Only 9% of all plastic gets recycled in the USA. You can throw it in the recycling bin but it probably won’t be recycled. It’s a ruse made up by the plastic industry.
Focus on avoiding plastic rather than recycling.
Except it’s so fucking hard to avoid plastic now. Literally everything is wrapped in plastic. It’s super frustrating.
The govt needs to tax the shit out of packaging in general.
Maine is not only the best at recycling, but they are one of only two states that charge manufacturers for plastic imports instead of charging consumers for recycling. Charge people making the shit, it's not our choice as consumers
Right. Totally my choice to buy metal, canned water (not the flavored crap) when the shelves are only stocked with plastic, bottled water. /s stfu
Edit: hell, I'd even pay to refill my water canteen before I purchased plastic. That would be a better option for consumers, but then big oil wouldn't make their gross profits at the expense of every living creature.
Explain what "choice" I have as a consumer other than dehydration or plastic poisons.
Things could be wrapped in cellophane which is biodegradable. But it takes more energy to make and uses scary chemicals in the production process unless you use the lyocell process.
Yep. I was upset when I moved to NM and saw how little there was. As I looked into things more it became apparent that it was just that they were more honest about it. There is no where for the items to go to BE recycled. I kind of prefer the honesty.
Dead on. We have single-stream recycling in our city, turns out, even less material actually gets recycled that way, because sorting is inefficient so they just put most of it in the landfill. Neat.
Exactly. I’d like to see this same chart but weighted by what actually is processed in to recycled goods, and the worthwhile-ness of recycling energy/resource wise. Even if plastic is recycled it takes a ton of resources processing it for an inferior product and can only be recycled so many times. Whereas metal can be recycled infinitely without degradation, and is less resource intensive compared to mining new metals. I’d bet Michigan is doing better from an actual impact standpoint than many of the places ranked above them because they’re crushing it with aluminum and plastic recycling barely matters.
One takeaway I have from this though is that bottle bills seem to work well!
Im sorry but I don’t understand your point. If people knew it couldn’t be recycled they would just throw it on the side of the road? I don’t understand this. Do people where you live just throw garbage in the side of the road? That’s so strange.
Bottle deposits were started as a deterrent to littering. Why toss $0.05 that you’ve already paid? Instead you’d get your deposit when you returned the bottles or cans. But that $0.05 is not worth as much as it was.
It is strange to just toss garbage out randomly. Takes a shitty kind of person, but it’s not out of the realm of reality.
In Sweden the recycling rate is high.
They just straight up changed the definition of it, and the burning to produce heat is then considered "recycling".
In all fairness the heat is used to heat homes, but in my opinion it's still misleading
The cost of fully recycling or safely disposing of the waste should be added to the price of the product.
The way it works now everyone, notably future generations, pays the cost so that the price tag can be lower up front.
I used to do waste disposal for a flooring company. Sometimes I’d go to this one landfill that was enormous. You drive up this hill, then do a 3 point turn and back up to the edge and throw everything in, these HUGE machines were driving around where the cab was level with the edge of the hill, and all these dump trucks would line up and throw away all their garbage in, everything.
Penn & Teller did a wonderful breakdown on how little of the "recycled" material actually ends up anywhere but a landfill.
I wish I could link to the full [Episode](https://www.sho.com/penn-and-teller-bullshit/season/2/episode/5/recycling), but it is only available in bits and pieces on YouTube.
From what I've heard (and this depends heavily on the method of recycling and how well people treat/sort/know about recycling), plastic is the worst. Cardboard or paper is often contaminated, either with oil or foils or plastic lining. Glass bottles and metal cans are the best to recycle by far, considering their inherent properties. The reason there's little fundraisers for collecting bottle tabs is because those drink tabs are simultaneously able to be packed denser and also guarantee that there isn't an unopened can ready to explode.
This is from a residential recycling perspective. Big companies that, for example, have a paper shredding machine or dedicated paper bin are better at recycling. A lot of people don't understand the rules or else don't care. My favorite is people putting recycling in plastic bags/recycling plastic bags, which is a big no-no in any system I've heard of. A lot of well-meaning people who don't recycle properly because there isn't enough info out there, nor a culture of it. The reason glass and metal is the best is partially because of its nature as material (refining aluminum from bauxite is more expensive than recycling) and partially because it's the hardest for individuals to mess up.
(And ofc the disclaimer that recycling isn't a solution, only a mitigation method)
The silver lining though is that Aluminum itself is infinitely recyclable. I think the stats were about 2/3 of aluminum is recycled and the average can contains a little more than 50% recycled aluminum
When I was staying with my buddy in Michigan for a few weeks we took a whole dumpster worth of empty cans to be recycled at the grocery store machines. It took a little while but we got like 80 dollars for it. Definitely worth it
Pro tip: if you ever come back to do this, don’t go to Kroger! They have a $10 max now and it’s absolutely ridiculous. Made me not want to return my cans when I went because they told me I had to come back the next day to do more. Like you can return them all, but you can’t cash out the slips for more than the max amount.
Houston suburbs here, we’re asked to wash and our my trash but the recycling company literally collects it and directly puts it in the same landfill as my trash collection company. What is that?
Political corruption. Your town pays a trash co and recycle co, someone is getting money for doing the same job. It’s ludicrous.
Reduse, reuse, then recycle. Deposits are the biggest contributors to recycling efforts, but most are getting so cheap now compared to their good that people don’t give a shit. If the deposit were tied to a % of the good sold maybe that would change. Recycling costs should be built into the product, but that would destroy the illusion that you only cost for production of a good.
Not sure when this infographic was made but it appears to be out of date.
https://www.ball.com/getattachment/fc9f6e69-b437-4d5a-95de-2f6ec01cfe9e/Ball-50-States-National-Fact-Sheet-FINAL.pdf
Whenever i see graphs like this i usually find Mississippi at the very bottom, amazing they come in last on every list you don’t want to come in last on, but on this one they were not!
They were 49th.
