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Perceptions and realities of recycling vary widely from place to place

Most Americans have access to some sort of recycling program. However, the rules, practices and community norms around recycling vary considerably from place to place, contributing to dramatically different local recycling levels. People who live in places where social norms strongly encourage recycling are more likely to be aware of recycling rules, say they have more options for recycling, and see more of the waste they generate being recycled rather than landfilled, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

The survey, part of a study covering issues involving climate change, energy and the environment , found that about three-in-ten Americans (28%) say their local community’s social norms strongly encourage recycling and re-use. About a fifth (22%) say most people in their communities don’t really encourage recycling; the remaining half live in places where, they say, norms around recycling are somewhere in the middle.

The study comes as U.S. recycling rates, after rising for decades, have plateaued. The Environmental Protection Agency says that in 2013, the most recent year for which it has data, Americans recycled or composted 1.51 pounds of waste per day, a figure that’s changed little since 2006. On the other hand, Americans are doing better at creating less trash in the first place: Per-capita waste generation has fallen from 4.7 pounds per person per day in 2006 to 4.4 pounds in 2013, and total municipal solid waste generation fell by 3 million tons.

A recent study conducted for the Sustainable Packaging Coalition , an industry group, estimated that 94% of the U.S. population has some type of recycling program available to them: About 30% have curbside collection only, 43% have both curbside service and drop-off centers and 21% have drop-off programs only. (This generally aligns with findings from the EPA, which has estimated that in 2011, there were more than 9,800 curbside recycling programs throughout the U.S., covering more than 70% of the population.)

Curbside collection is more common in larger cities and towns: 93% of the communities in the SPC study with populations greater than 125,000 provided single-family curbside recycling, as opposed to 65% of communities with populations below 50,000. (The Pew Research Center survey, interestingly, found a similar pattern but with lower rates: About seven-in-ten people living in urban and suburban communities said they had curbside recycling, compared with just four-in-ten rural residents, or 40%.)

But just because recycling programs exist doesn’t mean everyone with access to them actually recycles. According to the EPA, only 34.3% of the 254.1 million tons of municipal solid waste generated in 2013 was recovered through recycling or composting; the overall recovery rate has actually slipped a bit since peaking at 34.7% in 2011. (“Municipal solid waste” is the term of art for what most of us think of as trash; it excludes construction and demolition debris, wastewater treatment sludges, and non-hazardous industrial wastes. “Recovery” includes recycling and composting, but not burning waste to produce energy.)

Other researchers using different methodologies have come up with higher waste-generation estimates and lower recovery rates. For example, a new report from the Environmental Research & Education Foundation  estimates U.S. municipal solid waste generation in 2013 at 347 million tons, with 27% of it being recycled or composted. Columbia University’s Earth Engineering Center , using a broader definition of municipal solid waste than the EPA, surveyed state and local waste management agencies and came up with an estimate of 389 million tons generated in 2011, with 29% recycled or composted.

Using data from the Columbia study, we calculated that California (53.4%), Maine (51.5%) and Washington state (50.1%) had the highest recovery rates for municipal solid waste in the nation in 2011; Oklahoma (3.7%), Alaska (4.5%) and Mississippi (4.8%) had the lowest.

Looking beyond these overall recovery rates, local recycling programs vary considerably in which materials they accept and the degree to which residents must separate different materials. The Pew Research Center survey found that 59% of the public believes that “most types of items” can be recycled in their community; another 26% characterize their options as “some,” and 13% say only a few types of items can be recycled where they live. And the people who live in places that strongly encourage recycling also are more likely to say that most types of items can be recycled there.

But the perception that communities recycle “most types of items” obscures the markedly different rates at which various types of waste actually are recycled or composted. According to our analysis of the EPA data, 99% of lead-acid batteries (the sort found in cars and trucks), 88.5% of corrugated cardboard boxes, and 67% of newspapers, directories and the like were recycled as of 2013. On the other hand, only 28.2% of high-density polyethylene containers (such as milk jugs) were recycled, as were 13.5% of plastic bags and wraps and only 6.2% of small appliances. Three-fifths (60.2%) of yard trimmings were composted, but just 5% of food waste was.

One category of solid waste that’s grown rapidly, in both quantity generated and amount recycled, is consumer electronics – TVs, computer equipment, phones, DVD players and the like. According to the EPA report , 40.4% of the 3.1 million tons of consumer electronics that entered the wastestream in 2013 were recycled, up from 30.6% in 2012.

