September 4, 2018

Banning Straws and Bags Won’t Solve our Plastic Problem

September 4, 2018


Today’s article was written by Mathy Stanislaus. It was originally posted on the World Resources Institute’s Blog on August 16, 2018.


It seems to be the summer of plastic bans. Starbucks, Hyatt, the city of Seattle and others have all committed to phase out plastic straws. Stafford Township in New Jersey passed a plastic bag ban just last month, joining dozens of other American cities and states imposing taxes or bans on single-use plastics.


But is this a good thing?


Not if that’s all we do.


The Case for Banning Plastic


Use of single-use plastics (think wrappers, straws and bags) has skyrocketed over the last few decades. But as I explained recently, our ability to recycle these plastics at scale remains poor. Globally, 8 million metric tons of plastic trash leak into our natural spaces each year, harming wildlife, mucking up the ocean and jeopardizing people’s livelihoods.


So it’s understandable why bans are becoming popular. The beaches of New Jersey, for example, bring in billions of tourism dollars each year, creating jobs and funding local municipal needs. These sprawling, sandy spaces and the busy boardwalks that line them are an important part of local life. There are clear personal and economic incentives to keep these beaches clean, which make plastic bans politically palatable despite the inconvenience.


Monmouth County, New Jersey, which earned nearly $2.5 billion in tourism revenue in 2016, adopted what Clean Ocean Action called the most comprehensive plastic ban in the United States. The law was passed in May 2018, just before the start of beach season, and prohibits local businesses from distributing plastic bags, straws and Styrofoam containers. Local coverage of the ban indicates that it was well-received by residents and business owners. Monmouth Beach Mayor Sue Howard explained that, “If you live on the Shore, and you walk on the beach, and you see plastic straws and Styrofoam containers, you know what the damage is.”


Where Plastic Bans Fall Short


It’s encouraging that local governments are focusing on passing laws to fight plastic litter. Unfortunately, while these laws may reduce the most visible form of plastic pollution, it could be at the expense of other environmental impacts. That’s because, somewhat ironically, disposable plastic bags require fewer resources (land, water, CO2 emissions, etc.) to produce than paper, cotton or reusable plastic bags—by a wide margin.


For example, Denmark’s Ministry of Environment and Food found that you would need to reuse a paper bag at least 43 times for its per-use environmental impacts to be equal to or less than that of a typical disposable plastic bag used one time. An organic cotton bag must be reused 20,000 times to produce less of an environmental impact than a single-use plastic bag. That would be like using a cotton bag every day for nearly 55 years. (Note that these figures aggregate the bags’ impact on water use, CO2 emissions, land use and more, but they do not include their impact on plastic pollution.)


Banning plastic straws is also increasingly popular. Starbucks recently announced that it would phase out use of plastic straws by the year 2020. Straws don’t provide as much utility as bags, so for many this is an easy adjustment.


But these bans leave the impression that they solve the plastics pollution problem without much discussion of systematic solutions. As a society, we should think holistically about the products we use and their impacts. We can’t just ban bad products—we must invest in alternatives.


How Consumers, Governments and Businesses Can Beat Plastic Pollution


That same Danish study suggests that the most eco-friendly bag option for consumers is polyester, reused at least 35 times. This keeps plastic pollution out of our natural spaces and reduces the per-use environmental impacts of the bag to the lowest-possible levels. However, it will take a lot more than reusable bags to solve the plastics pollution problem. Right now, only about 9 percent of plastics are recycled globally.


As of January 1, China refused to import most recyclable materials from the United States and other developed countries, claiming the materials exceeded acceptable contamination levels. This has backed up the flow of disposed paper and plastic, causing serious problems for local waste management companies. However, there may be an ironic upside to China’s decision. For too long, the easy option of shipping excess recyclables to China has resulted in underinvestment in in optimizing plastics, maximizing their recovery and reducing waste.


