Some of the most exciting designs emerging from the world of sustainable fashion are those utilizing uncommon materials. There are gowns sculpted with grass roots, sequins made from algae, and electrical wires woven into lace. Now, researchers and designers at Aalto University can add another unusual substance to that list: the remains of a 300-year-old wooden shipwreck.

In 2019, a hotel in the Finnish city of Oulu undertook renovations that uncovered a 17th-century vessel buried beneath a parking lot. Called the Hahtiperä wreck, the finding was the oldest of its kind in this region, prompting conservators to raise the seven-by-20-meter ship for preservation. A few fragments remained, though, and researchers from Aalto’s Bioinnovation Center seized the opportunity to save these bits from the trash.

After removing the outer layers, designers shredded and dissolved the wood into pulp. They then utilized their trademarked Ioncell process—developed in collaboration with Helsinki University—which recycles materials like paper, straw, and other textile waste into silky fibers.

Lecturer Anna-Mari Leppisaari was responsible for machine-knitting the undyed yarn into a pair of seamless dresses, one of which is on display at Oulu Art Museum for an exhibition about the future of fashion. A sleek A-line shape, the garment’s marbled pattern mimics that of wood grain. It weights less than a pound.

“Of course, a shipwreck is an exceptional case, but it’s also a story that makes people pause and appreciate materials in a new way,” lead designer Pirjo Kääriäinen says. “If something this beautiful can be made from centuries-old wood, why do we keep throwing away materials that could still be circulated and reused?”

The second dress will be on view in September for the university’s Designs for a Cooler Planet exhibition. (via The History Blog)

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article This Wood-Fiber Dress Was Made from a 17th-Century Shipwreck appeared first on Colossal.

Ours is a throw-away culture. That even applies to houses. When homes or buildings are demolished to make way for a road, condo development or another house or building, the materials and contents are usually sent to the landfill. As with other characteristics of our consumer-driven societies, it’s wrong.

Many components — wood, concrete, bricks, metal, plastic, vinyl — can be reused, repurposed or recycled. It’s not a new idea, but it hasn’t taken off the way it should. In many jurisdictions, people have been able to apply for salvage rights, allowing them to take useful items from a home or structure slated for demolition. And “deconstruction” companies have been around for a while, but they’re the exception rather than the rule.

In some cases, entire houses are moved to another location and fixed up rather than being demolished. Vancouver circular construction think tank Light House estimates about 20 per cent of demolished homes here could have been moved and another 60 per cent could have been deconstructed, with materials reused or recycled.

Some municipalities are finally seeing the value in keeping materials out of landfills, implementing bylaw and regulation changes to encourage salvaging and recycling. It’s about time!

Vancouver has some rules around recycling materials from house demolitions, depending on the age and character of the home, and offers a “Construction and Demolition Waste Toolkit.”

As a Tyee article reports, population growth in Vancouver meant tearing down 7,100 single-family homes from 2012 to 2023 and about 2,700 every year in the larger Metro Vancouver region to make way for multiplex housing such as highrise towers. About one-third of Metro Vancouver’s landfill is from construction and demolition.

The problem isn’t just the waste of good materials. A 2025 Australian study notes that disposing of construction and demolition waste in landfills “has been widely recognized as a source of leachate, containing toxic contaminants, which pose significant environmental risks.”

And the building and construction sector accounts for about 37 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, with close to one-third of that from the energy used to produce materials for a building.

According to the CBC, “Replacing one building with another generates an entire building’s worth of emissions, which means that, from a climate perspective, it’s better to extend the lifetime of those materials and reuse them than discard them.”

The Tyee article highlights a Vancouver company, Vema Deconstruction, that claims to have saved from 135,000 to 225,000 kilograms of construction materials since its founding in 2022. It’s not just buildings that can be recycled. The Patullo Bridge that connected New Westminster and Surrey across the Fraser River was recently replaced, and steel, asphalt and concrete from the old bridge will be recycled.

Diverting construction materials has many benefits. As the City of Vancouver notes, “Recycling and reusing building materials has cost-saving incentives, saves trees, conserves landfill space, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and supports affordable housing.”

Reclaiming wood is especially beneficial. It means no trees have to be cut down, leaving them to sequester climate-altering carbon dioxide, and for the numerous other benefits trees, especially old-growth, provide. The retained or reused wood continues to store carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases — when wood decomposes, it emits methane, a potent greenhouse gas. And it can cost less than cutting, transporting and processing timber.

Of course, deconstructing a home takes longer and usually costs more than demolishing and carting it to the landfill. That’s why government incentives and regulations are often necessary, as well as more avenues to sell reclaimed materials.

As with just about everything in our consumer-based societies, though, the economic system itself creates the problem. The bottom line rarely underlines the most environmentally sustainable path. Using more products, doing things quickly and discarding and replacing products and materials all generate more profit than conserving, reducing, reusing and recycling.

We need to aim for a circular rather than a linear economy. This means considering the entire life cycle of the goods we produce — designing products to create zero or minimal waste and pollution, keeping products in use through better design, repair, reuse and recycling and safely returning materials to the natural environment while using renewable energy.

Homes and buildings are a good place to start. Deconstruction should be mandatory.

David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation. Written with David Suzuki Foundation Senior Writer and Editor Ian Hanington.

The post Don’t throw that home away! appeared first on rabble.ca.

That foam coffee cup, takeout box, or packing block likely won’t be recycled. It’s not your fault; most Americans lack access to recycling systems for these materials. The plastics industry says it’s improving, and that’s true in some ways. But there’s still a gap between industry claims and what people can actually do when taking out the trash.

Before we talk about why foam is hard to recycle, it’s helpful to know what it really is. “Polystyrene” is the material, though it is often referred to by the brand name “Styrofoam,” and it comes in different forms. EPS is the foam used in coffee cups, takeout boxes, and packing blocks. The hard kind, found in utensils and appliance parts, is GPPS or HIPS. Both are polystyrene but need different recycling methods.

The #6 symbol on the foam container only tells you what kind of plastic it is, not if it can be recycled. If you put it in the bin just because you see a number and the recycling arrows, it can actually contaminate your other recyclables, like paper, cardboard, and aluminum, and might cause the whole batch to be rejected.

The Recycling That Happens Without You

The plastics industry recently launched the Polystyrene Recycling Alliance (PSRA), which commissioned a detailed study of where polystyrene foam is actually recycled in the US. Its headline stat: about 105 million Americans — roughly one in three — have access to recycling services that handle at least one type of polystyrene.

That sounds promising. But one must read the fine print to see the whole picture.

The PSRA–RRS Polystyrene End Markets Study, published in February 2026, is the most detailed inventory of US and Canadian polystyrene recycling infrastructure to date. It identified 81 companies handling recovered EPS and XPS foam, with 119 facilities spread across 30 US states and four Canadian provinces. About 52% of those companies are manufacturing end markets, businesses that actually turn recovered foam into new products like transport packaging and insulation.

