The tendency of government to lay the blame for all our social and environmental problems at the feet of corporate America has continued with the California Attorney General’s civil suit against Exxon for allegedly misleading the public about the recyclability of plastics—such as those which the oil giant’s products help to manufacture. State Attorney General Rob Bonta asserts that Exxon has “falsely promoted” the practicality of plastic recycling. 

California is not wrong to catch up to the fact that most plastic bottles which we place in those blue recycling bins actually wind up in landfills.  It could add that municipalities across the country who have bought into the decades-long recycling mandate have burdened themselves with the cost of separate truck routes for all those water bottles.

But the Golden State might better be suing the Biden Administration Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—which has done more than any of its predecessors to urge localities to do what California now finds to be a legal nuisance. In 2020, with some fanfare, the Biden EPA announced a new “national recycling goal”—to “increase the U.S. recycling rate to 50 percent by 2030.” This was guidance from Washington—not Exxon. No mention from the EPA that plastic might not be included—only that we should “prevent trash and micro/nanoplastics from entering waterways and remove escaped trash from the environment.”

Nothing from federal environmental authorities, in other words, that would push local governments to stop separating plastics at the curbside. In reality, the nation has long been engaged—and urged to continue—“wishcycling” of much of our trash, which, until China closed its landfills in 2017, was simply shipped overseas and dumped. 

If the California litigation does anything positive, it will call attention to how misguided recycling policy has been for decades—and how it should be revised. As I’ve written for AEI, there is little to be feared from clean landfills. At the same time, we are foolishly sending them valuable materials which should be the focus of our recycling efforts, including the platinum, gold, silver, and rare earth minerals that go into the manufacture of our ubiquitous electronic devices:

A February 2020 analysis of the e-waste stream found 56 elements in electronic devices routinely sent to dumps. These include “14 rare earth elements, six platinum group metals, 20 critical metals, and 16 other elements, including some precious metals.” The study also found that 1 kilogram of mixed e-waste—hard drives, cell phones, and computers separated from the general municipal waste stream—can be worth $168. The resources in a similar amount of hard drives are valued—again, if isolated for recovery—at $454.

All that plastic and paper that we labor to separate—virtually worthless. The EPA hints at the problem, in vague but telling terms:

The U.S. MSW [municipal solid waste] recycling system currently faces a number of challenges, including confusion about what materials can be recycled, recycling infrastructure that has not kept pace with today’s diverse and changing waste stream, reduced markets for recycled materials, and varying methodologies to measure recycling system performance.

In other words, let’s start focusing on trying to recycle materials that have value—rather than suing a major corporation that has been providing the raw material for a perfectly legal product and sending the same message as the federal government: recycle it.

It’s time to rethink what municipalities collect as what I like to call a “trash mine” of electronic waste which would offer beleaguered municipalities a revenue lifeline to balance both environmental and budgetary concerns. One surprising way to salvage these valuable materials has been explored not by the EPA but the Department of Energy, which has suggested, surprisingly, that a new generation of incinerators could burn our trash—but capture the resulting ash and isolate the valuable raw materials.

The broad point is this: Our trash recycling system is broken but there are practical ways to fix it. That’s where California—and states and cities across the country—should be focusing their attention, not on looking for a corporate villain to blame.

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