A simple online game can teach people to more accurately sort waste and recycling with lasting results, a new study from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver has found.

States and local agencies have enacted or are considering food waste disposal bans or mandates. Two key questions that need to be answered prior to taking this step are:

How much food waste are we talking about?
Is there adequate processing capacity at our state’s or region’s composting and anaerobic digestion facilities?

Having this data helps calculate a realistic assessment of how a ban or mandate can be adopted and implemented successfully.

Earlier this year, the American recycling community was stunned by a knockout punch from the Far East as new rulings from China turned a once profitable relationship upside down. In January 2018, Beijing stated that it was banning intake of most paper and plastic waste in accordance with a new environmental policy designed to free China from being the world’s “dumping ground.” The ban extends to other materials as well, and American recyclers are now scrambling to find a way to dispose of tons of material that normally would be enroute to Asia.

Over the last year, staff from Resource Recycling Magazine created a chronological rundown of import policy action across Asia to help stakeholders get a firm grasp on the Chinese import policies that are reshaping materials recovery around the planet. 

An end-of-year report from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality shows the state’s recycling rate in 2017 was 42.8 percent, slightly better than the previous year.

Doubling of the bottle deposit to 10 cents was a booster for Oregon’s recycling race. But recycling had setbacks too, including the closure of local paper mills that bought recycled paper and China deciding to cut off recycling imports from the United States.

Metro is going back to the drawing board in its grand plan to convert the Portland area's food scraps into renewable energy, after failing to come to terms with Waste Management to build a processing facility in conjunction with the Portland sewage treatment plant in North Portland.

There has been much interest among paper industry stakeholders about how China’s recovered paper import policy might affect the recovered fiber supply chain.

Getting people to recycle is a challenge. Getting them to recycle as much as they can and to do it correctly can feel impossible. After all, different materials and housing environments present enormous barriers when encouraging recycling. 

That notion is particularly clear when trying to recover food scraps from multi-family buildings. Is success in that realm even possible? The answer is yes – but an understanding of the human factor in changing deep-seated attitudes and behaviors is a requisite for success.