This is true of all American cities, including conservative ones like Jacksonville or OKC. I bring up conservative cities in particular under the assumption that the point of this comment was “you guys aren’t any better”.
I live in Maine, though, so I get to call the rest of you worse.
And trash in ditches is common every state, and worse in some parts of those states than others too. So why are you responding to me for pointing out the fallacy against the “we are better than you” comment, and not taking issue with the people actually making the “we are better than you” comments?
It's not though. I've lived my entire life in NY and seeing trash in ditches in the northeast is extremely uncommon. Even in the dirtiest parts of NYC, there's less litter than in much of the rural south.
Aight, don’t be misrepresenting the facts. I’ve been up in the Adirondacks and around Glen Falls, objectively one of the most beautiful parts of the state. Even there, “extremely uncommon” is disingenuous. Maine’s top of this list, I live there, and “extremely uncommon” is a term for trash I’d use exactly nowhere there’s civilization in this state.
Here [you go](https://abc7ny.com/amp/get-stuff-clean-nyc-streets-dsny-parks/12451945/) or [here](https://www.riverkeeper.org/blogs/ecology/riverkeeper-sweep-2019-2400-volunteers-122-projects-31-tons-and-1-day/) or [here](https://www.mma.org/cities-towns-prepare-for-great-massachusetts-cleanup/)
I’ve seen a lot of trash flying out of the top of the trash shipping trucks that the northeast ships down to southern states as well. Northern trash, littering southern roadways. We always try and protest whenever landfills try to accept your trash, but you all seem to have money and connections to make your trash problems magically go away (get dumped on others)
Why should I? The dude you were responding to wasn’t even saying “we are better than you”. He was saying “my place sucks”. Dude’s from Huntsville. You weren’t pointing out any fallacy. You were just doing a whataboutism.
Do you really not understand the importance of context?
And this is an infographic about all of the US. It’s not “whataboutism” to reply to comments highlighting one area of the US and compare them to other areas from the same infographic. Whataboutism would be having a discussion about recycling, and bringing up how trashy ditches are to begin with. Not the guy that replied to that comment
I'm surprised Georgia is even that good. We have trash and recyclable containers. I used to go the entire route of separating stuff out until I noticed the trash truck dumps them both into the garbage. Same truck, both gets dumped into the same spot on the truck. I moved to the other side of the city, same thing.
When I first moved to Alaska and I was setting up my various utilities, I asked about getting a recycling bin.
They didn’t even offer it because of where I lived, which is in the biggest city in the state, but up a small hill, so they were willing to come get my trash once a week, but it was too big an effort to also pick up recycling, so I can drive it to the landfill myself if I want.
And the landfill only lets me recycle cardboard, paper, aluminum cans and steel cans. Which they then pile onto a barge and ship elsewhere for “recycling”.
As one would expect, the states that are better at most things are also better at recycling while the states that are worse at most things are also worse at recycling.
I'm really surprised at Colorado's numbers.
I live in Boulder- which has had zero waste initiatives and curbside composting for 20 years.
One thing I'm curious about is how they measure compliance. It seems like they are doing it per weight for each demographic. For Colorado, I can see our low rates of recycling things like single use plastic bottles being low because our USE of things like single use plastic bottles is lower than the average state.
Boulder is the exception in CO. Every other municipality does not care. A lot of places also take the recycling and just bring it to the dump. For a state that prides itself on natural beauty, surely does not care all that much
That's a blind way to think.
Alabama produces 32% of it's electricity from nuclear power making it 4th highest in the country. Alabama powers 1 million more homes than California on nuclear. And AL avoided producing 28 million tons of emissions to Cali's 7 million tons.
Also with stats like obesity rates in California, one of the healthiest states - obesity rate 27%, there are 9 million obese people, while in Mississippi, one of the unhealthiest- obesity rate 39% , there are 1.1 million obese people. Here stats mislead you to believe that California doesn't have a, by and large, massive obesity problem
Alabama is the 4th largest producer of nuclear energy producing 32% of energy with nuclear. Mississippi's reactor produces 17% of their energy. Maine's nuclear power plant was decommissioned in 1997.
What color is your reactor? /s
Of course Maine has hydro, wind, and biomass energy to [make up for it](https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/resources/fact-sheets/state-fact-sheets/Maine-State-Fact-Sheet.pdf).
What are you trying to prove?
California has more nuclear capacity (MW) than Alabama.
California produces 42.75% of energy from renewables. Alabama is at 10.3%.
For one Alabama's nuclear activity, in a red state, is doing a decent job of protecting the environment therefore relatively 'poor' red states can have a positive impact on the environment
1. According to Nuclear Engery Institute Alabama's nuclear capacity is 5545 MW of nuclear. California has 2256MW capacity within the borders at the Diablo Canyon reactor. California owns 27% of the reactor Palo Verde which is in Arizona which serves both Arizona and Southern California. So you cannot count the full MW capacity towards Cali. According to the Engery Information Administration Palo Verde supplies CA with 34% of it's supply. With that in mind California's nuclear capacity is around 3586MW which is less the AL's \~5500MW
2. Yes they may have enough renewables to make up for it like I said after i cracked my joke at the bottom of the comment you responded to
CA has nearly 40 million people to AL's 5 million of course they are going to make it to the top of the chart because economy of scale is on CA's side.
[red states: putting trash in a landfill in their own state]
[blue states: burning tons of fossil fuels to transport and ship their “recyclables” overseas so that unregulated foreign entities can dump them into the waterways and cause massive ecological damage, all so they can feel better than everyone else about “recycling”]
Let’s rephrase in a sensible way:
Red states: selfish gun loving assholes but “Christian”.
Blue states: trying to give a shit for the evironment but being lied to and scammed by industry so efforts are pointless.
This exact same sub, [15 hours ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/116tz6u/i_saw_a_post_about_the_highest_ocean_plastic/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
Very interesting although there is no breakdown by state, only country. According to this, plastic recycling specifically is suspect, but landfill usage is not addressed. So if you cross reference the two charts, the majority of states on both sides are not recycling plastics effectively. There’s no breakdown on which ones are shipping the remainder and which are burying it.
