Before the conflict began, inflation was at 2.4%, but the closure of the strait of Hormuz has affected energy prices

US inflation jumped to an annual rate of 4.2% in May, the third consecutive monthly increase since the start of the Iran war and a three-year high, as Americans continue to face steep oil prices.

Prices have increased sharply over the past several months, rising at an annual rate of 3.3% in March before going up to 3.8% in April. In February, before the conflict began, inflation was at 2.4%.

Source: Earth’s Future

Hotter, drier conditions in the western United States have led to a rise in wildfire activity that has damaged or destroyed infrastructure, natural ecosystems, and entire towns across the region. As fires grow larger and more destructive, the cost of managing them rises as well.

Fire management agencies in the United States have been feeling the pressure. Between 2014 and 2023, fire management agencies across all levels of government experienced a 131% increase in total area burned and a 268% increase in total fire spending adjusted for inflation compared to the period between 1985 and 1994.

Today, federal agencies like the Department of the Interior (DOI) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service (USFS) continue to invest in aiding states and managing hazardous fuel growth on public land, as well as suppressing active fires. Policymakers and federal agencies alike must decide how to manage limited budgets while protecting people, property, and natural resources.

Prestemon et al. built statistical models based on historical data to examine the potential increase in spending by the DOI and the USFS between now and 2100. Their models link wildfire activity to climate variables such as temperature and water vapor deficit and then connect fire activity to suppression costs. To capture a range of possible future conditions on federal lands, the study predicts 10 fire and suppression spending scenarios by applying five different climate models to two different warming pathways (the moderate Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) 4.5 scenario and the high-emissions RCP 8.5 scenario).

The results varied by region and scenario, but each of the 10 scenarios suggested a rise in area burned as well as inflation-adjusted fire suppression spending, with higher fire activity translating to higher costs. Projected changes in DOI and USFS land burned increased 80% by mid-century and 208% by late century.

By the middle of the century, both agencies are projected to see spending increases: about 0.65% per year for DOI spending and about 0.87% per year for USFS spending from 2020 to 2100. Although uncertainty increased with time and outcomes varied across climate models and warming pathways, the largest increases in both cost and wildfire activity were consistently projected for the northwestern United States. (Earth’s Future, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025EF007985, 2026).

—Rebecca Owen (@beccapox.bsky.social), Science Writer

Citation: Owen, R. (2026), As wildfires increase in the West, so does suppression spending, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260187. Published on 10 June 2026.

Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

The coal industry can damage human health in myriad ways via dangerous working conditions and harmful pollution. But the income opportunities offered by the industry can also provide much-needed stability for certain communities, such as those in Appalachia’s coal country.

“Being employed is good for your health, but environmental pollution is bad for your health, and these two things are operating at the same time in some communities,” said Mary Willis, an epidemiologist at Boston University.

The industry, though, is changing. Total coal production in the United States peaked in 2008, and the number of miners has steadily dropped since then.

A new study coauthored by Willis and published in Rural Sociology delves into the effects of this decline on life expectancies across the United States and in Appalachia in particular. The results show that a disappearing coal mining industry has mixed effects on health, highlighting the importance of a “just transition”—a shift away from coal mining and toward clean energy that also prioritizes decent work opportunities for those left without a job.

“How do we balance these two conflicting priorities?” Willis said.

Delving into the Decline

Coal production and consumption are linked to many human health harms, including heart disease, asthma, lung cancer, mental illness, and more. But how those health impacts intersect with the broader economic effects of mining has not been well studied.

In the new study, the research team analyzed the effects of the declining industry through the lens of the social determinants of health, or how social structures influence health outcomes.

To study these effects, the team compared coal mining data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration to life expectancy data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington from 2012 to 2019. Life expectancy is a metric that can be responsive to subtle changes in the environment, Willis explained. For example, the decommissioning of a coal-fired power plant a few miles away from a community may not affect residents’ day-to-day life but probably affects the scale of life expectancy across the population.

In coal-producing counties across the United States, the average life expectancy was 1.6 years lower than that in non-coal-producing counties. But the declining coal industry had more nuanced impacts on health in Appalachian communities, the researchers found. As coal production fell and miner labor hours decreased, life expectancy increased. But as the number of jobs available decreased, life expectancy decreased, too.

