faster.

Where Commercialization Stands in 2026

Fusion is now much more than a single lab experiment. According to the Fusion Industry Association’s 2025 Global Industry Report, there are 53 private fusion companies that have raised a total of $9.77 billion. Of that, $2.64 billion came in the 12 months ending July 2025, the second-largest yearly increase since the report started. The F4E Fusion Observatory said that by September 2025, total global private fusion funding was about $15.2 billion.

Three U.S. companies are now further along than the rest:

Commonwealth Fusion Systems (Massachusetts and Virginia)

Commonwealth, which started at MIT, is building a tokamak—a doughnut-shaped magnetic chamber—called SPARC at its Devens, Massachusetts, campus. The demonstration machine is about 75 percent finished and is expected to start operating by late 2027. If SPARC achieves net energy gain, the company plans to build the 400-megawatt Fall Line Fusion Power Station in Chesterfield County, Virginia. Google and the Italian energy company Eni have already signed agreements to buy power from that plant. An application to connect to the grid filed in April 2026 is the first step in a process that will take four to six years before approval. Without the grid connection, there’s no place for the electricity generated to go.

Helion Energy

Everett, Washington-based Helion uses a different approach called a field-reversed configuration, which aims to generate electricity directly from the fusion reaction’s magnetic field and avoids using a steam turbine. It has signed the world’s first fusion power purchase agreement, promising to deliver 50 megawatts of fusion electricity to Microsoft data centers starting in 2028. Helion began construction of the Orion plant in Malaga, Washington, in July 2025 and obtained its Conditional Use Permit from Chelan County in October 2025. Its prototype, Polaris, has reached plasma temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius. Many see the 2028 deadline as ambitious.

Inertia Enterprises

Inertia was founded in 2024 to bring the laser-driven inertial confinement method, developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility, to market. In April 2026, it announced a $450 million funding round and one of the largest public-private research partnerships in the history of DOE national labs. The company is working with LLNL to scale up the fusion-target manufacturing techniques used in NIF’s December 2022 ignition shot, which was the first lab experiment to achieve target gain by producing 3.15 megajoules of fusion energy from 2.05 megajoules of laser energy.

ITER and the International Track

ITER, an international tokamak project involving 35 countries and being built in southern France, updated itsrelease schedule in 2024. The first plasma is now expected in the mid-2030s, with operation starting in 2035 and full deuterium-tritium fusion beginning in 2039. ITER will not produce electricity, but it is still the most ambitious test site for the physics and engineering challenges that future commercial fusion plants will face.

The Regulatory Picture: Fusion Is Not Fission

In April 2023, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission unanimously voted to regulate fusion machines under 10 CFR Part 30 — the byproduct materials framework that already governs particle accelerators, medical isotope facilities, and industrial irradiators — rather than under the regime that governs fission reactors. Congress reinforced this approach in the bipartisan ADVANCE Act of 2024.

In February 2026, the NRC released its proposed rule to formalize this framework. The rule focuses on regulating tritium handling, neutron-activation products, and waste streams, instead of emergency cooling systems, because fusion machines do not create the leftover heat that fission reactors do. This is a significant policy change that addresses fusion’s real risks directly, which can speed up permitting for serious developers but also means those developers must clearly show their safety plans.

The Skeptical Case

Fusion’s commercial supporters are confident, but not everyone agrees. Daniel Jassby, who spent 25 years as a fusion researcher at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory, wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that fusion plants will need a lot of support infrastructure, even when the reactor is not running. He also says they may need more workers than fission plants of similar size and could create more low- to intermediate-level waste than fission, although the waste is much less radioactive.

The Sierra Club’s 1986 policy on fusion is still in place; it raised concerns about tritium release, decommissioning costs, and whether fusion is a better investment than renewables. A more recent Sierra Club essay says things have changed enough to reconsider fusion, but questions about cost, fuel-cycle viability, and how soon fusion can be deployed are still unanswered.

Even within the industry, 83 percent of fusion companies surveyed in 2025 said securing investment remains a major challenge. They estimate they need another $77 billion to build the first commercial plants, which is about eight times the money raised so far.

What This Means for the Energy Transition

The reason to pay attention to fusion in 2026 is not that it will solve the climate crisis this decade. Solar, wind, batteries, geothermal, and existing nuclear plants are already helping, with falling costs and a 15-year head start. The real point is that the next decade’s electricity demand, driven by AI data centers, the electrification of heating and transport, and industrial decarbonization, will require a diverse mix of reliable, low-carbon sources.

If fusion works at scale, it can provide reliable electricity with low emissions over its life, create little long-lived waste, and carry a low risk of nuclear proliferation. Whether fusion makes it to the grid by 2030 depends on scientists, funding, and regulations aligning. Maybe Helion, possibly with a smaller-than-promised first delivery, will win the race. Commonwealth’s Virginia plant in the early 2030s will need its grid interconnection process to move on schedule. Other players will follow later. None of these events is a sure thing.

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