Most of this recycling happens through business-to-business systems that regular people don’t use. Big retailers, warehouses, and appliance stores create large amounts of packing foam. They have private deals with haulers who collect the foam, compress it into dense bricks called “densified foam,” and send it to manufacturers, mainly to make new packaging and insulation. Some European and Asian companies also import compressed EPS from North America for manufacturing. There are also more than 700 drop-off locations for foam across the country.

Environmental groups note that EPS drop-off access, in stark contrast to industry claims, currently reaches only about 3% of the US population.

Between 2019 and 2023, Foam Recycling Coalition-funded programs nearly doubled the amount collected, according to Waste Dive‘s reporting. The Alliance reported 168.6 million pounds of EPS foam were diverted from disposal in North America in 2022. But it’s largely invisible to consumers, and almost none of it involves your curbside bin.

For the rigid forms of polystyrene, the stuff in your fridge’s vegetable drawer or your blender housing, the recycling picture is much less encouraging. The same PSRA–RRS study found just 45 companies handling recovered GPPS and HIPS in the US and Canada, and only 13% of those actually turning it into new products. Those 45 companies operate just 50 facility sites across 22 US states and four Canadian provinces, compared to 119 facilities in 30 states for foam. Most post-consumer rigid polystyrene that does get recycled comes from medical equipment and e-waste programs, not household recycling.

For consumers navigating this landscape, Earth911’s Recycling Mystery: Expanded Polystyrene offers a practical guide to what’s currently accepted and where it’s accepted.

Why Curbside Doesn’t Want It

Foam is a recycler’s nightmare, and the reason is simple: it’s mostly air.

EPS is about 95% air by volume. A regular collection truck can fill up with foam that weighs almost nothing, so the hauler spends the same amount of money to collect much less valuable material. Also, foam breaks apart easily, and small pieces can mix with paper and cardboard in the same bin, making everything else less valuable.

A 2024 study in the journal ChemSusChem found that processing polystyrene costs about $1,456 per metric ton, more than for most other plastics. This rate works only when there are grants, subsidies, or a guaranteed supply chain in place, but none of those exist at the scale needed to handle all the foam Americans throw away.

What “Chemical Recycling” Can and Can’t Do

You may have heard that polystyrene can be “chemically recycled,” meaning it is broken down by heat into its original building blocks to make new plastic. While that’s technically possible, it’s not happening on a large scale.

The only US facility dedicated to this polystyrene process, run by a company called Regenyx in Oregon, shut down in early 2024. A National Resources Defense Council report from March 2025 found only eight chemical recycling facilities of any kind operating in the entire US. Most of what these plants produce isn’t new plastic; it’s fuel oil, which means the material isn’t really being recycled so much as burned in a different way. The  Regenyx plant generated approximately one ton of hazardous waste for every ton of usable output, a serious problem the industry doesn’t advertise.

The 79% Nobody Talks About

Here’s a number worth sitting with: only 21% of all residential recyclables in the US actually get recycled, according to The Recycling Partnership’s 2024 State of Recycling Report — one of the most comprehensive independent analyses of the US system.

What about the other 79%? Most of it is lost at home before it ever reaches a recycling facility. People might not have access to a recycling program, might not know what their local program accepts, or just don’t take part. The report, along with EPA plastics data, shows that the overall US plastic recycling rate is only about 5–6%. For foam, which most curbside programs don’t accept, this gap at the household level is even harder to close. The industry’s solution is drop-off programs, but these require people to know where to go, make a special trip, and bring clean, uncontaminated foam. That’s asking a lot.

The Recycling Partnership says the biggest problem in the US recycling system isn’t technology or end markets. It’s getting people involved, and the main way to do that is through funding for education and outreach, which most municipalities lack. The EPA’s 2024 Recycling Infrastructure Assessment estimated it would take $36–$43 billion to upgrade the US system by 2030. A Resource Recycling summary found that nearly half of US states don’t even track how many curbside programs they have. You can’t fix a system if you aren’t measuring it.

How The U.S. EPS Recycling Rate Compares

The US lags well behind other wealthy countries when it comes to foam recycling.

Market data compiled through 2023 indicate that EPS recycling rates for comparable packaging are approximately 88% in South Korea, 83% in Taiwan, and 68% in Japan. Europe averages around 40%, though that figure masks wide variations. Some countries, including Portugal and Norway, approach 90% recovery rates, largely driven by fish box collection programs, while thers sit well below the average. North America comes in at roughly 31%, and that figure is almost entirely commercial collection programs, not household recycling.

It’s worth noting that all of these figures come primarily from GESA (the Global EPS Sustainability Alliance) and affiliated national industry groups, organizations with a direct stake in presenting favorable data. Independent verification is limited.

Japan’s foam recycling program has been running since 1978, and the country’s EPS industry group reports an effective utilization rate of 94.2% in 2024. That “effective utilization” figure includes incineration with energy recovery, not just mechanical recycling. South Korea made packaging producers legally responsible for recycling costs as early as 2000, a policy approach called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). The US has no federal EPR law for packaging and only seven states that have passed one so far.

Overall, the US ranked 30th in the world on the 2024 Environmental Performance Index’s waste recovery score. Germany, Japan, South Korea, and most of Western Europe all rank higher.

The Biggest Companies Are Giving Up on Foam

One of the clearest signs about foam’s future isn’t coming from regulators. It’s coming from the brands that use it.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF), which tracks voluntary sustainability commitments from over 1,000 companies representing about 20% of global plastic packaging production, released its final progress report in late 2025. Since 2018, signatory companies have removed over 775,000 metric tons of the most problematic plastics, including polystyrene and PVC, from their packaging entirely.

The EMF classifies certain polystyrene formats, especially foam foodservice containers, as plastics that should be eliminated rather than recycled. In its framework for problematic plastics, it consistently identifies these materials as candidates for phase-out, not circularity. That’s the stated view of an organization whose members include Nestlé, Unilever, Coca-Cola, and L’Oréal.

Meanwhile, those same companies are falling short of their overall recycled-content targets for plastics. The share of recycled plastic in the broader global packaging market barely moved — from 3.4% to 4.2% — even as committed companies tripled their own use of recycled content. As Chemical & Engineering News reported in November 2025, plastics recycling is struggling across the industry.

Voluntary commitments move the leaders, but they don’t move the system.

States Are Banning Expanded Polystyrene

Twelve states and three US territories have chosen not to wait for the recycling system to improve. They’ve banned foam food containers completely, and Earth911 tracks these changes. Oregon, California, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Hawaii all joined the ban list as of January 1, 2025.

California’s law included a recycling test: foam producers had to show a 25% recycling rate by January 2025 to keep selling EPS foodware in the state. When CalRecycle reported to the legislature that the industry had fallen far short—the rate was about 6% when the law passed—foam containers were effectively banned.

Not every ban effort has succeeded. Montana’s legislature passed a phase-out bill in spring 2025 — only to have the governor veto it. And while a federal “Farewell to Foam Act” has been introduced in Congress, it hasn’t passed.

Globally, the bans are further along. The EU banned foam food containers in 2021. Canada followed with federal legislation in 2022. Over 97% of Australians now live somewhere with an EPS ban in place, according to Wikipedia’s phase-out tracker.

