Article Title: Who Killed American Recycling?

Article Summary

In this article, the author tells why recycling in America has ground to a halt. Recycling in America saw its peak during the ‘70s all the way up to the ’90s as public information campaigns turned Americans to recycle earnestly. Throughout the 1990s, the USA produced a high-quality recycle product. The rest of the world wanted it enough to buy it. But co-mingled recycling came along promising to rid Americans of the devilish and time-consuming task of sorting at the source and it all went to hell from then onwards. Turns out that “co-mingling” is mostly confusing. Americans faced with a trash container and a comingled recycling container have no idea the difference. The result is as you can imagine…a mess! So, in ten years the “innovation” of co-mingled recycling has instead murdered the system. And this comes at a time when America is producing more trash than ever. The author says that the best way to fix recycling is to persuade people to buy less stuff and take better care of the stuff they buy.