40.00% - We built curbside recycling because it made people feel good — when China stopped buying contaminated recyclables in 2018, most went straight to landfill. The virtue signal was real; the environmental impact was not.
35.00% - Accepting glass, wet cardboard, and mixed plastics together guarantees contamination that renders the whole batch landfill-bound — these programs are structured to fail.
25.00% - Modern engineered landfills have geomembrane liners, leachate collection, and methane capture — they're not the open dumps from 1965, and the narrative needs to catch up.
Municipal recycling programs typically lose money to operate.
55.00% - Reducing waste at the source beats sorting contaminated mixed streams after the fact — recycling manages the symptom, source reduction treats the disease.
45.00% - Incineration with energy recovery beats landfill on greenhouse gases, land use, and methane — landfill methane is 25x more potent than CO2, and waste-to-energy is the answer we keep ignoring.
42.11% - We built curbside recycling because it made people feel good — when China stopped buying contaminated recyclables in 2018, most went straight to landfill. The virtue signal was real; the environmental impact was not.
36.84% - Accepting glass, wet cardboard, and mixed plastics together guarantees contamination that renders the whole batch landfill-bound — these programs are structured to fail.
21.05% - Reducing waste at the source beats sorting contaminated mixed streams after the fact — recycling manages the symptom, source reduction treats the disease.
100.00% - Municipal recycling programs typically lose money to operate.
0.00% - Municipal recycling programs typically lose money.
50.00% - Recycling