The findings suggest that the employment and associated economic impacts of a waning coal industry harm health. Previous studies documented similar increases in mortality in other regions where the fossil fuel industry has declined. Such research has indicated that these increased mortality rates may be partially driven by “deaths of despair” from drug and alcohol use and suicide related to economic distress. The association of these factors with mortality rates in coal country, the authors suggest, may be an area for future study.

Understanding that coal mining is associated with some positive economic and health effects is “an important perspective for understanding the sector as a whole,” said Lucas Henneman, an environmental engineer at George Mason University who was not involved in the new study. “It’s a really interesting piece of work.”

“This is just a really complex story that hasn’t been told yet—putting health into the context of these just energy transitions,” Willis said.

The complex reality of the coal industry extends beyond Appalachia. Most of the pollution related to the coal industry consists of toxins released when coal is burned, meaning those who bear the brunt of coal’s health impacts may not be located where coal is mined, Henneman said.

In fact, a 2023 study by Henneman and others found that before 2009, a quarter of all air pollution–related deaths of people on Medicare were attributable to coal burning. From 2013 to 2020, that number dropped to 7%, alongside a drop in coal consumption. A complete picture of how the coal industry affects health should also consider how pollution travels beyond coal country—where it’s burned, how it’s transported in the air, and who ultimately breathes it in, he said.

A Just Transition

The economic activity of a mine, through direct employment as well as businesses reliant on the mine and miners, “chases away other opportunities,” making the mine the economic backbone of the area, said Jonathan Buonocore, an environmental health scientist at Boston University and a coauthor of the new study. The concept of a just transition aims to ensure that employment opportunities in the wake of the coal industry’s decline reach these communities.

“The question is how to provide [jobs] in a way that provides the same level of stability, same kind of income benefits, and isn’t too much of a shock to [communities’] way of life or sense of identity,” Buonocore said.

—Grace van Deelen (@gvd.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2026), As the coal industry fades, life expectancies in coal country shift, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260134. Published on 30 April 2026.

Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

“Future winters promise less snow, more rain. Nobody’s prepared.” So proclaims the title of a recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America that frames adaptation to snow loss as the “million-dollar question” facing the western United States.

Declining snowfall—and snowmelt—affects ecosystems, urban and rural water supplies, hydropower, recreation, tourism, and agriculture. As the largest sectoral consumer of fresh water globally, agriculture is particularly vulnerable to snow loss.

Much of the U.S. West faces one of the worst snow years on record, and the statistics on future conditions feel dire. Up to 40% of the water demand for agriculture in the region is likely to go unmet as it gets warmer and less snowy. Similar scenarios are shaping up elsewhere around the world, including southern Europe, high-mountain and Central Asia, western Russia, and the southern Andes [Qin et al., 2020].

In response, water managers have developed a range of approaches for adapting to snow loss: infrastructure-based approaches like managed aquifer recharge, nature-based solutions such as forest management and beaver dam analogues, demand-side approaches like multibenefit land repurposing, and polarizing supply-side approaches like reservoir expansion and cloud seeding (Figure 1).

However, efforts to identify which of these strategies to implement for different drainage basins, or watersheds, using the variety of available approaches seem to fall into one of two traps: either searching for unrealistic one-size-fits-all panaceas [Ostrom, 2007] or treating every basin as unique, which is costly and inefficient.

Importantly, continuing along this trajectory means that we’re on track to offset only about a third of global climate-induced crop yield losses by 2100. For the western United States, previous work has estimated cumulative economic losses from declining snowfall of hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars while noting that rational adaptation decisions are hampered by the lack of financial analyses of the importance of snow [Sturm et al., 2017].

We thus suggest that the “trillion-dollar question” isn’t how to adapt but, rather, where existing strategies may make the most—and fastest—difference to offset projected losses. Answering this question requires an approach that matches strategies to the contexts where they are more likely to succeed—one that treats basins as neither uniform nor unique.

A Mismatch in Research and Operational Scales

Physical scientists tend to look at snow loss as a basin-scale problem, in part because this view aligns with hydrologic boundaries. However, as our colleague, applied economist Joey Blumberg, explains, “county lines were not drawn to follow watersheds, and rivers do not conform to political borders, creating a patchwork of mismatched boundaries.”

