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.


To read the full article click here

Share Post

Coke bottler’s switch to clear PET provides lessons learned

By Resource Recycling • June 18, 2025
A recent case study from the Northeast Recycling Council offers insights on transitioning packaging materials, gleaned from a regional Coca-Cola bottler that switched from green PET to clear for several of its products. The case study, part of NERC’s Guide to Increasing Recycling Supply , explores the process experienced by Coca-Cola Beverages Northeast. The local bottler sells drinks from Coke, Keurig Dr Pepper, Fairlife milk and others in New England and upstate New York. Coca-Cola North America announced in August 2022 it was switching to clear PET packaging for its Sprite, Fresca and Mello Yello drinks. Like other beverage brands, Coca-Cola sells concentrates and syrups to its nearly 70 bottling partners in North America for manufacture, packaging and distribution, but does not own or operate most local bottling companies, according to its website. The primary objective of the switch was to improve the quality of post-consumer PET bales by reducing color contamination, which in turn would improve bottle recyclability and increase the efficiency of plastic reprocessing, the report said. The company did not publish any formal goals, but the move aimed to help increase supply of PCR suitable for use in food-grade applications, according to NERC. Although the study acknowledges that Coca-Cola’s initiative was voluntary as part of its internal sustainability strategy, the lessons learned can be useful for other companies considering making changes. Read the full article here.

NERC states preference for mechanical recycling

By Waste Today Magazine • June 9, 2025
The Brattleboro, Vermont-based Northeast Recycling Council (NERC) has adopted a policy position on chemical recycling that was developed by a subcommittee of its Chemical Recycling Committee. NERC, whose members are drawn from 11 northeastern states, says the purpose of the policy statement is to articulate guiding principles for environmentally responsible chemical recycling of plastics, which it notes also is referred to as molecular or advanced recycling. NERC's Chemical Recycling Committee was established to better understand these processes and their environmental impacts to make informed policy decisions. In line with its mission of moving toward a more circular and sustainable economy, NERC says mechanical recycling currently is the preferred method of plastic waste processing, as it creates fewer environmental impacts than other currently available chemical recycling processes. View the full article here.

Northeast Recycling Council Publishes Chemical Recycling Policy Position

By Waste Advantage Magazine • June 2, 2025
The Northeast Recycling Council (NERC) published its Chemical Recycling Policy Position on May 30, 2025. The purpose of the policy statement is to articulate guiding principles for environmentally responsible chemical recycling of plastics. NERC supports the conservation of natural resources, waste minimization, and recognizes the role of recycling in reaching these goals. Plastic is a prevalent material for packaging and other products due to its material properties. Producing virgin plastic from fossil fuels is an extractive process with negative environmental and social impacts. Therefore, NERC supports reduction, reuse, and recycling processes that displace virgin production in plastics where environmentally preferable. You can view the policy statement here: https://www.nerc.org/chemical-recycling . View the full article here.
More Posts