What Would Actually Fix Polystyrene Recycling

The most honest answer is that recycling alone won’t solve the foam problem. But better policy can.

The Recycling Partnership’s EPR analysis finds that states with Extended Producer Responsibility laws have recycling rates up to 3 times higher than those without them. EPR generates funds for consumer education, access, and infrastructure that cash-strapped municipalities can’t provide on their own.

The PSRA’s end markets study is candid about what’s missing for rigid polystyrene. For GPPS and HIPS to be recycled at scale, the industry needs to solve a chicken-and-egg problem. Sorting facilities won’t invest in the equipment without a guaranteed buyer for the output, and buyers won’t commit without a reliable supply. The study’s concrete suggestion is to offer subsidies per pound to sorting facilities that would need to separate polystyrene from mixed plastic streams. Without that financial nudge, the economics don’t work.

As Earth911 has reported on Oregon and Maine’s early EPR programs, the results so far are encouraging, though implementation is still in early stages. Seven states now have packaging EPR laws, including Maine, Oregon, Colorado, California, Minnesota, Maryland, and Washington, and more are considering them.

The broader lesson is that without policy structures that change the economics, including embracing EPR, mandatory recycled content standards, or bans, voluntary action produces incremental progress against a systemic problem. As Chemical & Engineering News reported, even companies with strong sustainability commitments are falling short.

What You Can Do At Home

Find a drop-off:

• Search Earth911 for EPS foam drop-off locations near you. These are separate from your curbside bin — call ahead to confirm they accept your specific type of foam.
• For foam meat trays, most facilities won’t take food-soiled containers, so they must be clean and dry.
• Retailers like The UPS Store accept clean packing peanuts for reuse.

Cut foam out of your routine:

• Bring your own insulated mug to the coffee shop instead of accepting a foam cup.
• When ordering takeout, ask for paper or compostable containers.
• When shipping things, use crumpled newspaper, shredded paper, or molded pulp instead of foam peanuts.

Push for better policy:

• Find out whether your state has a packaging EPR bill pending. If it does, contact your representative in support. The trend is moving in that direction.
• Support Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) legislation in your state, which shifts the cost of recycling infrastructure from municipalities to the companies that make the packaging.

Related Reading on Earth911

• Recycling Mystery: Expanded Polystyrene
• EPS Foam Packaging & Products Bans Expand to Oregon, California, and Three Other States
• Extended Producer Responsibility in 2025: Progress, With More to Come
• Learning from Maine and Oregon’s EPR Programs
• The State of Plastic Bans in the United States
• Infographic: Plastic Recycling Codes

The post The State of Polystyrene Recycling In 2026 appeared first on Earth911.

Old glass trash container hand traced from a photo of mine of a glass recycling dumpster in the area. Black outlines, white surfaces. Optimized in SVGOMG. For emptying, a top loader truck with a crane arm raises the glass recycling container above the truck bed container and opens the dumpster into two, kind of like an upside-down scallop sea shell. The two halves don't have a snug fit, which explains the dirty-seeming vertical lines in the middle of the the right side. I suppose the bottom base is connected and should also be split and uneven at the split line.

A 2,000-square-foot house holds about 700 pounds of carpet. The average residential carpet lasts 5 to 15 years, depending on fiber and traffic. When it is removed, more than 90 percent of it goes straight to landfill, a bundle of fiber, backing, latex, calcium carbonate, and whatever stain-resistance chemistry was sprayed on top that will be buried in a single dense, slow-decomposing mass.

The U.S. generates roughly 3.4 million tons of post-consumer carpet a year. The last national report from the Environmental Protection Agency put the national recycling rate at 9.2 percent, essentially flat for a decade and a half, despite a 2002 industry-government agreement that promised steady gains. One state, California, has made significant progress, hitting 38.5 percent in 2024 under a producer-funded program. New York becomes the second state to require an extended producer responsibility (EPR) program for carpet, when its law launches in July 2026.

The remaining 48 states still treat carpet as ordinary household trash.

What’s in the roll

Modern wall-to-wall carpet is a layered composite designed for foot traffic, not disassembly. The face fiber is typically nylon 6, nylon 6,6, polyester (PET), or polypropylene. Beneath that sits a primary backing of woven polypropylene, a layer of styrene-butadiene latex glue, and a secondary backing weighted with calcium carbonate filler. A separate pad — usually rebond polyurethane foam — goes between the carpet and the subfloor. Your floors are covered in plastic that sheds billions of microfibers.

It’s the composite nature of carpet that is the problem. Each material has its own downstream value, but once they are glued, tufted, and coated together, separating them is mechanical and chemical work that the disposal price of carpet does not cover. A 2022 analysis in the Journal of Cleaner Production put it starkly: the annual mass of nylon embedded in U.S. waste carpet exceeds U.S. virgin nylon production. The country buries more of the polymer every year than it makes.

The Dalton concentration

More than 80 percent of the tufted carpet manufactured in America is produced within a 100-mile radius of Dalton, Georgia, the city that calls itself the carpet capital of the world. Shaw Industries, Mohawk Industries, Engineered Floors, and J&J Industries are all headquartered there. The concentration is an engineering and supply-chain success and an environmental liability in the same place.

For decades, Dalton-area mills used per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, the “forever chemicals” used as stain and water repellents. Wastewater carrying those chemicals was discharged into the Conasauga River and the local land application system, and downstream water utilities in Rome, Georgia, and elsewhere have since sued the manufacturers over drinking-water contamination.

U.S. carpet manufacturers stopped using PFAS in domestic production in 2019, according to the Green Science Policy Institute. Interface began phasing out PFAS in 2011 and completed the process in 2014; Shaw, Mohawk, Tarkett, and Engineered Floors have since followed suit.

The legacy carpet still on American floors and in American landfills — anything installed before roughly 2020 — was largely manufactured with PFAS. In 2024, the EPA designated PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances, which changes the liability arithmetic for any future cleanup at carpet manufacturing sites or carpet-receiving landfills.

The household line item

Over a 50-year homeownership arc, a single family will buy and discard carpet four to six times. Almost none of it will be recycled.

The cost of unrecycled carpet is uneven. New residential carpet runs $2 to $9 per square foot installed, according to HomeAdvisor, with the typical replacement project costing $780 to $2,813. Carpet removal and disposal adds $0.50 to $1.50 per square foot, a cost that most homeowners pay without seeing because it is bundled into the installer’s invoice. For a 1,500-square-foot home, that is $750 to $2,250 in disposal cost alone, almost all of which pays the tipping fee at the dump. Landfilling carpet is expensive.

The replacement cycle is short by durable-goods standards. Most residential carpet is designed to last 5 to 15 years, according to the Carpet and Rug Institute. PET-based carpet — increasingly common in the budget tier — sits at the lower end and is often replaced after 5 to 10 years.

What California built

California’s Carpet Stewardship Program, authorized in 2010 and run by the Carpet America Recovery Effort (CARE) under CalRecycle oversight, is the only U.S. carpet EPR program with a multi-year track record. A producer-funded assessment of about 35 cents per square yard of carpet sold — far less than the disposal costs in other states — funds collection, transportation, and recycling subsidies that close the gap between the cost of recycling and the lower cost of landfilling.

