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The Evolution of Bottle Cap Recycling

Products change over time, even if you have a set collection and processing system that works well. Other than car batteries, plastic recycling started in earnest with PET bottles. PET had 3-4 times the value of PE and PP so it was the target material. The first PET bottle was created in 1973 and 2-liter […]

Waste Collection, Recycling and Disposal: Where’s the Money?

Over the last 20 years, success and failure in recycling have often gone hand in hand. There’s money to be made, but loss is interwoven liberally throughout the years. Chemical recyclers, in particular, have faced tough challenges. Brightmark declared bankruptcy, only for its parent company to buy the assets at auction for $14 million—a creative […]

Eco-Modulation 101

If you’ve been following Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) law implementation in Oregon, you might’ve heard the term “eco-modulation” bandied about quite a bit. If you haven’t been, it’s still an important term to know and we recommend getting up-to-speed on EPR laws ASAP. With Colorado, California, and Minnesota soon to follow, it’s essential to understand […]

Lather, Rinse, Repeat: Lessons from Hospitality

Have you ever gotten in a hotel shower and have no idea what was in each bottle? What started as a casual observation turned into a lengthy evaluation over the last several years. I started paying attention when hotels made the move from small individual bottles for everything to large refillable containers suspended on the […]

End Markets: How Government Intervention Could Address Market Failures in the

At a recent industry conference, Steve Alexander, CEO of the Association of Plastic Recyclers, highlighted a critical challenge facing the recycling sector: the lack of stable, reliable end markets for recycled materials. This issue threatens the viability of recycling infrastructure and undermines progress toward circular economy goals. In the absence of strong market demand, recyclers […]

Global Leadership Through Recycling: Why the U.S. Should Back a Plastics Treaty

The recent failure of the U.N. to reach consensus on a global plastics treaty revealed a stark divide: while over 175 nations participated, only a handful—including the United States, Bahrain, China, Cuba, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Russia—opposed limits on plastic production. This alignment with other petro-states and major virgin plastic producers is unsurprising, but […]

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