In Seattle, as in most cities around the country, there are a number of items that you aren’t supposed to put in the curbside recycling bin: bubble wrap, for instance, or multilayer plastic packaging like potato chip bags and candy wrappers. This kind of trash is often too flimsy or contaminated to be accepted through the normal recycling stream.
Seattle-area residents who don’t want to send that stuff to the landfill have another option: Ridwell, a subscription-based waste collection service. Ridwell picks up people’s so-called “hard-to-recycle” refuse curbside, hauls it to warehouses, and sorts it into bales. Then — the main selling point — Ridwell says it will send those bales to reprocessing plants, where they can be converted into new products.
On a recent tour of Ridwell’s Seattle warehouse, representatives from the company showed Grist a number of those converted products. One was a black cube of landscaping material, made from discarded multilayer plastic packaging and meant to help water drain more slowly during a rainstorm. Another was a gravel substitute used for hydroponic plants and gardening. A third was a pot for small shrubs.
The products were nifty — unquestionably more so than the junk they were made from, which otherwise might have festered in a landfill. “Reduce where you can, Ridwell where you can’t,” the company’s CEO, Ryan Metzger, told Grist.
In the public’s mind, and to many governments and industry groups, recycling happens any time a used product is refashioned into something new. It’s this definition that allows so many T-shirts, tote bags, tennis shoes, and other consumer goods to incorporate old plastic water bottles and be labeled as “made with recycled content.” Trex, for example — a company that receives much of Ridwell’s plastic film — claims to make “eco-friendly composite decks from an innovative blend of up to 95 percent recycled plastic film and reclaimed sawdust.” The company calls itself “one of the largest plastic film recyclers in the U.S.”
But is it really recycling to turn plastic packaging into an entirely different product, if that product itself isn’t recyclable?
Many people involved in the recycling industry say yes. Metzger cited the Merriam-Webster definition of the word, which says that recycling means processing something “in order to regain material for human use.” For the experts and entrepreneurs who favor a broad definition of recycling, it’s obviously better to turn a plastic bag into a flower pot than to put it in the garbage. This group of people tends to be invested in boosting the official plastics recycling rate above the current dismal status quo of just 5 percent in the U.S.
But a small number of researchers and environmental advocates, who are concerned with reducing waste more broadly, think the word should refer only to the conversion of a used product back into a new version of itself, or something of similar utility. They’d consider a glass bottle, for instance, to be “recyclable” because it can be crushed down, melted, and reshaped into a new bottle a virtually infinite number of times. Most plastic products, by contrast, can be reprocessed only once — if at all — by turning them into lower quality products that are eventually destined for the trash bin. Although such reprocessing prolongs the life of the plastic, it’s a one-way trajectory that ultimately ends at a landfill or incinerator. Such a system isn’t recycling, advocates argue — it’s “downcycling.”
“Taking a plastic bottle and turning it into part of a pair of sneakers that after a year will be buried or burned is not perpetuating a cycle,” said Kevin Budris, deputy director of Just Zero, a nonprofit that advocates for waste reduction. In that “linear voyage,” he observed, plastic still ends up as garbage. “There’s no ‘cycle’ there.”
The conventional recycling process degrades the microscopic fibers
that make up plastic bottles.
Jesse Nichols and Parker Ziegler / Grist
It may seem wonky to quibble so much over recycling’s technical definition. But experts say the stakes are high, because of the huge amount of goodwill people have toward the idea of recycling — and because of the way plastics companies have promoted it to justify ever-increasing production of single-use plastics. At the heart of the debate is the question of whether recycling is a valuable activity in and of itself, or if it’s only worthwhile when it reduces the amount of raw resource extraction needed to create new goods.
Companies’ use of the word recycling to describe linear processes “does real harm,” Budris added. It “gives consumers a false sense of confidence that what they’re buying is sustainable or environmentally friendly, when these industries know that is very far from the truth.”
When it comes to the definition of recycling, virtually everyone agrees on at least one baseline: It involves the conversion of a used product — one that otherwise would have been discarded — into something new. That’s what organizations as varied as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Association of Plastics Recyclers, an industry group, say in their descriptions of the concept. Other definitions, like one from the Solid Waste Association of North America, define recycling as the whole suite of activities — collection, sorting, marketing, and processing — needed to give used materials a second life.