Scientists have long emphasized that mitigating climate change requires us to “think globally, assess regionally, act locally.” And in 1992, the authors of the Dublin Principles reasoned that moving the needle on “wicked water problems” requires targeting decisionmaking at the “lowest appropriate level,” where stakeholders can collaborate most effectively.

The challenge is that “local” isn’t a single, consistent unit. We recently explored the lowest appropriate level concept for agricultural water management in the U.S. West by defining local operational contexts on the basis of intermediaries such as irrigation districts, water conservancies, and mutual water companies that connect individual farmers to their hydrology [Gordon et al., 2024].

Working at this scale, we found one-size-fits-all strategies often don’t hold up, even within the same hydrologic basin [Gordon et al., 2024; Boisramé et al., 2026]. In the Upper Colorado River Basin, for example, expanding reservoir storage could buffer agriculture in northeastern Utah against declining snowpack, but the same strategy may fail miles away in southwestern Wyoming, where a thirstier atmosphere may make it harder to refill existing reservoirs.

However, collecting detailed local-scale information for just 13 of the roughly 2,600 operational contexts nationwide took almost 3 years of searching websites, reading working papers, and calling water managers.

Scaling this approach across the entire western United States is understandably overwhelming. We need a more systematic approach to help managers identify which strategies could work most effectively, and where.

A Diagnostic for Agriculture and Snow Loss

Ostrom [2007] argued that complex systems, such as Western agriculture, “are partially decomposable in their structure.” This insight is woven into archetype analysis, an approach for identifying recurrent patterns across otherwise diverse systems.

Like workplace assessments—which are genuinely useful, albeit imperfect, tools for understanding successful management styles—archetypes draw on qualitative, quantitative, or hybrid approaches to group diverse operational contexts on the basis of shared characteristics [Sietz et al., 2019]. These groupings enable systematic knowledge transfer about, for example, how management strategies that work in one context can also guide adaptation elsewhere.

“Researchers can empirically derive building blocks or components that comprise archetypes to represent key features of a system,” explains Elizabeth Koebele, who studies urban water sustainability [Garcia et al., 2019] and has begun applying archetypes in that context. However, she notes, these building blocks “vary based on the system context, available data, and study goal.”

We propose three main characteristics that interact to define operational contexts in snow-dependent agriculture in the western United States: physical constraints, governance systems, and human behavior. Physical constraints, including biophysical setting, infrastructure, and climate, determine available water supplies. Governance capacity relative to governance complexity shapes how those supplies are allocated across competing uses. Human behaviors influence both water demand and how users respond to supply conditions and governance rules.

Using these characteristics to establish archetypes of water management contexts could define a path forward for operationalizing an approach to accelerate successful adaptations to declining snowpacks in the West.

Constraining How Snowmelt Becomes Water Supply

Physical constraints stem from biophysical processes that influence how, when, and how much snow becomes streamflow; infrastructure that stores and conveys water; and hydrologic and climatic uncertainties about future supplies. These constraints can vary substantially from basin to basin.

Consider the Walker River Basin and California’s San Joaquin Valley, both of which rely on Sierra Nevada snowpack but have different biophysical settings. In some parts of the central Sierra, forest management can reduce wildfire risk and increase streamflow by up to 14% during low-snow years. Elsewhere, however, water made available by forest management may be consumed by remaining vegetation, limiting downstream gains.

These biophysical differences interact with uses of built infrastructure, including irrigation systems, reservoir outlets, and canals, to determine how and when water is stored and released. As temperatures warm and snowmelt declines, officials in both the Walker River and San Joaquin Valley basins must increasingly manage for a wider range of extremes, including “cold-water droughts.” However, the infrastructure to manage these trade-offs through reservoir storage and operations that balance agricultural deliveries with aquatic habitat needs is more developed in the highly managed San Joaquin than in the Walker.

Layered on top of biophysical and infrastructural constraints are climatic and hydrological uncertainties, such as whether snow loss will lead to more evapotranspiration and less streamflow. These uncertainties complicate management decisions based on cost-benefit modeling of individual strategies: Should districts expand reservoir storage if precipitation is predicted to increase or decrease depending on the model? Frameworks like Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty emphasize the need to select strategies that are robust across many possible futures.