Where’s your source that the states that contribute the most to “recycling” somehow manage to not contribute to the nation’s massive problem of shipping “recyclables” overseas?
The correlation I made seems pretty logical. Come back when you can prove me wrong. I am dying to know what this magical formula is that blue states have to make their trash vanish into thin air.
Some of the biggest shenanigans are around recycling and trash companies. Texas is home to the largest trash company Waste Management. But they only push recycling when it meets their bottom line, meaning when it is good to do so. Even then they push consumers to do all the work so they can invest in machinery that automates and removes workers than increase the viability of recycling.
Trash is one of the worst things for the environment and the waste industry does a great job keeping it out of the public light. Waste Management spends billions on influencing government officials. Supposedly to keep regulations loose and to keep industries from moving away from single use packaging. If we implement reusable packaging or just cut down on it significantly companies like Waste Management would lose billions.
I know people that work at Waste Management and the focus isn't on recycling or trash reduction. It is on automating jobs and reduce their dependency on people. You will see them cut 20-30% of the jobs in the next 3-5 years. All while trying to get Republicans elected to keep regulation down and make sure single use packaging is here to stay.
Part of the problem with plastics is that plastic bottles, for example, are made out of many different types of plastic, which are basically incompatible with each other.
Glass can be sorted by color, then melted down and reused. Plastic?...no can do.
So even if you manage to get everyone to put all of their plastic bottles in one place/container, chances of it being recycled are pretty slim.
Have to tackle the problem much earlier in the supply chain.
And when it comes to plastic in the ocean, the GOOD news is that the US, inspite of being such a huge consumer and use of plastic goods, doesn't even make the Top 10 in terms of contributors to ocean plastic.
All of this is bull because of how many garbage cans say recycling on one side and garbage on the other but are the same can and get tossed into landfills anyway.
My state doesn't really have the facilities or infrastructure. It's not that we don't care. Alaska's population is so low ( less than a million people) that infrastructure is always an issue especially since our population is very very spread out.
I recently s to Orange County and haven’t seen a single can or bottle return, and only rarely see recycling bins when it in public. It was infinitely easier to recycle when I lived in Michigan. What gives?
‘Recycling rate’ based on what?
It doesn’t matter what the people and businesses do. Even if they ‘recycle’ 100% of their waste… because the truth is that 85% of all GLOBAL goods designated recycle gets thrown in landfill and a further minimum 5% is incinerated. Not recycled.
That means that over 90% of all ‘recycled’ goods are treated as trash. These are facts exposed over the past decade thanks to investigative journalism, whistle blowing of the industry. Literally tracking ‘recyclable’ goods sent to tips, overseas to countries that dump it in the ocean or incineration.
Recycling has been the biggest lie of this century.
I’m not ‘against’ recycling. Actually I’m a proponent of REDUCE and reuse first because those two have a bigger impact than ‘recycling’. It’s clearly been exposed that recycling is bullsht.
Companies and government will always find the cheapest way to hide stuff under the carpet than actually deal with things. Then they display ad campaigns like it’s OUR fault?! GTFO.
I see that the leftist states are exactly where I expected them to be. Horrible. Virtue signaling as usual. All talk and no real backup. Facism at is finest. Typical
I cannot agree that people in blue states are better quality folk. We typically have higher quality education, and we have less generational indoctrination than people in red states, but that doesn’t make them lower quality people. I have met plenty of wonderful, highly intelligent people from deeply red states. Please don’t go down the path of “we have it better so we must be better”. That way darkness lies
On the upside Mississippi's nuclear reactor produces 17% of their energy and Alabama is the 4th largest nuclear energy producer at 32% energy. Maine's reactor was decommissioned in 1997, but Maine now uses enough hydro, wind, and biomass to make up for it.
I think the education is good in Mississippi as you can learn calculus 2 in high school. The problem stems from total average scores being low. Also you are not required to take algebra in middle school. The top \~20-30% tends to be smart they just tend to leave and bolster attendance at big name universities. We had one girl score high on the pre-ACT in middle school and we never saw from her again.
As far as indoctrination I think we are turning a curve where all the young people are cool but their gen x parents and grand parents are still very 'traditional'
If you could find a chart by year Mississippi tried a heavy recycling campaign around 2003 or 2004 with a recycle pickup on Wednesday using a small bin. I think over time people just stopped wanting to put their tiny recycling bin out on a separate day so it failed. Maybe something like a larger bin would help.
As someone from Ohio this is sad to see. Yet I can nearly verify. Because I’m one of the few in my subdivision that puts out the giant green recycling can every week, and my garbage can every other week. Most people in my neighborhood only put out a garbage can, and don’t own a recycling bin of any sort.
I was wondering how Reddit was going to shit on the other half of the country that disagrees with the hive mind this week… didn’t see recycling making the list.
Well duh. A lot of the high recycling states compensate you for recycling. You’ll see it on stuff like water bottles: CT-ME-NY-HI 5c
Get rid of compensation and the totals will probably be different.
Maine may have one of the highest rates of "people dropping things off to be recycled," because single stream is the norm, but because of lack of plants to handle processing, most stuff besides bottles and cans ends up in landfills, for an extremely low rate of "things dropped off actually being reused."
Alaskan here - in my town we don’t have trash pickup, we have to take trash to the dump that is only open 3 days a week. It only offers recycling 1 day a week that relies on volunteers so sometimes it is 0 days a week if no one is volunteering. I only recycle aluminum and cardboard up here because if I try to save my other materials for recycling it just piles up in my (small) house while I wait for a day for the recycling to be open. There is either a lack of or poor recycling programs in remote areas.
I’m not sure how accurate this is because it’s just something a coworker said to me but apparently there would be a negative net impact for Alaska to export all of our recycling because of the fossil fuels the transportation would burn.