But beyond this conceptual framework, few government agencies and industry organizations devote any attention to what materials are ultimately turned into. They don’t differentiate between, say, an aluminum can being converted into another can, and a granola bar wrapper getting incorporated into a carpet.
Before the invention of plastics, no one seemed to be concerned with this distinction between linear and circular reprocessing. Most industrial-scale recycling in the early 20th century involved metal, which is inherently recyclable multiple times, with low loss rates, or the amount of material that gets wasted during reprocessing.
Plastic, which companies began to mass-produce in the form of single-use products after World War II, complicated things. Unlike metal or glass, plastic degrades every time it’s ground down or melted, meaning it’s difficult to turn it into new products without the addition of virgin material. Even the plastic in water bottles, the most widely reprocessed type of plastic, is mostly not turned back into new bottles, but downgraded into less pure products. Some plastics are so filled with chemical additives that it’s unsafe to reprocess them into products that will come into contact with food.
Paper faces a similar problem: High-quality cardboard, printer paper, and cardstock can only be reprocessed about five to seven times before its fibers get too short for another use cycle. But it was plastic — not paper — that by the 1960s and ’70s was ending up everywhere in the natural environment. And so, despite knowing about the shortcomings of plastics recycling, industry groups promoted recycling in order to neutralize concern among the public and fend off the threat of government regulations.
These efforts were wildly successful. Ads, newspaper editorials, and lobbying to put the chasing arrows recycling symbol on all sorts of plastic products helped make recycling synonymous with environmentalism and moral goodness. For plastics in particular, they convinced the public that recycling was far more effective than it really was. By 2019, nearly 60 percent of respondents to a national survey said — incorrectly — that plastics are “endlessly recyclable,” and more than a quarter believed that plastics are more recyclable than glass or metal.
More recent surveys have shown that an overwhelming majority of consumers overestimate the amount of plastic that gets recycled, while behavioral science experiments have suggested that the availability of recycling bins encourages people to use more plastic. (In reality, the global recycling rate for plastics is just 9 percent. And less than 1 percent of it is ever recycled more than once.)
All of this created a difficult situation for environmental advocates, who, in their efforts to hold large plastic companies accountable for their role in the plastic pollution crisis, have found themselves criticizing one of the most beloved symbols of the environmental movement.
“The biggest hurdle to actually making progress on plastic waste and pollution is this incredible love that people have for the word ‘recycling,’” said Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer and founder of the advocacy group The Last Beach Cleanup.
Experts who favor a broad definition of recycling seem unconcerned with the possibility that the word has an unearned halo. To them, it’s axiomatic that it’s environmentally preferable to reprocess materials at least one time, if the alternative is that they will not be reprocessed at all. And they say differentiating between recycling and downcycling would add to the public’s befuddlement over complicated and often conflicting advice about how to recycle.
“Recycling is already really difficult for consumers,” said Aisha Stenning, who leads a plastics initiative for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for a “circular economy” that tries to minimize waste by keeping products and materials in use for as long as possible. Even though only a tiny fraction of plastics actually get recycled, Stenning argued that it’s important to maximize the amount of material that gets collected in curbside bins to ensure that recyclers have access to feedstock.
Tom Szaky, the CEO of TerraCycle, a Ridwell competitor that converts so-called “hard-to-recycle” plastics into new products, acknowledged that “almost all recycling that occurs today is downcycling,” but he doesn’t think there’s a need to communicate that to the public. Rather, he argued that downcycling is recycling — and that quibbling over these definitions is making the problem worse.
Metzger, the Ridwell CEO, shared a similar perspective, saying that downcycling is “part of the recycling umbrella,” and a “step toward keeping waste out of landfills and giving materials a new purpose for many years.” To him, the problem is less about terminology and more about transparency: “The real issue arises when products are labeled with recycling symbols but offer no visibility into whether the material is actually repurposed into something meaningful,” he added. “That’s where confusion and mistrust grow.”