Governments at the state and federal levels need to team up with private industry to address more systemic issues. We need to invest in redesigning plastics so that they can be readily broken down into their molecular units and remanufactured into new plastics of the same quality, the essence of a closed loop system. We need better recycling technology that can address the major obstacle of recycling plastics: about 25 percent of plastics collected are contaminated and therefore unusable. We need to reinvest government budgets in the infrastructure and associated policies needed for these systemic solutions. Once these technologies are deployed at a large scale, we can start recapturing the economic value of plastics, incentivizing their recovery and recycling, while minimizing plastic pollution and overconsumption of natural resources.


We need a wider array of smart public policies, a recycling infrastructure that’s right-sized for the problem, better recycling technology and new business models. Banning single-use plastic bags and straws without significant further action is putting a finger on a spigot at a time when we need to suppress the tidal wave.


Mathy Stanislaus serves as a Circular Economy Fellow at the World Resource Institute (WRI). His role is advance WRI’s consideration of circular economy in its programs and WRI’s role in assisting its partners to develop strategies to accelerate the transition to a circular economy. Prior to his current role, Mr. Stanislaus served in the Obama Administration as Assistant Administrator for US EPA's Office of Land and Emergency Management.


The mission of the World Resources Institute is to move human society to live in ways that protect Earth’s environment and its capacity to provide for the needs and aspirations of current and future generations. The article is reposted by permission.

 

NERC welcomes Guest Blog submissions. To inquire about submitting articles contact Athena Lee Bradley, Projects Manager at athena(at)nerc.org. Disclaimer: Guest blogs represent the opinion of the writers and may not reflect the policy or position of the Northeast Recycling Council, Inc.

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Northeast Recycling Council and ReMA Launch Sustainable Materials Careers Program

By Waste Advantage • October 9, 2026
In partnership, Northeast Recycling Council (NERC) and Recycled Materials Association (ReMA), announce the launch of a new pilot initiative: the Sustainable Materials Careers Program (SMCP). Building on the success of NERC’s Emerging Professionals Program, which offers new professionals exposure to sustainable materials management (SMM), mentorship, and career guidance, SMCP will focus on college students – with the potential to engage high school students in the future. The program will give students a deeper understanding of career opportunities in SMM and provide hands-on pathways from the classroom to the workplace. Through Career Exploration events and professional development training, students will gain industry exposure, build foundational knowledge, and chart a clear path toward careers in sustainable materials. Career Exploration events will be part of ReMA’s Recycling Jobs Day initiative, a national program connecting students with careers in the recycled materials industry. Event activities will include tours of material recovery, recycling, and/or manufacturing facilities, as well as panels highlighting diverse career pathways in the sector. “Many students want to work in sustainability, but they rarely see the diverse career paths available across the materials lifecycle,” said Megan Schulz-Fontes, Executive Director of NERC. “By combining hands-on facility tours with foundational training, this program opens doors across every corner of the industry—including state and municipal governance, equipment and technology manufacturers, recycling infrastructure, and corporate sustainability teams—ensuring the next generation is equipped to lead.” The material economy accounts for over 40% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to the EPA. Recycling and composting in the United States prevent the release of roughly 186 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent into the air each year—an impact equal to taking over 39 million gasoline-powered cars off the road annually. Compared to the processing and transportation needed for mining, drilling, harvesting, or other methods of extracting natural resources for manufacturing, the use of recycled materials typically produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Global demand for green jobs is growing at 8% per year. Yet, LinkedIn’s Global Green Skills Report highlights a shortage of qualified talent, with many roles unfilled due to limited training and a lack of mixed skills, as noted by the Institute of Sustainability Studies. SMCP addresses these gaps by increasing awareness of sustainable materials careers and offering free training to participating students. In the 2026-2027 academic year, NERC plans to hold six Career Exploration events and provide enrollment in its Foundations of Sustainable Materials and Recycling course at no cost to students from participating Academic Partners. Current Academic Partners include MIT Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Rowan University Advanced Materials & Manufacturing Institute, University of Massachusetts Lowell, University of New Hampshire Sustainability Institute, University of Southern Maine, and Yale Office of Sustainability. NERC invites forward-thinking businesses and organizations to support and expand the Northeast Sustainable Materials Careers Program. By becoming a Program Partner, sponsors directly enable more students to access free training and hands-on industry exposure—building a strong, qualified pipeline for the future circular economy workforce. Read on Waste Advantage.