The state’s 2024 results are the strongest the program has posted. CARE reported a 38.5 percent recycling rate, exceeding CalRecycle’s 34 percent goal for the year. The state collected 82.7 million pounds of carpet, of which 90.5 percent was recycled. Reuse also plays a part, as carpet diverted to a second use rather than ground up grew 249 percent from 2021.

New York’s law, signed in December 2024, is in some respects more aggressive. It is the first U.S. carpet EPR program to include artificial turf, requires that all carpet sold in the state contain at least 10 percent post-consumer recycled content, and bans the sale of PFAS-containing carpet, effective December 31, 2026. Producer plans are due to NYSDEC by December 31, 2025; the producer-funded collection program launches July 1, 2026.

That leaves 48 states with no carpet-specific recovery infrastructure beyond what CARE finances voluntarily and what individual municipal bulky-waste programs choose to set up.

The recycling reality

Even in California, the math is harder than the headline rate suggests. The bulk of recycled carpet today is downcycled, mechanically shredded and pelletized into engineered resins for automotive parts, construction products, and carpet backing, rather than run through a closed-loop fiber-to-fiber recycling process that would substitute for virgin nylon production. Carpet-to-carpet recycling exists at meaningful scale only for nylon 6, which can be depolymerized and repolymerized into new fiber, and only at a small number of facilities globally. Aquafil’s Slovenia and Phoenix plants supply most of the ECONYL closed-loop nylon used in commercial carpet today.

Nylon 6,6, historically dominant in U.S. residential carpet, lacks an equivalent commercial chemical-recycling pathway. PET face-fiber carpet, the fastest-growing residential carpeting, is largely incompatible with existing nylon recovery streams and most municipal PET recycling because its latex backing and calcium carbonate filler contaminate the polymer.

The real cost of unrecycled carpeting

Carpet imposes costs that show up in places other than the homeowner’s invoice:

Landfill volume. At roughly 3.1 million tons of post-consumer carpet landfilled annually, it is one of the larger durable-goods waste streams in the country. Carpet is dense and slow to break down. Most carpet installed today contains synthetic fibers with a century-plus lifespan, so the volume sent to landfills is essentially permanent.

PFAS legacy. Legacy carpet in landfills is a documented source of PFAS leachate. The Interstate Technology and Regulatory Council’s 2024 PFAS fact sheet identifies carpet, textiles, and fluoropolymer-containing consumer products as primary PFAS sources in municipal solid waste streams, with measurable migration into leachate that flows downstream to wastewater treatment plants not designed to remove PFAS.

Methane is not the main story here, but the latex is. Unlike food waste or paper, carpet itself does not generate significant methane in landfill. The climate cost sits earlier in the chain, in the virgin petrochemical production of nylon and polypropylene and the calcium carbonate mining for filler, and at the end, in the slow leaching of additives.

Virgin material extraction. Every ton of carpet not recycled is, in effect, a ton of virgin polymer and filler that requires drilling for oil, refining, and polymerization to replace it. Nylon recovery from end-of-life carpet alone could supplant U.S. virgin nylon demand if collection and chemical recycling capacity existed at scale.

What You Can Do

At home

Buy carpet that can be recycled where you live. Ask the retailer specifically whether the carpet you are considering is recoverable through any program in your state. In California, CARE’s online tool lists certified collection points; outside California, the honest answer is usually that there is no local pathway. Buying with eventual recovery in mind matters most for nylon 6 face fiber, which has the clearest closed-loop pathway.

Choose carpet with verified PFAS-free certification. All major U.S. manufacturers have phased PFAS out of new production, but verify the specific product, particularly for stain-treated lines. Look for OEKO-TEX, Cradle to Cradle, or NSF/ANSI 140 certification, which require disclosure of PFAS content. Avoid imported carpet without an equivalent disclosure.

Extend the carpet you already have. More than 60 percent of premature carpet replacement is driven by poor maintenance or installation rather than fiber failure. Professional cleaning every 12 to 18 months, prompt spot treatment, and replacing the pad rather than the carpet when the pad fails first all measurably extend useful life.

At end of life, ask the installer where the old carpet goes. Most installers default to the nearest landfill because it is the cheapest disposal option. If you live in California, the disposal fee already funds CARE’s recovery system — ask explicitly whether the installer is using a CARE-certified collector. Outside California, ask whether the installer can route to any regional carpet recycler (CARE maintains a national directory), and use the Earth911 recycling search tool to check local options. Be prepared for the answer to be no.

In your community

Ask your state legislator about carpet EPR. Ten states have considered carpet stewardship legislation. Only California and New York have enacted programs. The Product Stewardship Institute tracks model legislation that other states can adopt rather than draft from scratch.

Push municipal bulky-waste programs to separate carpet. Most municipal solid-waste contracts treat carpet as bulky waste to be landfilled with everything else. A separate carpet drop-off, even at one transfer station, is a precondition for any future recovery pathway.

For renters and tenants, ask about flooring material at lease signing. Property managers replace carpet in rental units roughly every 5-7 years, generating the largest aggregate carpet waste stream in many cities. Tenant advocacy for flooring choice and for cleaning rather than replacing where possible reduces per-unit waste meaningfully.

The post One State Recycles 38% of Its Carpet. The Other 49 Recycle 9%. appeared first on Earth911.

On average, each American throws away about 81 pounds of clothing, shoes, and household textiles every year. That’s roughly a hamper full every month for each person. For a family of four, this adds up to over 320 pounds of textiles tossed or donated each year. Most people don’t realize how much they discard until they actually weigh it over a year.

The number comes from EPA’s most recent, 2018 sustainable-materials accounting, which puts U.S. post-consumer textile generation at roughly 17 million tons and the recovery rate at 14.7 percent. While the EPA has discontinued its reporting, ThredUp’s 2025 Resale Report and the Apparel Impact Institute updates suggest per-capita generation has continued rising. Most of what falls inside that 14.7 percent is downcycled into industrial wiping rags or insulation, not turned into new clothing.

What “donating” actually does

The mental model in most American closets is that the donation bin is the recycling bin. It isn’t. Goodwill, Salvation Army, and the secondhand chains sell what they can on the resale floor, typically only 10 to 30 percent of the clothing they accept as donations. The rest is sold by the pound to textile graders, who export the higher grades to wholesale markets in West Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central America, bale the remainder as wiping rags or insulation feedstock, and landfill the rest.

That export pipeline is under pressure. Ghana, Kenya, and Chile have moved to restrict or refuse low-grade used-clothing imports, citing the volume of unsellable fast-fashion synthetics arriving contaminated and culturally mismatched. The January 2025 GAO report on textile recovery flagged the offshore-disposal pathway as structurally fragile and quietly subsidized by U.S. consumers who treat donation as absolution.

