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December 3, 2019 01:00 pm

The 'Amazon Effect' Is Flooding a Struggling Recycling System With Cardboard

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The rise in curbside cardboard waste coming from packaging is "the Amazon effect," says David Biderman, the executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America, an industry group. It peaks around the holidays -- particularly as online shopping has only gotten more popular. Last year, Cyber Monday was the biggest shopping day for Amazon in the history of the company. The trend extends beyond the holidays: U.S. Postal Service deliveries have doubled to 6.2 billion in 2018, from 3.1 billion in 2009. As Americans have gotten more enthusiastic about online shopping, China -- which once welcomed almost half the world's recyclables -- has gotten more stringent about what it will accept. Starting in January 2018, China stopped accepting shipments of cardboard that are contaminated with more than 0.5 percent of other materials. All those packages, along with the stricter rules on recycling, mean more cardboard in the trash -- especially during the holiday shopping season. Republic Services, a US waste hauler that operates in 42 states, expects each household to dispose of 25 percent more trash, or about 1,000 extra pounds, between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day. But thanks to China's new policies, there will be less money to be made recycling. "To use the word bluntly: that's a crisis, an economic crisis in the viability of recycling in the U.S.," Richard Coupland, vice president of municipal sales at Republic Services, tells The Verge. Republic Services has seen about a 5 percent increase in the overall volume of cardboard it has picked up and resold for recycling over roughly the past seven years. But some locations have seen more dramatic increases. Coupland says that about 25 to 30 percent of the materials picked up by a recycling truck are too contaminated to go anywhere but a landfill or incinerator. Meanwhile, there's been a more than 50 percent decline in the price of recovered cardboard in the U.S. since China's decision. "Coupland believes there's actually been as much as an 80 to 100 percent devaluation in some markets," reports The Verge. "That's a big reason why cities across the country are scaling back or completely dumping their recycling programs."

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