Ramping up reuse of construction materials

By Brian Clark Howard | Resource Recycling • October 8, 2026
The construction and demolition industries send a massive volume of materials to landfills, but reuse can make a big difference, panelists said at the Northeast Recycling Council’s (NERC) Annual Rethink Resource Use Conference in Plainsboro, New Jersey on Wednesday. In New York City, 60% of the total waste stream is construction and demolition (C&D) waste, said Kelly Tigera, the founder and CEO of Orbit , an online marketplace for reclaimed construction materials launched in 2005 in the Big Apple. In the US overall, C&D waste has been estimated at 23% of the total waste stream . According to the EPA , 600 million tons of C&D debris were generated in the United States in 2018, which was more than twice the amount of generated municipal solid waste. Just over 455 million tons of C&D debris were directed to next use (primarily as aggregate); the rest went to landfills. Construction is “one of the most wasteful industries,” said panelist Andrew Sigal, a market manager at the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). “Within that 145 million tons lies a significant opportunity to really decrease waste and direct more material towards its highest and best use.” At New York construction sites, 10% to 15% of all new materials are thrown away unused, said Tigera. So reuse has the potential to draw from brand new stock as well as used materials. And reuse can help address supply chain and affordability concerns; construction material costs have increased 43% since February 2020, said Tigera. “In terms of value for users, we can provide access to free and low-cost materials,” said Tigera. “We can provide tax write-offs for donated materials, and we also help sellers save on hauling and dumping costs.” From panels to seats Tigera gave a few examples of recent salvage efforts that have leveraged her marketplace. Deconstruction contractor CO Adaptive recovered wood panels from an auditorium at Hunter Brookdale School of Nursing. The panels ended up in four different sites around Brooklyn. Auditorium seats were donated to SoHo Playhouse. In another project, Orbit worked with the city’s Port Authority to salvage historic bricks from retaining walls in Lincoln Tunnel. Orbit is also working with the agency to design a reuse plan for a bus terminal that is scheduled to come down in a few years. New York City also has a new initiative called the Circular Construction Hub, which is going to be a reuse center for contractors where they can drop off material. Orbit is the online marketplace for that project, said Tigera. She added that some of the most popular materials on her platform have been doors, shelving, cabinets and acoustic panels. In addition to traditional contractors, buyers include the film industry (for building sets) and the events industry. A lot of reuse work is already happening around the city and country, “we’re just helping it scale,” said Tigera. Yarden Jarari, an architect and sustainability adviser at Arcadis , a design and engineering firm, said her recent research suggests the value of pilot projects when it comes to reuse in the C&D space. “You can have pilot projects that are not going to totally overwhelm someone trying something new,” she said. “And also iterate over time with a lot of long-term relationships where you have repeat partners, repeat teams, and have that opportunity to build and bite off more and more rather than trying to do everything at once.” Jarari added that she would like to see “ways that we can start to measure outbound materials that are coming out of a space the same way that we’re thinking about what’s going into a space.” Having that data could make it easier to drive reuse, she said. Sigal said certification systems, like those offered from the USGBC, can incentivize reuse. The organization’s True certification for zero waste (with Green Business Certification Inc.) has a particular focus on reuse, he noted. As a case study, Sigal mentioned 270 Park Ave. in midtown Manhattan. The 60-story headquarters of JPMorganChase opened in October 2025 as a LEED platinum project. The previous building at the site, the former headquarters for Union Carbide, was deconstructed, with 97% of its materials reused or recycled. Evolving mindset The panelists agreed that the mindset in the C&D industry is starting to tilt toward reuse, spurred by environmental and cost concerns. “Our thesis has been if we can provide demand and show that there’s demand for these materials, everything else will wind up behind it,” said Tigera. She added that government procurement can help drive more reuse in the industry. Tigera also pointed out that salvaged materials are often routed through resellers, who clean and organize them, making purchasing of used goods as easy as buying new. Sigal added that he would like to see more policy support for C&D reuse. In New York, several bills have been introduced that would bolster reporting and encourage reuse. “Building reuse saves carbon, but also saves resources from having to be extracted, harvested, manufactured and installed,” said Sigal. “Not to mention the end-of-life considerations there.” Read on Resource Recycling.