The amount of clothing waste is closely tied to price. Since 1995, clothing prices in the U.S. have dropped by over 30 percent, even as other costs have gone up. This is mainly due to ultra-fast-fashion brands like Shein and Temu. Many clothes, especially those made from polyester-spandex blends, aren’t made to last, be repaired, or recycled. They’re often thrown out after just six wears. According to McKinsey’s State of Fashion report, the average piece of clothing is now worn only seven to ten times before being discarded, much less than in the past.

The household bill

The value of clothing can change a lot, so it’s harder to put an exact dollar amount on waste compared to food. Still, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says the average U.S. household spends about $1,900 a year on clothes. If 30 to 40 percent of those clothes are thrown out within two seasons, that means a household is tossing $570 to $760 worth of new clothing every year.

The environmental impact of clothing is even bigger before it reaches your closet. The UN Environment Programme says fashion is responsible for 2 to 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and 20 percent of industrial water pollution. Making just one cotton t-shirt uses about 2,700 liters of water, which is as much as one person drinks in two and a half years.

The policy lever finally arriving

For years, there were no rules holding clothing producers responsible for textile waste in the U.S. That changed with California’s SB 707, the Responsible Textile Recovery Act of 2024, which is the first law of its kind in the country. CalRecycle chose Landbell USA to run the program starting February 27, 2026. Brands selling clothes and household textiles in California will have to help pay for collection and processing, with requirements rolling out through 2030. Other states like New York, Massachusetts, and Washington are considering similar laws that would make clothing manufacturers cover the costs of fast fashion waste.

Fiber-to-fiber recycling — the missing technology piece — is moving, slowly. Circ, Syre, and Reju are at pilot or first-commercial scale. Renewcell, the most visible name in cellulosic recycling, filed for bankruptcy in early 2024 and has since been acquired and restarted as Circulose. Textile recycling technology is real, but the economics of the business still depend on virgin-fiber prices going higher, the development of a sorting infrastructure, and the kind of policy support SB 707 is now beginning to provide.

What You Can Do

At home and while shopping:

1. Focus on slowing down how often you buy new clothes, not just buying less. Choose better quality items and wear them for longer. If you double how long you wear each garment, you can cut its total emissions by about half.
2. Try to fix your clothes before replacing them. Local tailors, Repair Cafés, and repair programs from brands like Patagonia, Nudie Jeans, and Eileen Fisher can help you get more use out of what you already have.
3. Be honest when sorting your donations. Clean, up-to-date, and resaleable items should go to local thrift stores. Items that are stained or torn should go to textile-specific takeback bins at places like H&M or Madewell, where they can be properly processed.
4. Before putting anything in your curbside bin, use Earth911’s recycling search to find local textile drop-off locations by ZIP Code. Most curbside bins don’t accept clothing or textiles.

In your community:

1. Support textile extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws in your state. SB 707 is the example to follow, and the next few states to pass similar laws will help decide if this approach can grow.
2. Ask retailers to clearly label fiber content and recyclability. The EU will require digital product passports by 2027, and U.S. brands selling overseas will have to comply. Whether these labels appear in the U.S. depends on consumer demand.
3. Support and volunteer at local repair and reuse programs. Repair Cafés, Buy Nothing groups, and clothing swaps help reduce waste before it starts, which is the most effective way to make a difference.

The post Where Waste Comes From: Your Closet appeared first on Earth911.

In a converted 18th-century chapel on the grounds of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, a strange form creeps through openings in the architecture. One can imagine its clipper- and knife-footed tendrils scurrying across the floor as it spills from an upper aperture and even slithers around part of the building’s exterior. Its otherworldly genesis is at the hands of Nicola Turner, known for her monumental, contorted textile installations that often surge from structures and public spaces.

Turner’s solo exhibition, Time’s Scythe, comprises forms made of recycled wool and horsehair, which she hand-stitches inside of mesh to create the bulging, knotted forms. “This is Turner’s first large-scale installation to use pale wool and creates a different energy to her dark sculptures, moving away from their more melancholic character,” the gallery says.

Time’s Scythe continues through September 27 in Wakefield. If you go, check out LR Vandy’s provocative exhibition, Rise, which also continues into September. See more on Turner’s Instagram, and for more twisting, creature-like forms, might also enjoy the work of Kate MccGwire.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article A Giant Wool Form by Nicola Turner Heaves and Skitters Through an 18th-Century Chapel appeared first on Colossal.

The average American household uses about 150 pounds of glass containers each year, but more than two-thirds of that glass never gets recycled into new bottles. This isn’t because people aren’t trying. Glass is now the only common packaging material that costs recycling facilities more to process than they make from selling it, and the U.S. recycling system has been adapting to this problem for the past twenty years.

According to the EPA, the U.S. has recycled about 31 percent of its glass containers for the past ten years. In contrast, the European Union collected 80.8 percent of its glass containers in 2023. This gap isn’t because of how people act, but because of differences in infrastructure, policies, and the fact that glass is heavy, breakable, and not very profitable. As a result, glass no longer fits well in the single-stream recycling system most Americans use.

The math that broke glass recycling

Cullet, which is the industry term for crushed and sorted recycled glass, is a permanent material. It can be melted and reused over and over without losing quality. Adding 10 percent more cullet to a furnace reduces energy use by 2.5 to 3 percent and lowers CO₂ emissions by about 5 percent. If a furnace uses only cullet, it produces about 58 percent fewer emissions than making glass from raw materials like sand, soda ash, and limestone.

These numbers show that glass should be valuable to bottle makers. However, manufacturers want cullet that is color-sorted, clean, and ready for the furnace, which is rarely what comes out of single-stream recycling facilities.

A 2017 analysis by the Closed Loop Foundation found that single-stream glass costs U.S. recycling facilities $150 million each year in equipment damage, transportation, and disposal. On average, a facility loses about $35 for every ton of glass it handles. For example, a transfer station in Washington, D.C. spends about tens of thousands of dollars a year replacing screen baskets damaged by glass shards. When trucks unload, glass shards also get stuck in paper and cardboard, making those materials less valuable.

This is known as the negative-value problem. The glass itself isn’t worthless, because high-quality cullet can be sold. But the way glass is collected usually produces a dirty, color-mixed load, so it often ends up being used as road base, landfill cover when ground into sand-like consistency and laid over the day’s waste, or just thrown away.

How we built a system that loses money

The current U.S. glass recycling shortfall is largely the story of two infrastructure decisions made decades apart.

The first decision was moving to single-stream collection in the 1990s and 2000s. This change increased overall recycling rates but mixed glass with other materials. As a result, glass often arrived at recycling facilities already broken, contaminating other recyclables and damaging equipment designed for paper and plastic.

The second decision was to close glass-only drop-off programs as city budgets tightened. Without dedicated collection routes, like the ones used in Italy, Belgium, and Germany to recycle 90 percent of glass containers, American glass no longer had a clean way to be collected.

The exception is the 10 states with container deposit laws. These states, known for their bottle bills, recycle about 70 percent of beverage containers, which is more than twice the national average of 33 percent. Oregon’s deposit system achieved an 87 percent redemption rate in 2024, the highest in the country. Glass returned through deposit programs is typically clean, sorted, and unbroken — exactly what manufacturers want.

What does glass costs your household?