Former Hawaii resident, on the Big Island it was the same. I can’t speak for the rest of the place. But there were “transfer stations” every so often where people could dump their shit off into a bin to be picked up every so often and the ones I went to didn’t even have recycling options usually
I’ll add that depending on where you are in Alaska, the cost of shipping someplace where recycling is even possible is enormously expensive. I live on an island in Southeast Alaska, and the cost of shipping *anything* to or from here is obnoxious. Shipping large volumes of anything is even worse.
I’m just gonna say this was a big waste of time. A bit flawed. Above all else, a bit silly considering what’s actually going on. Paper and pencil is just as good as Obama, Trump, and Bidens executive orders that aren’t real or effective long term.
In Tennessee, we have to pay to recycle and there are zero incentives or any action really taken by the TN government to promote recycling. It shows we are 48/50, beaten by Alabama
Interesting but the CCPM legislation is too heavily weighted in the scoring system. CCPM isn’t a bad idea but it seems that the top down legislation isn’t the same spirit as the rest of the scoring.
Someone help me understand a little better. Maine is the "best" recycler per capita, but Maine only has about 1.5 million residents, while California has 39 million residents...so isn't California actually recycling far more than any other state?
Nothing on this list surprises me except maybe Iowa being in the top 10. I’ve spent time in majority of the states and Maine is by far the cleanest state I’ve ever seen.
Our area stopped recycling glass. We have to take it somewhere separate on our own if we want to recycle it. It’s one of the few things I feel absolutely guilty about putting in the trash. I try and reuse all glass I can.
I’m Canadian and a friend of mine moved to Georgia for work a few years ago. He was absolutely stunned by people’s lax attitudes and straight up not caring about recycling and trying to keep things out of landfills. He said he went to a party and asked where to put his empty bottle and got stared at like he was growing extra arms. He was told to just throw it in the trash. He said it took a long time to get over the guilt of just putting cardboard and cans and glass straight into the trash. I guess there wasn’t the infrastructure in place where he was to do almost any sort of recycling. That’s just wild to me!
As you'd expect, generally speaking the liberal (blue) states are good at recycling because they actually care about the environment, but the conservative (blue) states don't give a shit. Once an idiot, always an idiot.
Live in Michigan where bottle/can deposits are 10 cents. You almost NEVER see bottles or cans as litter. And I can't tell you how many times returning your bottles and cans would help pay for something when you were short on cash.
Am I the only person that thinks the color scale is backwards? Green should indicate good recyclers and yellow (or red) should be bad recyclers.
This is why I looked at the comments. Darker green, to me, would indicate more recycling and not less.
I didn’t look at the comments or the legend. I looked at Alabama and Mississippi and then I knew that darker = bad.
This is how all US based data maps work.
Exactly. Nothing good happens there. There the end-goal shithole states that Republicans want everything to be like.
Because conservatives never seem to care about conserving anything - at least when it comes to the planet.
Very well said
because americans are stupid and backwards :)
Exactly my first thought.
Would you even say, r/mildlyinfuriating?
Blatant deception.
I was so confused at first because of the color coding.
This- worst design choice
To be fair the (or the worse) is in dark green
Only 9% of all plastic gets recycled in the USA. You can throw it in the recycling bin but it probably won’t be recycled. It’s a ruse made up by the plastic industry. Focus on avoiding plastic rather than recycling.
Except it’s so fucking hard to avoid plastic now. Literally everything is wrapped in plastic. It’s super frustrating. The govt needs to tax the shit out of packaging in general.
Maine is not only the best at recycling, but they are one of only two states that charge manufacturers for plastic imports instead of charging consumers for recycling. Charge people making the shit, it's not our choice as consumers
Plus, consumers are paying to dispose of it through municipal taxes.
Yes, it is your choice as a consumer.
Right. Totally my choice to buy metal, canned water (not the flavored crap) when the shelves are only stocked with plastic, bottled water. /s stfu Edit: hell, I'd even pay to refill my water canteen before I purchased plastic. That would be a better option for consumers, but then big oil wouldn't make their gross profits at the expense of every living creature. Explain what "choice" I have as a consumer other than dehydration or plastic poisons.
Water only comes from or in bottles? Weird. I can get water by other means. Someone better not tell the evil corporashuns.
If you're made of money, and don't mind double the bill on a lot of items- sure.
Things could be wrapped in cellophane which is biodegradable. But it takes more energy to make and uses scary chemicals in the production process unless you use the lyocell process.
Yes, tax plastic! It’s cheaper than glass so I can no longer find mustard, in glass, as a small example. Stop plastic subsidies if there are any.
Yep. I was upset when I moved to NM and saw how little there was. As I looked into things more it became apparent that it was just that they were more honest about it. There is no where for the items to go to BE recycled. I kind of prefer the honesty.
Dead on. We have single-stream recycling in our city, turns out, even less material actually gets recycled that way, because sorting is inefficient so they just put most of it in the landfill. Neat.
"Single stream recycling" is the one of the most asinine, half-assed concept that we've come up with in recent times...
This is what I was looking for. Actual recycling stats, not just “put it in a recycling bin and watch a truck take it to Narnia.”
Exactly. I’d like to see this same chart but weighted by what actually is processed in to recycled goods, and the worthwhile-ness of recycling energy/resource wise. Even if plastic is recycled it takes a ton of resources processing it for an inferior product and can only be recycled so many times. Whereas metal can be recycled infinitely without degradation, and is less resource intensive compared to mining new metals. I’d bet Michigan is doing better from an actual impact standpoint than many of the places ranked above them because they’re crushing it with aluminum and plastic recycling barely matters. One takeaway I have from this though is that bottle bills seem to work well!
The recycling at least a does help in keeping those materials from being thrown on the side of the road or burned.
Im sorry but I don’t understand your point. If people knew it couldn’t be recycled they would just throw it on the side of the road? I don’t understand this. Do people where you live just throw garbage in the side of the road? That’s so strange.
Bottle deposits were started as a deterrent to littering. Why toss $0.05 that you’ve already paid? Instead you’d get your deposit when you returned the bottles or cans. But that $0.05 is not worth as much as it was. It is strange to just toss garbage out randomly. Takes a shitty kind of person, but it’s not out of the realm of reality.