Improving recycling access for underserved communities

By Brian Clark Howard | Resource Recycling • October 7, 2026
There are some universal lessons for those working to improve recycling access to underserved communities, panelists said at the Northeast Recycling Council’s (NERC) Annual Rethink Resource Use Conference in Plainsboro, New Jersey, outside Princeton on Tuesday. Angie Lemar, a planner in Wisconsin with Foth Infrastructure and Environment, an engineering firm, said the key is to “understand the communities that you’re reaching out to.” For instance, providing recycling education in languages that are most spoken in your community is key, said Lemar, as well as understanding the needs of your specific community. Mark Dancy of WasteZero, a company that works with municipalities to increase recycling participation, added that “convenience is universal. So the more convenient everything is, the more effective it is.” “For a long time the conversation has been how do we recycle better, and we’re trying to change that and think about well maybe we need to think more about who actually gets to recycle than just how to do it better,” said John Atkinson, professor of environmental engineering at New York’s University at Buffalo. Atkinson and his colleagues have been studying how to quantify that recycling inequality. After crunching data from 84,000 Census tracts and 130 million buildings across the continental US, Atkinson and team found that plastic packaging waste generation is stable across socioeconomic groups. “Everybody generates the same amount of plastic waste,” he said. Yet there’s a statistically significant relationship between MRF proximity and recycling rates—the communities closest to MRFs recycle more. And Atkinson and colleagues found that communities near MRFs are 30% to 55% wealthier and 14% to 19% more college educated than communities farther away from MRFs. “The summary here is that wealthier, more educated states recycle more,” said Atkinson. He added that the study is a first step toward better understanding recycling access around the country. The data could be used to help site future MRFs, he noted. “Ultimately what we are trying to do is create a more equitable system,” said Atkinson, whose study was published in Nature Communications Sustainability . The first author was Zeinab Mousania. Balancing grants Lemar of Foth Infrastructure and Environment talked about her team’s work with Ramsey County, Minnesota. Ramsey includes St. Paul and is the second most populous county in the state. The goal was to “create a more equitable dispersion of their recycling funds,” Lemar said. So Foth applied the CDC’s EJI Explorer tool for environmental justice to Ramsey County, which ranks Census tracts on 36 environmental, social and health factors. Prior to that, the funding mechanism for recycling grants had been purely based on population. But after the tool was run, the county’s municipalities were divided into three tiers. Those places that the tool identified as most burdened in terms of health and environment were flagged to receive the highest payments per household. Communities are then able to spend the money on a range of recycling enhancement projects. “We’re seeing communities that previously were not receiving very much money now actually be able to implement some programming because their funding dollars have gone from $1,500 to over $20,000,” said Lemar. Dancy of WasteZero said roughly 15% of communities in the country are considered recycling deserts, with little to no access. These are especially clustered in the South. Some of those communities formerly had access but lost it due to budget cuts, excess contamination or other issues. Due to the inertia in government “it’s really hard to get them reinstated,” said Dancy. One of the solutions WasteZero suggests is telling communities that have trash pickup service but not recycling to begin sorting high-value recyclables, such as aluminum cans, in separate bags within the regular waste stream. Then, those bags can be pulled out and sorted at the waste facility for a fraction of the cost of running separate recycling collection services. Politics? Atkinson said every reviewer that looked at his team’s paper said they needed to add a variable for politics, specifically red state versus blue state. “I don’t buy into that,” he said. “Recycling is an economics problem.” He added that new technology can help improve access in rural areas. For instance, apps could alert a hauler not to come out to a specific house that’s remote if the bin is empty on a particular day. Session moderator Caroline Mitchell, the director of community partnerships development with The Recycling Partnership, said additional funding for recycling provided through extended producer responsibility (EPR) systems in several states often includes earmarks for environmental justice. “(EPR) does provide an amazing increase in resources and additional focus and clarity to help on a lot of our environmental justice fronts,” said Mitchell. Atkinson added, “I think one of the things that our work shows is that people want to recycle, independent of where they live and how much money they make and what level of education they have.” Read on Resource Recycling.