Consumers end up paying for glass twice. First, the cost of the bottle is included in the price of products like wine, beer, sauce, or seltzer. Second, people pay municipal recycling fees through property taxes, garbage bills, or both. These fees cover the average $ 62-per-ton landfill tipping fee in 2024, plus the extra cost of glass contamination that affects other recyclables.

The exact dollar figure varies wildly by region. New York City’s Department of Sanitation has estimated curbside recycling collection at $686 per ton, a number that includes labor, fuel, and equipment that reaches beyond what households see on their utility bills, but shows up in tax rates.

In states with bottle bills, the economics are different for households. A 5- or 10-cent deposit can be fully recovered, and if the home doesn’t recycle, others can generate income picking it up.

Glass that would have cost the city money instead becomes a small refund for the household and a clean material for manufacturers. This system covers the cost directly through fees for using glass, rather than spreading it across all taxpayers.

Glass emissions matter

Glass furnaces use a lot of energy compared to other packaging processes. Making 1 ton of container glass produces between 0.5 and 1.6 tons of CO₂, depending on the furnace’s efficiency and the amount of cullet used. Each ton of cullet used instead of raw materials saves about 0.67 tons of CO₂ and 1.2 tons of mined sand, soda ash, and limestone. soda ash, and limestone.

If you apply these numbers to the 6 million tons of glass containers that were landfilled in the U.S. in 2018—the most recent year for which the EPA provides data—the country misses out on about 4 million tons of avoided CO₂ emissions each year, plus more than 7 million tons of raw materials that could have been saved. This is a climate cost that the recycling rate alone cannot capture.

The Glass Packaging Institute and Boston Consulting Group have created a plan to raise the U.S. glass recycling rate to 50 percent by 2030. It focuses on expanding deposit programs, building dedicated glass processing facilities, and moving away from single-stream collection where possible. Reaching this goal would nearly double the current recycling rate without requiring people to change what they drink or how often they recycle.

What’s changing, and what isn’t

Seven states, including California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington, have passed extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws for packaging. These laws shift the cost of recycling from cities to the companies that sell the bottles. Oregon started enforcing its program in July 2025, and Colorado, Minnesota, and Maryland will phase in their programs by 2028.

EPR is the policy most likely to change the economics of glass recycling in the next decade. When producers pay recycling costs directly, they have to deal with contamination from single-stream recycling, not the recycling facility. This makes dedicated glass collection much more appealing. The European experience shows that this approach works, but it has not yet been tried on a large scale in the U.S.

What you can do

• Check if your state has a bottle bill. If it does, redeem your deposit for a clean recycling stream and a small refund. If not, look up your local recycling options using the Earth911 recycling search before putting glass in your curbside bin.
• If your area has glass-only drop-off sites, use them. Many cities offer free drop-off locations at transfer stations or grocery store parking lots. The glass collected from these sites is the type manufacturers prefer.
• Rinse your bottles instead of crushing them. Whole bottles are easier to sort than broken pieces. Take off metal lids and recycle them separately.
• Buy refillable bottles when possible. A refilled bottle does not use any cullet, raw materials, or the recycling system. Programs for returnable beer, milk, and water bottles are slowly becoming more common in the U.S.
• Support extended producer responsibility and bottle-bill laws in your state. Most glass that gets recycled in the U.S. today comes from the 10 states with deposit programs. Expanding these programs is the most effective policy change available.

The post Glass: Recycling’s Negative-Value Problem appeared first on Earth911.

24. That is the average number of electronic devices sitting in a typical American home right now. Phones in drawers, tablets behind the TV, chargers without their devices, and devices without their chargers. Most of those products are headed for a landfill or a shipping container, not a recycler.

Electronics are the fastest-growing solid waste stream on the planet, and U.S. households are an outsize engine. The UN’s Global E-waste Monitor 2024 found that global e-waste reached a record 62 million tons in 2022, which is up 82 percent since 2010, and is rising five times faster than electronics recycling capacity. Americans produce roughly 46 to 48 pounds of it per person per year. Most of those discarded devices contain materials worth real money and environmental harms worth understanding.

The 2022 e-waste pile contained an estimated $91 billion in recoverable metals, according to the United Nations, including roughly $19 billion in copper, $16 billion in iron, and $15 billion in gold. About $62 billion of that value was lost to landfills, incinerators, or unregulated dumping.

Translate that into household terms. The metals in a single discarded smartphone include small but meaningful quantities of gold, silver, palladium, copper, and cobalt. Multiply by the 151 million cell phones, 40 million computers, 20 million televisions, and 23 million small appliances Americans throw away each year, and the unrecovered value runs into the billions for U.S. households alone.

The materials don’t disappear; they just stop circulating. Mining companies extract more virgin gold and copper from the ground while millions of pounds of the same metals sit on shelves in junk rooms and lie fallow in landfills.

What’s Driving the Growth

The average U.S. smartphone replacement cycle has stretched to 3.64 years in 2024, according to Assurant; that’s up from under 3 years a decade ago, yet the underlying hardware can typically last 5 to 7 years with software support. That gap between when consumers upgrade and when the device actually fails is where most e-waste is born.

Behind the phones, a longer parade of devices is generating serious volume. Wearables, smart speakers, e-cigarettes, lithium-powered toys, and cheap rechargeable accessories now show up in municipal waste streams in quantities that did not exist a decade ago. The WHO documented more than 1,000 hazardous substances associated with informal e-waste recycling, including lead, mercury, and brominated flame retardants, all of which can leach from devices that are crushed or burned rather than processed properly.

What the U.S. Actually Recycles

The picture here is genuinely confusing, and reporting that pretends otherwise is wrong. The most-cited EPA estimate of consumer electronics recycling puts the U.S. rate at 38.5 percent, but that figure dates from 2018. More recent independent estimates put the actual U.S. rate closer to 15 percent, with global formal recycling at 22.3 percent in 2022. The gap between the two numbers reflects the difference between what enters a recycling program and what actually gets recovered as usable material.

The remainder follows three main paths. Some heads to U.S. landfills, where heavy metals contribute to leachate problems. Some is incinerated, releasing dioxins from PVC and other plastics. And roughly 90 percent of exported e-waste is processed in low- and middle-income countries, where informal recyclers — often including children — strip devices by hand or by burning. A systematic review in PubMed Central links e-waste exposure in children to reduced lung function, altered thyroid function, ADHD, and lower cognitive scores. None of that shows up on the product box when you buy it.

The Household Financial Picture

Households absorb the cost from two directions at once. They pay for new devices that replace working products, and they leave material value on the table when they discard what they own.

A reasonable estimate, using the per-capita value of unrecovered e-waste metals from the UN report and U.S. generation rates, puts the recoverable value sitting in the average American household’s old electronics in the range of several hundred dollars over a few years. That is metal the household paid for, embedded in devices the household paid for, and the household will not recover unless the device reaches a refiner that can extract it.

The cost on the other side — replacement spending — is easier to size at the industry level than the household level. The Consumer Technology Association puts U.S. consumer technology retail revenue at roughly $505 billion in 2024, which works out to nearly $3,900 per household when spread across the 131 million U.S. households tracked by the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey. Even allowing for wide variation across income tiers, much of that spending replaces devices that were repairable or still functional.