Thankfully, measuring physical constraints on snowmelt at basin scales—a means, along with improved modeling, to reduce hydroclimatic uncertainties—is becoming more feasible today with newly developed tools. Water managers can turn, for example, to databases like the U.S. Geological Survey’s ResOpsUS [Steyaert et al., 2022], which catalogs historical reservoir operations across the contiguous United States, and to publicly available hydrologic projections such as those from Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Coupled Models Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6) ensemble.

Governance Controls Supply Allocations

We frame governance around capacity and complexity. Capacity in this context is the ability of stakeholders “to mobilize resources in order to make equitable and fair decisions around shared challenges,” according to governance scholar Gina Gilson. Complexity refers to the number and intricacy of jurisdictions, authorities, regulations, and stakeholders involved. As governance complexity increases, the effectiveness of adaptation strategies becomes more sensitive to capacity constraints, particularly regarding timescales and funding.

For example, infrastructure in the Walker is controlled locally by a single water district, and jurisdictional coordination involves two states and the Walker River Paiute Tribe. Coordination on water management is never simple, but fewer jurisdictions generally means faster decisionmaking and clearer authority, allowing the single water district to implement strategies like multibenefit land repurposing more readily. Such implementations, in turn, enable reduced agricultural water use, directly supporting restoration of Walker Lake and recovery of endangered species.

The San Joaquin Valley is vastly different in scale and complexity, covering eight California counties, one of which alone has 22 water districts and seven cities. Following the passage of the state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, water users in the basin formed more than 120 groundwater sustainability agencies. Agricultural water management thus involves overlapping federal and state systems that operate under different rules, contracts, and regulatory requirements. While land repurposing programs can be implemented, more substantial capacity, time, and resources are typically needed to do so.

Emerging efforts like the Western States Water Data Access and Analysis Tool (WestDAAT) and the Harmonized Database of Western U.S. Water Rights make it easier to assess governance in a basin by standardizing data about rules, regulations, and water rights across states. Combined with mapping of irrigation service areas and water transfers [Siddik et al., 2023], these resources help stakeholders identify the jurisdictions involved, how authority is distributed, and what coordination mechanisms exist for agricultural water management.

Human Behavior Shapes Demand Responses

Once snowmelt reaches water users, behavioral dynamics—how people respond to crises, policies, and changing conditions—determine how effectively management strategies achieve desired results.

Water demand is influenced by consumption choices and by economic, political, and cultural factors. It is also influenced by factors that typical hydrologic models rarely account for, including social structure, social memory, and affluence. More affluent users are less likely to modify their behavior to reduce water use under conditions of scarcity.

The dynamics of water demand in the South Platte River Basin, for example, are especially complex, as they are balanced across cities, agriculture, and ecosystems across parts of Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming. Water prices in the basin’s Big Thompson project, a federal water diversion system in northern Colorado, jumped from $1,500 per acre-foot in 1990 to more than $30,000 in 2018, driven by economic factors that resulted in cities owning 70% of water originally intended for agriculture.

Even with reliable projections of future climate and water supply, carefully planned strategies can be overwhelmed by economic and behavioral factors, resulting in transfers and reallocations of water. What’s more, behavioral responses to adaptation strategies can paradoxically increase demand when users perceive that scarcity problems are solved.

The “reservoir effect” occurs when water security perceptions encourage expansion of water-intensive activities [Di Baldassarre et al., 2018]. Similarly, the irrigation efficiency paradox shows how efficiency gains can lead to expanded production and reduced return flows (how much irrigation water returns to streams and aquifers) downstream [Grafton et al., 2018].

Conceptual frameworks, models, and global case studies have all been used as approaches to study the effects of human behavior on hydrology. With sufficient training data, we believe tools like machine learning could be used to further explore how behaviors influence adaptation and to anticipate shifts as snow loss continues.

Archetypes in Practice

By evaluating how physical factors, governance systems, and human behavior shape outcomes across places like the Walker, South Platte, and San Joaquin basins, researchers and practitioners can establish archetypes to help identify patterns in what strategies are most effective in different places and assess how to transfer lessons from one setting to another (Figure 2).

