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Some recyclables-notably, aluminum cans-continue to have a relatively high market value. These costs include the personnel and equipment for separate additional refuse collection (or payment to a contractor to provide the service), as well as the cost of paying firms to accept recyclables, now that they no longer can be profitably resold. Those city departments responsible for trash pickup now incur significant costs, over and above what they would have to pay in the absence of recycling. Meanwhile, the economics of municipal recycling has been turned upside down. It remains true that recyclable materials may be reused-but there is no assurance that this will happen, especially for plastics.

Yet, despite their reputation, landfills-once infamous for leaking into groundwater-have become federally regulated and are far more environmentally safe. Since then, newspapers and other materials that municipal sanitation departments (or private firms) had picked up from city residents, who had dutifully sorted the materials and placed them in blue boxes, have increasingly piled up in warehouses or have been sent to landfills. As a result, the market for recyclables collapsed, and imports from the U.S. When Operation National Sword took effect in 2018, China insisted that it would accept only the noncontaminated recyclables that its manufacturers could use. As a result, much of the garbage that China imported was not recycled and ended up in landfills or incinerated. Pizza-box cardboard, for instance, is frequently contaminated by food residue, and plastic by dirty labels. recyclables in 2017, announced a new policy, Operation National Sword, under which it would no longer permit the import of what it called “foreign trash.” The government stopped taking in other nations’ garbage partly because much of the material was not recyclable, and this was partly because of contamination. China, which was importing several billion dollars’ worth of U.S. This apparent win-win situation has changed dramatically. Even in periods of slack demand, the cost to dispose of recyclables was lower than that of mixed garbage-allowing cities to reap an economic benefit by paying less to get rid of some of their trash. The materials would be reprocessed and used as newsprint, bottles, or cans, while the markets for such materials would make it possible to cover the costs of collection and reprocessing, or even to realize income. Recycling has long been considered environmentally and financially beneficial. Every major American city provides this service. That service has been augmented, over the past four decades, by the collection of recyclables-typically paper, glass, metals, and plastic. All Rights Reserved.Garbage pickup is one of the core responsibilities and functions of many local governments. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices © S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2019 and/or its affiliates. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC.

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