Right to Repair Is Starting to Bite

The most consequential policy shift on e-waste in the past two years has been the spread of right-to-repair legislation. As of mid-2025, eight states have passed right-to-repair laws covering consumer electronics: New York, California, Minnesota, Oregon, Colorado, Maine, Washington, and Massachusetts. Oregon’s law, which took effect January 1, 2025, became the first in the country to explicitly ban “parts pairing,” the practice of using software to disable replacement components installed by independent shops.

These laws do not immediately reduce e-waste, but they change the economics. When manufacturers must supply parts, tools, and documentation to independent repairers, the cost of fixing a phone or laptop drops. When repair is cheaper than replacement, more devices stay in service. The Repair Association tracks more than 40 active bills across at least 20 states in 2025.

Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for electronics covers 24 states, but there is substantial variation in how well-funded and enforced those programs are. A patchwork is still better than nothing, but the absence of a federal framework means a device thrown away in one state may be treated as toxic and a device thrown away in another may end up in a regular dumpster.

What You Can Do

The interventions here are tiered, with very different impacts depending on where you can act.

At home:

• Before replacing a device, check whether repair is feasible — battery swaps and screen replacements are the two most common smartphone failures and both are repairable.
• Sell or donate working electronics rather than storing them. The Earth911 recycling search tool provides local options by ZIP code.
• For batteries, including the lithium cells in earbuds, e-bikes, vapes, and power tools, use The Battery Network (formerly Call2Recycle), the North American battery stewardship program, which operates collection sites at most major retailers.
• For phones specifically, manufacturer trade-in programs (Apple, Samsung, Google) and carrier programs typically capture more material than dropping a phone in a generic recycling bin, because the devices are tested for reuse first.
• Buy refurbished when you can. Certified refurbished phones and laptops are typically 30 to 50 percent cheaper than new and have the same useful life.

In your community:

• If your state hasn’t passed a right-to-repair law, ask your legislators why. The model bill from the PIRG Right to Repair coalition is a good starting reference.
• Support EPR legislation that puts the cost of end-of-life management on manufacturers, not municipalities.
• Push back on devices that are designed against repair — glued-in batteries, paired parts, and service-only components — by buying brands that score well on iFixit’s repairability index.

Individual household action on e-waste matters, but it is not where the leverage lives. Changing product designs and recycling policy, both of which are moving slowly in the right direction, is the path to a more sustainable electronics industry. Your household choices buy time and recover value while the larger system catches up.

The post Electronics: The Fastest-Growing Waste Stream in Your Home appeared first on Earth911.

Pull the sheets back from the numbers and the American mattress starts to look less like a product and more like a disposal problem. The United States throws out an estimated 18.2 million mattresses a year — roughly 50,000 every day — and only about 19% of them are recycled. The rest, more than four out of five beds, are landfilled or incinerated.

A mattress is one of the largest, bulkiest, and most expensive things you own, and almost none of it has to be wasted. Recyclers can recover 80 to 95% of a mattress — steel, foam, fiber, and wood that become new products. Yet the default path for most beds is a hole in the ground, and that default costs the typical household twice: once to buy the bed, and again to get rid of it. Most mattresses are built to last seven to ten years, so a single household will buy and discard several over a lifetime. The bed itself is the obvious expense: a new queen mattress averages around $1,500, and even budget models start near $400.

The hidden cost shows up at the curb. Getting rid of an old mattress averages about $100 and runs from $40 to $200 or more depending on how you do it. Junk-hauling services typically charge $80 to $250. Municipal bulk pickup is often free but can mean a two- to eight-week wait, and many landfills tack on a $20 to $40 bulky-item fee. For a household replacing a bed every several years, disposal alone quietly adds up.

Why the landfill is the worst place for it

Mattresses are built to resist compression, which makes them miserable landfill tenants. Each one can take up as much as 23 cubic feet of space even after compacting, and their steel springs tangle and damage the heavy equipment that operators use to manage the waste. Multiply that by tens of thousands a day and mattresses become a stubborn drain on landfill capacity.

The waste is also material that holds real value. A typical mattress contains roughly 25 pounds of steel and 9 pounds of cotton, plus foam and wood. Across its programs, the Mattress Recycling Council reports keeping more than 555 million pounds of steel, foam, fiber, and wood out of landfills by recycling over 14 million mattresses. Buried beds throw all of that away.

A recycling system exists, but it’s uneven

Where you live largely decides whether recycling is even an option. Four states — California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Oregon, whose program began January 1, 2025 — run extended producer responsibility (EPR) programs. A small fee on every new mattress funds free drop-off through the industry’s Bye Bye Mattress program. The access is meaningful: in 2024, 98.4% of California residents lived within 15 miles of a collection site.

Once a mattress is dismantled, up to 75% of its materials become new products. The foam and fiber go into carpet padding, springs are melted down as scrap steel, and box-spring wood is chipped into mulch or biomass fuel. Outside the four EPR states, though, recycling depends on a patchwork of private facilities, and most households still pay to haul a bed away.

What you can do

• Recycle it where you can. In California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Oregon, drop-off is free through byebyemattress.com. Everywhere else, search by ZIP Code on Earth911’s recycling locator to find the nearest facility, if one is available.
• Donate a bed that still has life. Charities, shelters, and reuse organizations accept clean, structurally sound mattresses. Reuse beats recycling because it skips the dismantling step entirely.
• Extend the lifespan you already paid for. A protector, a supportive foundation, and regular rotation can push a quality mattress toward the long end of its seven-to-ten-year range, cutting both cost and waste.
• Ask the retailer about takeback before you buy. Many sellers will haul away your old mattress on delivery, sometimes routing it to a recycler. Confirm where it actually goes.
• Back producer-responsibility laws. EPR programs are the single biggest reason recycling is free and accessible in some states and not others. Their expansion is what moves the national recycling rate above 19%.

The post 18.2 Million Mattresses Disposed a Year, and Most of Them Get Buried 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.

The post 7 Retailers With Impressive Recycling Programs appeared first on Earth911.

Every kilogram of medical X-ray film holds 5 to 15 grams of silver — enough to make tossing those old films in the trash not just an environmental problem, but an outright waste of a recoverable precious metal. Add the fact that it’s also illegal to throw X-rays in the garbage in most jurisdictions, and the case for recycling them becomes urgent.

Millions of Americans still have film X-rays sitting in file folders, shoe boxes, or back-of-drawer oblivion. These relics from a pre-digital era of medical imaging need to be handled safely. Whether you’re a patient trying to clear out a closet or a smaller clinic still managing physical archives, understanding how X-ray film recycling works, why it matters, and who accepts it can help you make a responsible choice that’s good for the environment and, in some cases, your wallet.

What’s Inside an X-Ray Film

X-ray films are made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, the same material used in many beverage bottles, coated with an emulsion layer containing silver halide crystals. When the film is exposed to X-ray radiation, those silver halide crystals capture the image by converting to metallic silver to produce the dark-and-light diagnostic image your doctor reads.