The Walker River Basin exemplifies an archetype common to agriculturally dominated headwaters in the western United States with low governance complexity (few jurisdictions), adequate capacity (resources), low behavioral complexity (more predictable and unified user groups), and substantial physical constraints (significant future snow loss and limited infrastructure for water storage and supplementation).

With this profile, the Walker is an ideal testing ground for evaluating how effectively different strategies offset changes in snowmelt. Does cloud seeding increase snowpack? Could beaver dam analogues—a nature-based solution reminiscent of Idaho Fish and Game’s mid-20th century effort to parachute beavers into the wilderness—meaningfully increase water retention? Could multibenefit land repurposing buffer people and ecosystems against supply volatility while restoring ecosystem functionality?

The value of organizing operational contexts by archetypes is that each context need not be treated as unique. Lessons learned from the Walker could be systematically transferred to other areas with similar characteristics and could be incrementally tested in others.

The South Platte has physical constraints similar to Walker’s but features greater governance complexity because of multiple interstate compacts, as well as greater behavioral complexity. Modeling analyses indicate that demand-side strategies could adapt to more volatile water supply in the South Platte [Gharib et al., 2023]. But implementing them requires balancing perspectives from both agricultural and urban water users—a behavioral dynamic absent in Walker.

Crop switching to cultivate higher-value crops on less acreage could reduce water use. However, options for what crops can be grown where are constrained by factors like elevation and climate. Even where feasible, new crops would require investments in education, new infrastructure, risk management, and agronomic knowledge.

Through iterative expansion and testing, broad archetypes like “high behavioral complexity” could be specified to reflect dynamics like rural-urban competition or concerns around buy-and-dry economics. Archetypes may also point to contexts where governance complexity signals that decisionmaking is occurring above the lowest appropriate level.

The San Joaquin, with its extremely complex governance involving numerous local, state, and federal agencies managing surface and groundwater, is one potential example. Recognizing this pattern can help identify where substantial resources and long timelines may be required to implement programs (e.g., LandFlex) requiring legislative authorization, multiagency coordination, and stakeholder engagement. It may also signal the need to identify smaller operational contexts within larger settings so implementations proceed more rapidly.

Operationalizing Archetypes from Diagnosis to Action

Developing a systematic approach to match adaptation strategies with areas where they are most likely to succeed in operation is only a first step. Applying diagnostics without mechanisms to implement new strategies is often insufficient to drive timely action.

An instructive precedent of success in water quality management comes from the 1970s. By then, pollution controls on factories had improved compared with the early 20th century, yet water quality in surface waters across the country still declined because of pollution in agricultural runoff. The breakthrough came with the EPA’s total maximum daily load (TMDL) program, which created a structured process that set measurable goals for reducing pollution and assigned responsibility for meeting those goals to the sources of the pollution, allowing for local control over adaptation.

Archetypes could play a similar role in facilitating beneficial snow-loss adaptations, and a structure like the TMDL program could start by assessing supply-demand risks across operational areas, setting performance targets such as reservoir reliability and shortage frequency, and then using the diagnostic to identify which strategies fit each archetype. Results and lessons could be shared region-wide, while implementation would remain locally driven.

This suggestion is, emphatically, not a prescription for specific policy mechanisms. But it serves as a reminder that—just as few of us engage with workplace assessments or change behavior on the basis of their results without organizational support—archetypes will need to be paired with implementation structures to translate diagnosis into action.

Beyond Silver Bullets

Nearly 20 years ago, Ostrom [2007] warned against seeking panaceas for complex environmental problems. There is no silver bullet for snow loss or single answer to our trillion-dollar question, but one path forward for sustaining complex Western ecosystems lies in developing archetypes of different types of basins.

A small irrigation district, for example, wouldn’t need to independently test every strategy in Figure 1 or develop complex decision support tools when a similar archetype already evaluated which strategies work under comparable governance, behavioral, and physical conditions.

Critically, these archetypes can be developed and refined by managers and scientists to capture more nuanced realities. Physically constrained systems, for example, could include areas facing high future uncertainty or limited reservoir flexibility. Governance and behavioral dimensions could likewise evolve to represent contexts where subsidies lead to incoherent incentives or where cultural norms link water use to local identities and traditions.

