Recycling Council Emphasizes Importance of Supply

Colin Staub • July 30, 2024

Resource Recycling


With industry-wide attention on building up recycled material end user demand, the Northeast Recycling Council is urging materials recovery stakeholders not to forget about ensuring there is adequate supply.


The organization last week published a “Guide to Increasing Recycling Supply,” a resource for stakeholders across the recycling chain. It lays out a number of ways different stakeholders have successfully built up local material supply and covers all traditional municipal recyclables.


In announcing the guide, NERC noted that “supply and demand issues are primary components to recycling market development.” But the organization expressed that the industry dialogue has skewed largely in one direction of late.


“For many years, increasing demand for recycled materials has taken precedence over supply issues,” NERC wrote.


The council in 2023 formed a supply side policy committee aiming to “explore, discuss, and write a policy guide about supply side strategies to increase the supply of post-consumer materials to the marketplace.” The new publication is the result of that process.

A majority of the Northeast U.S.-focused guide’s case studies are government-led strategies to increase supply, but it also highlights efforts spearheaded by nonprofits, MRF operators and, in areas with container deposit systems, redemption centers.


It points to Prince George’s County’s public outreach campaign in Maryland, which included bilingual communication efforts in high-contamination service areas where county officials theorized a language barrier was hampering proper recycling practices. The case study provides several lessons county regulators learned from the campaign. For instance, when trying to reach non-English speaking residents, recycling staffers had to get creative: “Attending school meetings to promote proper recycling did not necessarily work because non-English speaking residents were not attending the school meetings, hence, the decision was to visit local supermarkets where parents shop.”

In another example, the guide highlights efforts by the Massachusetts state recycling organization, MassRecycle, to counter the “negative influence of recycling misinformation in the media.” This came after a wave of public attention on problems within the recycling world in 2022, including from a Greenpeace report and the resulting coverage in an NPR story. MassRecycle was concerned the news coverage would mislead local residents into believing the bulk of their recyclables were not being correctly processed, so the organization began a coordinated effort to respond.


“Media stories implying that recycling is landfilled led to the need for professionals to defend both recycling and their personal roles,” the organization wrote in the case study.


That effort included MassRecycle board members giving media interviews with a formulated approach: They would vet the media outlet to ensure they felt it would provide a balanced article, they would avoid acronyms, they would clearly lay out industry background information, and they would limit their discussion to recycling within Massachusetts.


NERC says the supply guide will be a living resource that will expand as more case studies come in.


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August 29, 2025
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By Recycled Materials Association July 29, 2025
The Northeast Recycling Council (NERC) has opened the 2025 Emerging Professionals (EP) Program . Now, in its third year, the program provides professionals who are new to the field of recycling, sustainability, and environmental stewardship with discounted access to NERC’s Conference and Foundations Course, sponsored by their employer organization. EPs gain valuable connections with seasoned industry professionals and peers while engaging in discussions on current trends, challenges, and innovations shaping the industry. This program is designed for those with three or fewer years of experience. “This year, EPs also receive a discount to our Foundations of Sustainable Materials Management course (a live, instructor-led training) developed to provide the key building blocks for understanding the industry,” said Mariane Medeiros, Senior Project Manager at NERC. “It’s a great way to close the loop: gaining both a strong technical foundation and real-world connections in one experience.” Read and Learn More.
By Chaz Miller June 30, 2025
Recycling coordinators know that some people and locations are stubbornly indifferent to recycling. COVID has ruptured civic values and behavior. Creating a recycling culture is harder than ever. Producers know how to sell their products. Now they need to learn how to sell recycling. On July 1, Oregon’s packaging and paper extended producer responsibility (EPR) program begins operating. This will be a first in our country. “Producers”, instead of local governments or private citizens, will be paying to recycle packages and paper products. Colorado’s program begins operating early in 2026. For years we have heard the theory of how packaging EPR will work. At last, we will get results. Five other states also have laws. Their programs should all be operating by 2030. None of the state laws have identical requirements. The Circular Action Alliance, the “producer responsibility organization” responsible for managing the program in most of those states, knows it has a lot on its plate. EPR laws are not new to the U.S. Thirty-two states already have laws that cover a wide variety of products such as electronics, paint, mattresses, batteries, etc. Those laws are relatively simple. Most cover one product. The producer group is a small number of companies. Goals and programs are focused and narrow. They are a mixed bag of success and failure. Packaging EPR is far more complex. The number of covered products is way higher. Thousands of companies are paying for these programs. Goals are challenging. Some are impossible to meet. In addition, local governments treat recycling as a normal service. Their residents will still call them if their recyclables aren’t picked up. It probably hasn’t helped that advocates tout EPR as the solution for recycling’s problems. We are told we will have more collection and better processing with higher recycling rates. Markets will improve and even stabilize. Some of this will happen, but not all. 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