About half (48%) of adults in the Pew Research Center survey say their community has services for recycling electronic devices, though about a third (34%) say they aren’t sure. People living in places that strongly encourage recycling in general are much more likely to say that electronics are recycled in their local areas most or some of the time, compared with people who live in communities that “do not really encourage” recycling (62% versus 15%).

A challenge for many community-based recycling programs, especially in recent years, is that they’re losing money. Recycling, at root, is a commodity business, and lower prices for wood pulp, aluminum, oil (out of which plastics are made) and other feedstock commodities are pushing many recyclers into the red . That, in turn, has forced localities to pay recycling companies to accept their collected bottles, cans and paper, when just a few years ago the recyclers paid them.

Advocates say there are other important considerations in favor of recycling – prime among them that making products with recycled materials rather than virgin stock uses less energy and thus creates fewer greenhouse-gas emissions. The EPA estimates that the 87.2 million tons of materials recycled or composted in 2013 reduced greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of more than 186 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. However, critics point out that almost 80% of those greenhouse-gas benefits come from paper and paperboard recycling, and most of the remainer comes from recycling steel, aluminum and other metals.

Note: The topline for the Pew Research Center survey is available here (PDF) , and the methodology is here .

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Drew DeSilver is a senior writer at Pew Research Center .

Majority of Americans support more nuclear power in the country

Americans’ extreme weather policy views and personal experiences, u.s. adults under 30 have different foreign policy priorities than older adults, about 3 in 10 americans would seriously consider buying an electric vehicle, how americans view national, local and personal energy choices, most popular.

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• Published: 24 July 2023

Recycling bias and reduction neglect

• Michaela J. Barnett   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1901-2605 1 ,
• Patrick I. Hancock   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3101-1688 1 ,
• Leidy E. Klotz 1 &
• Shahzeen Z. Attari   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0006-0818-6091 2  

Nature Sustainability volume  6 ,  pages 1418–1425 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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Waste generation and mismanagement are polluting the planet at accelerating and unsustainable rates. Reducing waste generation is far more sustainable than managing waste after it has been created, which is why ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ is ordered the way it is, with reduce first and recycling as a last resort. However, our research finds strong evidence for a recycling bias and reduction neglect. Across two surveys ( N Total  = 1,321), most participants perceived recycling as the most sustainable action to manage waste. This error decreased when different waste destinations were emphasized and when choice options were reduced. When asked in study 2 ( N  = 473), 53.9% of participants recognized that the product design stage offered the greatest potential for mitigating waste and its impacts. However, participants only felt empowered to enact change via their consumption (72.9%) and disposal choices (23.3%). For consumers and producers alike, policies and interventions should motivate source reduction and reuse, which could help correct the misplaced preference for recycling.

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Acknowledgements

This work is funded by the Convergent Behavioral Science Initiative at the University of Virginia and by Indiana University’s Prepared for Environmental Change Grand Challenge initiative (S.Z.A.). We thank members of the Convergent Behavioral Science Initiative and the Attari Lab at Indiana University Bloomington for pretesting surveys and offering feedback, the Behavioral Research at Darden Lab for their help in pretesting and D. Miniard for her assistance.

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Department of Engineering Systems and Environment, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

Michaela J. Barnett, Patrick I. Hancock & Leidy E. Klotz

O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA

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M.J.B., P.I.H. and S.Z.A. designed the research with support from L.E.K. M.J.B. and P.I.H. analysed the data with support from S.Z.A. M.J.B., P.I.H., L.E.K. and S.Z.A. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Michaela J. Barnett .

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The lead author owns a zero-waste refillery. All other authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Sustainabilit y thanks Grant Donnelly, Katherine Lacasse and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary information.

Supplementary Tables 1–4, additional analysis and survey text.

Reporting Summary

Source data, source data table 1.

Open-ended survey data response with response categorical codesheets.

Source Data Fig. 1

Participant numerical ranking of the waste management hierarchy and 3Rs in order of best to worst for the environment.

Source Data Fig. 2

Numerical data for participant waste-sorting task and accompanying codesheet.

Source Data Fig. 3

Numerical data for participant selection of the most impactful stages and accompanying codesheet.

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Barnett, M.J., Hancock, P.I., Klotz, L.E. et al. Recycling bias and reduction neglect. Nat Sustain 6 , 1418–1425 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01185-7

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Received : 14 November 2022

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Published : 24 July 2023

Issue Date : November 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01185-7

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