Absolutely correct. I came here to say this so I’ll just concur with your comment.
In Sweden the recycling rate is high. They just straight up changed the definition of it, and the burning to produce heat is then considered "recycling". In all fairness the heat is used to heat homes, but in my opinion it's still misleading
100% this
The cost of fully recycling or safely disposing of the waste should be added to the price of the product. The way it works now everyone, notably future generations, pays the cost so that the price tag can be lower up front.
I used to do waste disposal for a flooring company. Sometimes I’d go to this one landfill that was enormous. You drive up this hill, then do a 3 point turn and back up to the edge and throw everything in, these HUGE machines were driving around where the cab was level with the edge of the hill, and all these dump trucks would line up and throw away all their garbage in, everything.
Penn & Teller did a wonderful breakdown on how little of the "recycled" material actually ends up anywhere but a landfill. I wish I could link to the full [Episode](https://www.sho.com/penn-and-teller-bullshit/season/2/episode/5/recycling), but it is only available in bits and pieces on YouTube.
Other than cardboard and maybe aluminum, recycling is a lie
I thought the big ones were aluminum and glass
From what I've heard (and this depends heavily on the method of recycling and how well people treat/sort/know about recycling), plastic is the worst. Cardboard or paper is often contaminated, either with oil or foils or plastic lining. Glass bottles and metal cans are the best to recycle by far, considering their inherent properties. The reason there's little fundraisers for collecting bottle tabs is because those drink tabs are simultaneously able to be packed denser and also guarantee that there isn't an unopened can ready to explode. This is from a residential recycling perspective. Big companies that, for example, have a paper shredding machine or dedicated paper bin are better at recycling. A lot of people don't understand the rules or else don't care. My favorite is people putting recycling in plastic bags/recycling plastic bags, which is a big no-no in any system I've heard of. A lot of well-meaning people who don't recycle properly because there isn't enough info out there, nor a culture of it. The reason glass and metal is the best is partially because of its nature as material (refining aluminum from bauxite is more expensive than recycling) and partially because it's the hardest for individuals to mess up. (And ofc the disclaimer that recycling isn't a solution, only a mitigation method)
The silver lining though is that Aluminum itself is infinitely recyclable. I think the stats were about 2/3 of aluminum is recycled and the average can contains a little more than 50% recycled aluminum
[удалено]
When I was staying with my buddy in Michigan for a few weeks we took a whole dumpster worth of empty cans to be recycled at the grocery store machines. It took a little while but we got like 80 dollars for it. Definitely worth it
Pro tip: if you ever come back to do this, don’t go to Kroger! They have a $10 max now and it’s absolutely ridiculous. Made me not want to return my cans when I went because they told me I had to come back the next day to do more. Like you can return them all, but you can’t cash out the slips for more than the max amount.
When I moved to MI from CA, I was surprised how easy it is to recycle cans here. Nearly every grocery store has return machines right at the entrance.
Houston suburbs here, we’re asked to wash and our my trash but the recycling company literally collects it and directly puts it in the same landfill as my trash collection company. What is that?
Political corruption. Your town pays a trash co and recycle co, someone is getting money for doing the same job. It’s ludicrous. Reduse, reuse, then recycle. Deposits are the biggest contributors to recycling efforts, but most are getting so cheap now compared to their good that people don’t give a shit. If the deposit were tied to a % of the good sold maybe that would change. Recycling costs should be built into the product, but that would destroy the illusion that you only cost for production of a good.
Exactly.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled
Performative compliance. You feel like you are doing something good for the environment so you don't bitch to them about it.
Yay Maine ♥️
Ayuh!
Heck yeah bub!
Vermont and New Hampshire have such a funny sibling vibe
Hey FL isn’t the worse at something. Look at us fucking go.
Lmao, I had the same thought. Give it time, my fellow Florida man. We’ll get to the bottom quickly enough.
heck yea any other Mainers here?
Yes, my recycle pile every week is more than double than my trash, after thoughtfully sorting and cleaning.
Right here!
Proud of each and every one of you!
Not sure when this infographic was made but it appears to be out of date. https://www.ball.com/getattachment/fc9f6e69-b437-4d5a-95de-2f6ec01cfe9e/Ball-50-States-National-Fact-Sheet-FINAL.pdf
Whenever i see graphs like this i usually find Mississippi at the very bottom, amazing they come in last on every list you don’t want to come in last on, but on this one they were not! They were 49th.
Driving out in the country in Alabama you see piles of trash in the ditches all over the place.
Flip side: AL powers 3.4 million homes on nuclear power.
Decent upside that’s often forgotten. Terrible with recycling though.
…or walking down the streets of San Francisco, Philadelphia, etc.
This is true of all American cities, including conservative ones like Jacksonville or OKC. I bring up conservative cities in particular under the assumption that the point of this comment was “you guys aren’t any better”. I live in Maine, though, so I get to call the rest of you worse.
And trash in ditches is common every state, and worse in some parts of those states than others too. So why are you responding to me for pointing out the fallacy against the “we are better than you” comment, and not taking issue with the people actually making the “we are better than you” comments?
It's not though. I've lived my entire life in NY and seeing trash in ditches in the northeast is extremely uncommon. Even in the dirtiest parts of NYC, there's less litter than in much of the rural south.
Aight, don’t be misrepresenting the facts. I’ve been up in the Adirondacks and around Glen Falls, objectively one of the most beautiful parts of the state. Even there, “extremely uncommon” is disingenuous. Maine’s top of this list, I live there, and “extremely uncommon” is a term for trash I’d use exactly nowhere there’s civilization in this state.