When organizations place any stipulations on what counts as recycling, they tend to involve examples of what recycling isn’t — burning trash in order to generate energy, for example, or using it as landfill cover. But it’s rarely clear where they draw the line. Stenning said that plastic conversion into roadways shouldn’t count as recycling because used material “has to go into something that is then inherently recyclable.” But her organization’s “Global Commitment” — a pledge signed onto by hundreds of transnational companies to use more recycled content and increase the recyclability of their products, among other objectives — does not mention that same condition.
Sarah Dearman, chief innovation officer for the nonprofit The Recycling Partnership, told Grist that the recyclability of reprocessed products is “an important factor to consider,” but not required. Her short definition of a recyclable item: “It has to be accepted for recycling, it has to be able to be recycled in a recycling facility, and then purchased by a responsible end market.” She said her organization is primarily focused on overcoming obstacles in these areas.
She also cited a geographical challenge: A given material might be recyclable back into the same product in one state, but downgraded into nonrecyclable products in another state. “So how would you label that, anyway?” she said.
“The average person, when they hear ‘recycling,’ they think of ‘recycling,’” she added — as if the definition should be self-evident.
The problem with this perspective, according to its critics, is that it takes for granted that there will be an endless supply of plastic trash and focuses on mitigating the harm it causes — rather than trying to limit waste generation in the first place. It runs counter to the meaning suggested by the word “recycling”: a reuse loop in which discarded material repeatedly becomes new products, thereby eliminating waste and displacing the need to use virgin materials.
“We don’t design definitions to make certain businesses feel good.”
Advocates who seek to reduce plastic production, as well as some scientists and industry insiders, narrow the definition of recycling to include only cyclical processes. Bob Gedert, former president of the National Recycling Coalition — a group of roughly two dozen regional recycling programs around the country — said a scenario in which used plastic bottles get turned into landscaping materials, shoes, or tote bags, “is considered ‘downcycling’” and that the coalition is driven to “to keep the recycling definition pure and clean and not allow for downcycling to ‘count’ as recycling.” He added, “We don’t design definitions to make certain businesses feel good.”
Dell, with The Last Beach Cleanup, said genuine recycling should turn a product “back into itself” or into “something of equal class and value” with a loss rate no greater than 20 percent — a standard that, between sorting at material recovery facilities and processing at recyclers, no type of plastic meets.
“What we should be thinking of as recycling just doesn’t work for plastic,” Budris, with Just Zero, said. He added that, despite decades of efforts from industry groups to boost the recycling rate, the needle has not shifted in an appreciable way. “We’re still at effectively a 5 percent plastic recycling rate across the country,” he said, referring to numbers from 2019 and 2021. “And that recycling rate, by the way, includes things like downcycling. So the true recycling rate is actually much lower than that.”
The reason this distinction is important, according to Budris, is because the point of recycling isn’t to reprocess used items for the sake of reprocessing them; it’s to displace the need for virgin materials, which are environmentally costly to extract and process. Displacement doesn’t happen with downcycling, Budris argues, because it makes a given line of products dependent on a continuous stream of waste. Even if companies were somehow able to reprocess 100 percent of the world’s plastic waste, but exclusively through downcycling, there would always be a need to make new plastic.
There’s also evidence that “recycled” plastic products are additive — items that would otherwise not have been made at all. Researchers have argued that more recycling may tamp down prices for both recycled and virgin materials, leading to an increase in supply and demand for new products.
On a global scale, the virgin plastic market is expanding alongside growth in the market for recycled polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, and recycled plastic products. Even companies that have explicitly pledged to reduce their virgin plastic use have made no progress toward that goal since 2018. Globally, demand for virgin plastic is expected to more than double to $322 billion by 2032.
Recent research has mathematically disproven the idea that even genuinely cyclical recycling will automatically reduce the amount of material reaching a landfill or incinerator. Writing in the Journal of Industrial Ecology in 2018, professors Trevor Zink and Roland Geyer suggested that the only environmentally relevant metric by which to evaluate materials reprocessing is its “displacement potential,” its capacity to offset demand for virgin materials. They argued that, due to inevitable losses during reprocessing — even in the most optimal of scenarios — recycling can never be an infinite loop that diverts 100 percent of material from landfills.