Like workplace assessments, the goal isn’t to diminish unique personalities but to work with them more strategically. Archetypes can show where we don’t need to reinvent the wheel to adapt and where the wheel might need to be tweaked. By leveraging collective knowledge and learning across regions facing similar challenges, rather than crafting new solutions basin by basin, we can reduce the time and resources needed to implement equitable and sustainable adaptation solutions.

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grants 1828902 and OIA-2148788. Where We Live is funded by a grant from NSF’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) RII Track-2 program and features partnerships across the University of Idaho (award 2316126); the University of Nevada, Reno (award 2316127); and the University of South Carolina (award 2316128). Work was also supported by internal funds from the Division of Hydrologic Resources at the Desert Research Institute.

References

Boisramé, G. F., et al. (2026), Think globally, model locally: Complex responses of agricultural water supplies to different climate projections, J. Am. Water Resour. Assoc., 62(3), e70117, https://doi.org/10.1111/1752-1688.70117.

Di Baldassarre, G., et al. (2018), Water shortages worsened by reservoir effects, Nat. Sustainability, 1(11), 617–622, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0159-0.

Garcia, M., et al. (2019), Towards urban water sustainability: Analyzing management transitions in Miami, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, Global Environ. Change, 58, 101967, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2019.101967.

Gharib, A. A., et al. (2023), Assessment of vulnerability to water shortage in semi-arid river basins: The value of demand reduction and storage capacity, Sci. Total Environ., 871, 161964, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.161964.

Gordon, B. L., et al. (2024), The essential role of local context in shaping risk and risk reduction strategies for snowmelt‐dependent irrigated agriculture, Earth’s Future, 12(6), e2024EF004577, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EF004577.

Grafton, R. Q., et al. (2018), The paradox of irrigation efficiency, Science, 361(6404), 748–750, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aat9314.

Ostrom, E. (2007), A diagnostic approach for going beyond panaceas, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A., 104(39), 15,181–15,187, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0702288104.

Qin, Y., et al. (2020), Agricultural risks from changing snowmelt, Nat. Clim. Change, 10, 459–465, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-0746-8.

Siddik, M. A. B., et al. (2023), Interbasin water transfers in the United States and Canada, Sci. Data, 10, 27, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-01935-4.

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Author Information

Beatrice L. Gordon (beatrice.gordon@dri.edu), Gabrielle F. S. Boisrame, Christine M. Albano, and Rosemary W. H. Carroll, Desert Research Institute, Reno, Nev.; and Adrian A. Harpold, University of Nevada, Reno

Citation: Gordon, B. L., G. F. S. Boisrame, C. M. Albano, R. W. H. Carroll, and A. A. Harpold (2026), Archetypes could accelerate agricultural adaptation to less snowpack, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260184. Published on 9 June 2026.

This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s).

Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

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European Central Bank increases main deposit rate to 2.25%, with two further rises expected by next spring

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The European Central Bank has raised interest rates for the first time since 2023 in response to higher inflation caused by the war in Iran.

The ECB raised its main deposit rate from 2% to 2.25% in a move that financial markets expect to be the first of three rises by next spring.

A used aluminum can is worth more, pound for pound, than almost anything else you put at the curb. In late 2024, a ton of crushed and baled cans was selling for around $1,338. Glass, by comparison, sells for roughly, well, nothing. Mixed plastics often cost the recycler money to handle. A single bale of cans, about the size of a small refrigerator, can be worth $40,000 in scrap. In a lot of towns, that one bale is the reason the whole truckful of recyclables is worth picking up.

That makes aluminum the quiet engine of curbside recycling. And right now, fewer Americans are putting cans in their bins than at any time since the early 1990s. According to a 2024 report from the Aluminum Association and Can Manufacturers Institute, the U.S. consumer aluminum-can recycling rate fell to 43 percent in 2023, well below the 30-year average of about 52 percent. Consequently, more than half of every can you finish ends up buried in a landfill instead of back on a store shelf as a new can.

How a recycling plant makes its money

Your bin doesn’t go straight to a recycling factory. It goes to a sorting facility called a MRF, pronounced “murf,” short for material recovery facility. A MRF is essentially a giant conveyor belt with magnets, screens, optical scanners, and people, all pulling the stream into separate piles: cardboard here, paper there, plastics by type, glass, metal.