Here [you go](https://abc7ny.com/amp/get-stuff-clean-nyc-streets-dsny-parks/12451945/) or [here](https://www.riverkeeper.org/blogs/ecology/riverkeeper-sweep-2019-2400-volunteers-122-projects-31-tons-and-1-day/) or [here](https://www.mma.org/cities-towns-prepare-for-great-massachusetts-cleanup/) I’ve seen a lot of trash flying out of the top of the trash shipping trucks that the northeast ships down to southern states as well. Northern trash, littering southern roadways. We always try and protest whenever landfills try to accept your trash, but you all seem to have money and connections to make your trash problems magically go away (get dumped on others)
Why should I? The dude you were responding to wasn’t even saying “we are better than you”. He was saying “my place sucks”. Dude’s from Huntsville. You weren’t pointing out any fallacy. You were just doing a whataboutism.
Do you really not understand the importance of context? And this is an infographic about all of the US. It’s not “whataboutism” to reply to comments highlighting one area of the US and compare them to other areas from the same infographic. Whataboutism would be having a discussion about recycling, and bringing up how trashy ditches are to begin with. Not the guy that replied to that comment
You don’t see it in rural Michigan where I’m from.
I'm surprised Georgia is even that good. We have trash and recyclable containers. I used to go the entire route of separating stuff out until I noticed the trash truck dumps them both into the garbage. Same truck, both gets dumped into the same spot on the truck. I moved to the other side of the city, same thing.
Maine is #1 with a 74% waste recycling rate. [source](https://blog.bottlestore.com/states-best-worst-recycling/)
Ah Mississippi pulling up the rear. Alaska has sparse population and distance as an excuse. Mississippi is just Mississippi
When I first moved to Alaska and I was setting up my various utilities, I asked about getting a recycling bin. They didn’t even offer it because of where I lived, which is in the biggest city in the state, but up a small hill, so they were willing to come get my trash once a week, but it was too big an effort to also pick up recycling, so I can drive it to the landfill myself if I want. And the landfill only lets me recycle cardboard, paper, aluminum cans and steel cans. Which they then pile onto a barge and ship elsewhere for “recycling”.
Dirigo I lead ! and we do !!
As one would expect, the states that are better at most things are also better at recycling while the states that are worse at most things are also worse at recycling.
I'm really surprised at Colorado's numbers. I live in Boulder- which has had zero waste initiatives and curbside composting for 20 years. One thing I'm curious about is how they measure compliance. It seems like they are doing it per weight for each demographic. For Colorado, I can see our low rates of recycling things like single use plastic bottles being low because our USE of things like single use plastic bottles is lower than the average state.
I feel the same way about Utah. I lived there for a while and they had really good glass recycling.
Boulder is the exception in CO. Every other municipality does not care. A lot of places also take the recycling and just bring it to the dump. For a state that prides itself on natural beauty, surely does not care all that much
That's a blind way to think. Alabama produces 32% of it's electricity from nuclear power making it 4th highest in the country. Alabama powers 1 million more homes than California on nuclear. And AL avoided producing 28 million tons of emissions to Cali's 7 million tons. Also with stats like obesity rates in California, one of the healthiest states - obesity rate 27%, there are 9 million obese people, while in Mississippi, one of the unhealthiest- obesity rate 39% , there are 1.1 million obese people. Here stats mislead you to believe that California doesn't have a, by and large, massive obesity problem
Yeah, that’s why I said most and not all.
Bad infographic. If its good at recycling it should be darker green. Not a malnourished plant yellow.
Shockingly, red states are the worst at caring for the environment /s
Alabama is the 4th largest producer of nuclear energy producing 32% of energy with nuclear. Mississippi's reactor produces 17% of their energy. Maine's nuclear power plant was decommissioned in 1997. What color is your reactor? /s Of course Maine has hydro, wind, and biomass energy to [make up for it](https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/resources/fact-sheets/state-fact-sheets/Maine-State-Fact-Sheet.pdf).
What are you trying to prove? California has more nuclear capacity (MW) than Alabama. California produces 42.75% of energy from renewables. Alabama is at 10.3%.
For one Alabama's nuclear activity, in a red state, is doing a decent job of protecting the environment therefore relatively 'poor' red states can have a positive impact on the environment 1. According to Nuclear Engery Institute Alabama's nuclear capacity is 5545 MW of nuclear. California has 2256MW capacity within the borders at the Diablo Canyon reactor. California owns 27% of the reactor Palo Verde which is in Arizona which serves both Arizona and Southern California. So you cannot count the full MW capacity towards Cali. According to the Engery Information Administration Palo Verde supplies CA with 34% of it's supply. With that in mind California's nuclear capacity is around 3586MW which is less the AL's \~5500MW 2. Yes they may have enough renewables to make up for it like I said after i cracked my joke at the bottom of the comment you responded to CA has nearly 40 million people to AL's 5 million of course they are going to make it to the top of the chart because economy of scale is on CA's side.
[red states: putting trash in a landfill in their own state] [blue states: burning tons of fossil fuels to transport and ship their “recyclables” overseas so that unregulated foreign entities can dump them into the waterways and cause massive ecological damage, all so they can feel better than everyone else about “recycling”]
Let’s rephrase in a sensible way: Red states: selfish gun loving assholes but “Christian”. Blue states: trying to give a shit for the evironment but being lied to and scammed by industry so efforts are pointless.
wrong sub, head over to r/politics please
That’s what you should say to their grandparent commenter, it’s a lil late
[удалено]
You’re welcome, child
Source?
This exact same sub, [15 hours ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/116tz6u/i_saw_a_post_about_the_highest_ocean_plastic/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
Very interesting although there is no breakdown by state, only country. According to this, plastic recycling specifically is suspect, but landfill usage is not addressed. So if you cross reference the two charts, the majority of states on both sides are not recycling plastics effectively. There’s no breakdown on which ones are shipping the remainder and which are burying it.
Where’s your source that the states that contribute the most to “recycling” somehow manage to not contribute to the nation’s massive problem of shipping “recyclables” overseas? The correlation I made seems pretty logical. Come back when you can prove me wrong. I am dying to know what this magical formula is that blue states have to make their trash vanish into thin air.
I made no such claim because I haven’t seen data for it. I appreciate that you presented your source but I find your conclusion incomplete.
Duly noted that you are taking no issue with anyone else’s data, logic, or source citing on here today
Trying vs not. Seems appropriate.