“The only way to reduce the amount of material we landfill or incinerate is to reduce the amount we produce in the first place,” the authors wrote. “The ability of recycling to accomplish that goal is uncertain at best.”
These arguments are not new. The term “downcycling” entered common parlance — among environmental advocates, anyway — after the 2002 publication of Cradle to Cradle, which called out the failure of most so-called recycling processes to divert waste from landfills. Producing a rug out of used plastic soda bottles, the authors wrote, would only postpone the plastic’s eventual fate: “The rug is still on its way to a landfill; it’s just stopping off in your house en route.” The linear trajectory of downcycling meant there would always be a need to produce new products from virgin plastic.
Cradle to Cradle’s authors, the architect William McDonough and the chemist Michael Braungart, criticized product manufacturers for “blindly adopting superficial environmental approaches without fully understanding their effects” — hinting that the “agenda to recycle” had turned the activity into an end in itself. Two decades later, the glut of companies offering clothing, furniture, and reusable water bottles made from discarded plastic suggests that this observation is still true.
You’d be hard-pressed to find companies proudly advertising their products as “downcyclable,” or that they support downcycling infrastructure. But plenty of them tout their activities as “upcycling.” TerraCycle, for instance, sells an “upcycled” tote made from discarded mailbags. Vissla, an apparel company, sells T-shirts made with its “upcycled textile system” composed of cotton and plastic waste. Even the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which supports reducing plastic production, sells an “upcycled” crossbody bag made from discarded plastic water bottles.
Upcycling was coined in 1994 by a German mechanical engineer named Reiner Pilz, who defined it as a system “where old products are given more value, not less.” The idea remains popular. In the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s definition of a circular economy, which relies heavily on recycling, products and materials are circulated “at their highest value,” meaning economic value. A 2019 report commissioned by the Department of Energy similarly described upcycling as the conversion of a waste material into “higher-value products,” although academic reports also describe it as increasing the “quality and lifetimes of materials and products.”
Quality and economic value, however, are subjective. They’re sometimes at odds with each other, and they can be poor proxies for environmental benefits. For instance, Repurpose Global, an organization that sells plastic credits to companies so they can say the packaging they create is “plastic neutral,” calls it upcycling when plastic trash is converted into plastic wood boards for use in construction. It’s undeniable that the boards have more economic value than a pile of dirty Snickers wrappers, but technically the final product is less pure than the plastic it was made out of. And because the boards are unlikely to be reprocessed due to the degradation of the plastic they were made of, upcycling doesn’t contribute to a cyclical system any more than downcycling does.
Budris considers the term to be an ironic admission of what his group has been arguing all along. “It’s partially acknowledging that the process is not actually recycling,” he said. “But it’s, like, attempting to upsell it.”
Dell, with The Last Beach Cleanup, said state legislators or an agency like the Federal Trade Commission should step in to more clearly differentiate cyclical recycling from linear processes — perhaps by replacing labels like “made with recycled content” to ones that say “made with downcycled content.”
Although no states have enacted legislation requiring the use of the word downcycling, several have passed laws precluding certain processes — particularly those that turn waste into fuel, like most so-called “chemical recycling” — from counting toward legally mandated recycling targets.
“If changing the name were to prevent people from thinking that the impacts of their consumption can be erased at the point of disposal, I’m all for it,” said Zink, the lead author of the 2018 research paper and an associate professor of management and sustainability at Loyola Marymount University. He added, however, that he generally thinks hand-wringing around recycling terminology is a distraction from more systemic, upstream interventions to scale back the production of unnecessary goods.
“The answer is to buy less stuff,” he said, “and that’s a very difficult to impossible proposition for companies in an open market economy.”
To Ridwell’s credit, the company is forthcoming about where it sends the plastic it collects. Partners like Trex are featured prominently on Ridwell’s website. “It’s all there for everyone to see,” Metzger said, “so consumers can make educated decisions.” He said he supports “a system where everyone has insight into how much recycling is truly happening and what material becomes.”
Still, during Grist’s tour in Seattle, Metzger acknowledged the ambiguity of recycling terminology.
“Recycling, downcycling, upcycling” — it can all be a bit confusing, he said. “We prefer to just use the word ‘circularity.’”
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