Each of those piles becomes a bale, a compressed cube of a single material wrapped in wire. The MRF sells the bales to processors, who melt or pulp them into raw material for new products. That sale price, minus what it cost to sort, is the MRF’s revenue.

Most of the bales barely break even. Glass usually loses money. Mixed plastics sometimes make a loss, and sometimes don’t. The bale that consistently makes money is aluminum. A used can returned to a mill is back on a shelf, full of soda or seltzer, in as little as 60 days, using about 95 percent less energy than making aluminum from raw ore. And the metal doesn’t degrade. The same atoms can be recycled over and over, forever, with minimal losses of material during the recovery process.

That combination of high value and infinite recyclability is why aluminum is the only material in your bin that the recycling system genuinely wants. The rest of the content rides on the can’s profit.

Why fewer cans are getting back to mills

The 43 percent national rate hides a sharp split between two kinds of states.

Ten states have a system called a deposit-return scheme, more commonly known as a bottle bill. You pay an extra five or 10 cents when you buy a canned drink and get it back when you return the empty to a store or a redemption center. Those states are California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon, and Vermont, where return rates run from 65 to 90 percent, with Michigan and Oregon — both at $0.10 deposits — consistently reporting the highest recovery rates, according to Container Recycling Institute data.

The other 40 states rely solely on curbside collection. Their rates are about half as high.

The reason is simple. A deposit turns a can from “trash” into “money I’m holding.” It doesn’t take an environmental conviction to bring it back; it takes ten cents on the table. Curbside recycling doesn’t create that signal. It depends on people remembering to rinse and toss every can in the right bin, week after week, with no immediate reward. A lot of cans don’t make it.

What this costs your community

When cans miss the bin, the cost is spread across three areas.

The first is your municipal budget. Many city and county recycling contracts include aluminum revenue as a line item. When that revenue shrinks, somebody covers the gap — usually you, through a slightly higher trash bill or property-tax allocation. According to the Aluminum Association, roughly $800 million worth of cans are landfilled in the U.S. every year. That lost value has to come from somewhere; the gap shows up in your trash bill or your property taxes.

The second is energy. Every can made from raw bauxite ore rather than recycled metal requires far more electricity. Across the volume the U.S. landfills annually, the difference is the equivalent of several large coal-fired power plants’ worth of generation, every year, lit up to make new metal we already have above ground.

The third is the recycling system itself. The aluminum bale is what subsidizes the rest of the bin. When fewer cans go in, the cost of recovering everything else rises — and pressure builds on cities to drop materials they can’t afford to handle. Glass is usually first to go, and it has been abandoned by many municipalities over the last decade.

Why bottle bills are coming back

For most of the late 20th century, the beverage industry fought bottle bills hard. That has flipped. Both the Aluminum Association and Can Manufacturers Institute now back well-designed deposit programs, because the industry has set a 70 percent recovery target by 2030, and the arithmetic doesn’t work without deposits in more states.

Washington State has considered a bottle bill in several recent legislative sessions. Tennessee and Rhode Island also have active or recurring proposals. Since 2019, Vermont, Connecticut, and Oregon have expanded or updated their programs by adding wine and spirits containers, raising deposit amounts, or installing reverse-vending machines that process returns automatically.

Whether recycling scales to your community’s needs depends largely on how loud and informed the local civic conversation gets in the next five years.

What You Can Do

At home

1. Rinse and recycle every can. Make sure it’s empty and dry before putting it in the bin. A little residue is okay, but food waste lowers the value of the bale.
2. If you live in a bottle-bill state, don’t crush your cans. Reverse-vending machines need to scan the barcode, and a crushed can can’t be read, so you lose your deposit.
3. Aluminum foil and trays can be recycled too, but they are sorted separately.
4. If your state has a deposit system, return your cans for redemption. Cans returned this way go straight to mills with almost no loss during sorting. Curbside cans take a longer route and more are lost along the way.

In your community

1. Support bottle-bill legislation if your state is thinking about adopting one.
2. Encourage updates to deposit programs in states with older systems. A five-cent deposit set in the 1970s doesn’t motivate people like it used to. Ten cents is now the standard that works.
3. Ask your city council how recycling revenue is used. It’s a real part of the budget and directly affects your trash bill. Most people never ask, but those who do usually get answers.

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