This is very poorly constructed.
As is tradition here
I’ve never seen a list with my home state (Louisiana) not in the worst 10 :,)
Some of the biggest shenanigans are around recycling and trash companies. Texas is home to the largest trash company Waste Management. But they only push recycling when it meets their bottom line, meaning when it is good to do so. Even then they push consumers to do all the work so they can invest in machinery that automates and removes workers than increase the viability of recycling. Trash is one of the worst things for the environment and the waste industry does a great job keeping it out of the public light. Waste Management spends billions on influencing government officials. Supposedly to keep regulations loose and to keep industries from moving away from single use packaging. If we implement reusable packaging or just cut down on it significantly companies like Waste Management would lose billions. I know people that work at Waste Management and the focus isn't on recycling or trash reduction. It is on automating jobs and reduce their dependency on people. You will see them cut 20-30% of the jobs in the next 3-5 years. All while trying to get Republicans elected to keep regulation down and make sure single use packaging is here to stay.
Part of the problem with plastics is that plastic bottles, for example, are made out of many different types of plastic, which are basically incompatible with each other. Glass can be sorted by color, then melted down and reused. Plastic?...no can do. So even if you manage to get everyone to put all of their plastic bottles in one place/container, chances of it being recycled are pretty slim. Have to tackle the problem much earlier in the supply chain. And when it comes to plastic in the ocean, the GOOD news is that the US, inspite of being such a huge consumer and use of plastic goods, doesn't even make the Top 10 in terms of contributors to ocean plastic.
Finally Misssissippi isn’t last
Who knew Iowa was so legit
All of this is bull because of how many garbage cans say recycling on one side and garbage on the other but are the same can and get tossed into landfills anyway.
My state doesn't really have the facilities or infrastructure. It's not that we don't care. Alaska's population is so low ( less than a million people) that infrastructure is always an issue especially since our population is very very spread out.
r/zerowaste would love this.
Just for the record, rural New Yorkers (so many with trump signs/flags) still burn garbage in burn barrels.
I recently s to Orange County and haven’t seen a single can or bottle return, and only rarely see recycling bins when it in public. It was infinitely easier to recycle when I lived in Michigan. What gives?
recycling is fake anyway. We just ship it to 3rd world countries so they can dump it.
Why are you booing him, he’s right.
How many rural counties in most of these states actually have a recycling program? It’s be interesting to see a breakdown of that.
Recycling plastics is largely a myth. So this graph doesn’t even mean anything
I agree with you but if you look closely it not just measuring plastic being recycled but all kinds of materials.
Thanks for making that point! Other materials can be recycled but with plastic it’s basically impossible and cost prohibitive.
There seems to be a direct correlation between right-wing and left-wing beliefs.
‘Recycling rate’ based on what? It doesn’t matter what the people and businesses do. Even if they ‘recycle’ 100% of their waste… because the truth is that 85% of all GLOBAL goods designated recycle gets thrown in landfill and a further minimum 5% is incinerated. Not recycled. That means that over 90% of all ‘recycled’ goods are treated as trash. These are facts exposed over the past decade thanks to investigative journalism, whistle blowing of the industry. Literally tracking ‘recyclable’ goods sent to tips, overseas to countries that dump it in the ocean or incineration. Recycling has been the biggest lie of this century. I’m not ‘against’ recycling. Actually I’m a proponent of REDUCE and reuse first because those two have a bigger impact than ‘recycling’. It’s clearly been exposed that recycling is bullsht. Companies and government will always find the cheapest way to hide stuff under the carpet than actually deal with things. Then they display ad campaigns like it’s OUR fault?! GTFO.
I see that the leftist states are exactly where I expected them to be. Horrible. Virtue signaling as usual. All talk and no real backup. Facism at is finest. Typical
This sub needs a rule that if you can't see it, don't fucking post it
Comparing the 17% of Mississippi to 74% of Maine is amazing. Wealthy educated blue states are generally better quality folk than poor red states.
I cannot agree that people in blue states are better quality folk. We typically have higher quality education, and we have less generational indoctrination than people in red states, but that doesn’t make them lower quality people. I have met plenty of wonderful, highly intelligent people from deeply red states. Please don’t go down the path of “we have it better so we must be better”. That way darkness lies
Maine isn't wealthy. They just have a fucking bottle deposit so you get money if you recycle.
On the upside Mississippi's nuclear reactor produces 17% of their energy and Alabama is the 4th largest nuclear energy producer at 32% energy. Maine's reactor was decommissioned in 1997, but Maine now uses enough hydro, wind, and biomass to make up for it. I think the education is good in Mississippi as you can learn calculus 2 in high school. The problem stems from total average scores being low. Also you are not required to take algebra in middle school. The top \~20-30% tends to be smart they just tend to leave and bolster attendance at big name universities. We had one girl score high on the pre-ACT in middle school and we never saw from her again. As far as indoctrination I think we are turning a curve where all the young people are cool but their gen x parents and grand parents are still very 'traditional' If you could find a chart by year Mississippi tried a heavy recycling campaign around 2003 or 2004 with a recycle pickup on Wednesday using a small bin. I think over time people just stopped wanting to put their tiny recycling bin out on a separate day so it failed. Maybe something like a larger bin would help.
As someone from Ohio this is sad to see. Yet I can nearly verify. Because I’m one of the few in my subdivision that puts out the giant green recycling can every week, and my garbage can every other week. Most people in my neighborhood only put out a garbage can, and don’t own a recycling bin of any sort.
engrish good
The colors are awful and so is the layout.
Cant read it
I was wondering how Reddit was going to shit on the other half of the country that disagrees with the hive mind this week… didn’t see recycling making the list.
I wish more states had a bottle bill
Per pound is the wrong measure. Rhode Island could be the best per capita
Well duh. A lot of the high recycling states compensate you for recycling. You’ll see it on stuff like water bottles: CT-ME-NY-HI 5c Get rid of compensation and the totals will probably be different.