That silver content is why X-ray film is worth recycling. A research paper in the Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering reports that medical X-ray films typically contain between 5 and 15 grams of silver per kilogram of film. That’s the highest silver concentration of any common photographic material and a meaningful quantity: at 2025 silver spot prices hovering around $30 to $35 per troy ounce, a 50-pound box of old hospital films can yield real financial value through silver recovery.

The plastic substrate, once the silver has been stripped out, is recyclable PET. Nothing in a properly recycled X-ray film needs to go to a landfill.

Why You Can’t Just Throw X-Rays Away

Federal and state regulations prohibit tossing X-ray films in the ordinary waste stream for two separate reasons.

First, silver is classified as a hazardous material in landfill environments. When films degrade in landfills, silver leaches into soil and groundwater, where it can harm aquatic ecosystems and contaminate drinking water supplies. The EPA’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act governs how silver-bearing waste must be handled. X-ray films older than 50 years may be made from nitrocellulose, a highly flammable material that requires special EPA-regulated transport and disposal handling.

Second, X-ray films are protected health information (PHI) under HIPAA and its successor, the HITECH Act. That means they cannot simply be thrown out, shredded in a standard office shredder, or otherwise disposed of without ensuring the images and any associated patient data are rendered permanently unreadable. The responsibility for proper disposal falls on whoever has the films, the originating medical facility, or, in some states, the patient themselves.

How X-Ray Film Is Recycled

The modern silver recovery process is efficient and well-established. According to Radiopaedia, the current standard method — called the “wash” process — recovers more than 99.9% of the silver in the film.

The process typically unfolds in four stages:

• Collection and sorting. Films are collected, weighed, and assessed. Films received in paper patient jackets have those jackets separated first. The paper goes to standard recycling centers, and the film is handled separately.
• Shredding and chemical wash. The film is shredded and immersed in a chemical bath of cyanide solution, though some facilities now use alternative reagents to dissolve the silver emulsion from the plastic base.
• Electrolytic silver recovery. Silver is separated from the solution by electrolysis, producing refined silver that can be cast into bars or coins and returned to the industrial silver market.
• PET plastic recycling. The now-clear plastic substrate is baled and sent to PET recyclers for reuse in manufacturing.

HIPAA-compliant recyclers also provide a Certificate of Destruction documenting that all protected health information on the films has been permanently and irrecoverably destroyed, which is essential for any medical facility’s compliance records.

Most New X-Rays Are Already Digital But Film Persists

The vast majority of U.S. hospitals and large imaging centers have completed the transition to digital radiography, which eliminates film entirely. Digital systems transmit images directly to secure electronic health records, reducing cost, storage burden, and chemical waste.

However, film-based imaging persists in several settings, such as some smaller clinics, rural practices, dental offices, veterinary practices, and industrial non-destructive testing (NDT) applications, which continue to use conventional film. If you’re receiving imaging at a smaller or independent practice, it’s worth asking directly: “Do you use digital imaging, or do you still produce physical film?” If the answer is film, follow up with: “What is your policy for recycling X-rays when they’re no longer needed for my care?”

A responsible provider should have a documented recycling process in place. Many do so because the silver recovery value incentivizes facilities to partner with certified recyclers rather than pay for disposal.

Recycling Programs: Who Accepts X-Ray Film

The X-ray recycling landscape is largely served by specialized national companies rather than municipal programs. Most curbside and drop-off programs do not accept X-ray film. Here are reputable options for both medical facilities and individuals.

Provider	Key Details
X-Ray Film Recyclers	Free nationwide pickup; pays by weight; HIPAA-compliant; Certificate of Destruction; serves hospitals, clinics, dental offices, vets. Individuals should contact for small-quantity options.
B.W. Recycling / XRayFilmsDisposal.com	Free pickup nationwide (minimum weights vary by state; typically 50 lbs out of jackets). Pays by weight based on silver market. HIPAA-compliant; EPA-registered. Serves facilities; individuals may ship.
Protec Recycling	Based in Homewood, Alabama; accepts shipments nationwide; one-time purges or recurring service; issues Certificate of Destruction. Focuses on medical and industrial film.
AMS Store and Shred	NAID AAA-certified; provides silver rebate; nationwide service; secure on-site collection and destruction. Targets healthcare facilities and industrial clients.
Pyromet	NAID AAA-certified chemical film wash; offers “Metal on Account” option (sell silver at a future date); accepts medical, industrial, litho, and microfilm.
CRE (Commodity Resource & Environmental)	First NAID-certified silver refiner in the world. Pays “spot” silver price; nationwide pickup available for large quantities (truckload); ships accepted. Medical focus.
Electronic Recycling Guys	Serves all 50 states; accepts medical, dental, veterinary, and industrial film; free pickup for qualifying volumes; Certificate of Destruction provided.

If you’re a patient with a few old X-rays at home from a broken bone, a dental procedure, or years of routine imaging, the options are more limited than for medical facilities, but they exist.

Most of the major X-ray recycling companies set minimum weight thresholds for free pickup (often 30 to 50 pounds without paper jackets). A typical individual patient’s collection of personal X-rays won’t meet that threshold, so your options include:

• Mail-in services. Many recyclers, including B.W. Recycling/XRayFilmsDisposal.com and X-Ray Films Recycling, accept small-quantity mail-in shipments. You’ll typically pay postage; the recycler may pay you a small amount or simply provide free recycling in return. Contact the provider first to confirm their current individual consumer process.
• Check local hazardous waste events. Some municipal household hazardous waste (HHW) events accept medical imaging film. Check with your county or city’s waste management program. Call ahead to confirm, as not all HHW programs accept X-ray film, and policies vary.
• Return to your provider. Some medical facilities will accept old films for recycling as a patient service. Ask your clinic, hospital, or specialist’s office directly.
• Contact your original imaging center. Many imaging centers retain legal ownership of films they produce, and some will accept returned films for recycling at no cost to the patient. Policies vary, and a call is often worth the time.

Watch for a common source of confusion: HIPAA’s destruction requirements apply to covered entities, such as healthcare providers and insurers, and their business associates, but not typically to individual patients who receive copies of their own records. As a patient, you are not obligated to follow HIPAA disposal procedures for your own X-rays. That said, ensuring the secure destruction of your imaging records remains sound personal data hygiene.

What You Can Do

• Don’t throw X-rays in the trash or recycling bin. They are not accepted in municipal recycling programs and may be illegal to landfill in your state.
• Ask about digital imaging before your next appointment. Confirm whether your provider uses digital or film-based imaging, and ask about their film recycling policy if film is still in use.
• Search for a recycler using Earth911. earth911.com/recycling-search can help locate the few local options for X-ray film in the United States.
• If you’re a patient with personal X-rays, contact a national recycler directly. Most will advise on mail-in options for small quantities. Don’t let confusion leave films sitting in a drawer indefinitely.
• If your facility still uses film, set up a certified recycling program. The silver recovery value offsets the cost of a certified pickup, and a HIPAA-compliant Certificate of Destruction protects your organization from liability.

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