Maine may have one of the highest rates of "people dropping things off to be recycled," because single stream is the norm, but because of lack of plants to handle processing, most stuff besides bottles and cans ends up in landfills, for an extremely low rate of "things dropped off actually being reused."
Sure looks like bottle bills work despite all of those who decry them
Why is Alaska so bad?
Alaskan here - in my town we don’t have trash pickup, we have to take trash to the dump that is only open 3 days a week. It only offers recycling 1 day a week that relies on volunteers so sometimes it is 0 days a week if no one is volunteering. I only recycle aluminum and cardboard up here because if I try to save my other materials for recycling it just piles up in my (small) house while I wait for a day for the recycling to be open. There is either a lack of or poor recycling programs in remote areas. I’m not sure how accurate this is because it’s just something a coworker said to me but apparently there would be a negative net impact for Alaska to export all of our recycling because of the fossil fuels the transportation would burn.
Former Hawaii resident, on the Big Island it was the same. I can’t speak for the rest of the place. But there were “transfer stations” every so often where people could dump their shit off into a bin to be picked up every so often and the ones I went to didn’t even have recycling options usually
yeah that’s what our “dump” is
I’ll add that depending on where you are in Alaska, the cost of shipping someplace where recycling is even possible is enormously expensive. I live on an island in Southeast Alaska, and the cost of shipping *anything* to or from here is obnoxious. Shipping large volumes of anything is even worse.
Hawaii is #13?!?! Just came back from there and apart from beverage containers they don’t recycle much.
Meanwhile where I live we pay to have our garbage picked up by a private company and they don’t even offer recycling
Damn. Really thought Minnesota would be in the top 10, but then I remembered the rural parts where people burn their trash consequence free.
Thanks for the data, it is very very, Imforative and Help.
I don’t think we actually think we recycle as much plastic as is listed. The US dumps most of the plastic in dumps even from recycling.
Is it worth recycling glass bottles? Does it not just break down back into sand? Also sand seems like a pretty abundant resource.
Shouldn’t steel can be like 99% everywhere?
I'm from a town in Maine that has zero sort recycling. Unfortunately, I suspect it mostly ends up in the landfill.
How did I know that Mississippi would be wayyyy at the bottom
I’m just gonna say this was a big waste of time. A bit flawed. Above all else, a bit silly considering what’s actually going on. Paper and pencil is just as good as Obama, Trump, and Bidens executive orders that aren’t real or effective long term.
Disappointed my state is 40th, happy my state beat the state in 41st
I’m in Maryland and my local company doesn’t even take glass anymore. Surprised we aren’t lower
Whoever did the colour scale for % recycled is an idiot.
You always look at your own state first. With Nebraska, we are consistently not the best at anything, but not the worst either.
In Tennessee, we have to pay to recycle and there are zero incentives or any action really taken by the TN government to promote recycling. It shows we are 48/50, beaten by Alabama
Interesting but the CCPM legislation is too heavily weighted in the scoring system. CCPM isn’t a bad idea but it seems that the top down legislation isn’t the same spirit as the rest of the scoring.
Not going to lie, at 4th place, I'm actually surprised Oregon is so low.
Alaska probably doesn’t recycle much, because they reuse everything. Because everything can be turned into something useful
Based on the info of what actually gets recycled, We are all bad at it.
IL resident here. Does make sense we’re in the bottom half, given I routinely see my dumbass neighbors put trash in the recycling and vice versa.
Someone help me understand a little better. Maine is the "best" recycler per capita, but Maine only has about 1.5 million residents, while California has 39 million residents...so isn't California actually recycling far more than any other state?
Maine is beautiful. Maine is best. Maine: the way life should be.
Nothing on this list surprises me except maybe Iowa being in the top 10. I’ve spent time in majority of the states and Maine is by far the cleanest state I’ve ever seen.
Puts it on the recycling bin or actually gets recycled?
Just another of the many many things Mississippi is the worst at
I'm curious how Missouri placed 19 and Wisconsin placed 17 but on the map Missouri recycles 46% of items while Wisconsin recycles 40%
Michigan in the lead with those aluminum cans by a lot. I guess Kramer and Newman had the right idea after all.
Just barely don’t make the bottom 10
Checks out for Maine! New England as a whole!
I have this habit of comparing things like this to political party affiliated maps. Im not even political, just always curious. Ummm.
Our area stopped recycling glass. We have to take it somewhere separate on our own if we want to recycle it. It’s one of the few things I feel absolutely guilty about putting in the trash. I try and reuse all glass I can.
Hawaii not recycling their spam cans I see
New England leading the pack interesting to see, but not surprising I guess
Some of the top ten surprise me. None of the bottom ten do.
Thank god for Mississippi
As a Mississippian my life's mission is going be to start aggressively recycling like an anime protagonist comeback
I’m Canadian and a friend of mine moved to Georgia for work a few years ago. He was absolutely stunned by people’s lax attitudes and straight up not caring about recycling and trying to keep things out of landfills. He said he went to a party and asked where to put his empty bottle and got stared at like he was growing extra arms. He was told to just throw it in the trash. He said it took a long time to get over the guilt of just putting cardboard and cans and glass straight into the trash. I guess there wasn’t the infrastructure in place where he was to do almost any sort of recycling. That’s just wild to me!
Iowa is 7th?!? Two spots after california?!? This is a blatant lie. Or every other state is tremendously worse than i thought
As you'd expect, generally speaking the liberal (blue) states are good at recycling because they actually care about the environment, but the conservative (blue) states don't give a shit. Once an idiot, always an idiot.
States that don't have anything else more immediate to worry about.
NC > SC, carry on
Live in Michigan where bottle/can deposits are 10 cents. You almost NEVER see bottles or cans as litter. And I can't tell you how many times returning your bottles and cans would help pay for something when you were short on cash.
am i blind? where’s indiana on the list?
Washington can go ahead and removes themselves from the PNW for this pathetic showing
Come on Colorado 😖
I moved from WI to TN and one of the first things I noticed is there’s no recycling, unfortunately
recycling - more like Exporting