I like to think of myself as a good caretaker of the planet. To that end, I am faithful about placing my recyclable waste items—plastic containers, glass bottles and jars, cans, paper and cardboard—into my recycling bin every week and lugging them down to the curb for pickup. I do my best to follow the guidelines about what to recycle, and I make every effort to ensure that the items I place in the bin are as clean and free of food and liquids as possible. Heck, I even put my peanut butter jars through the dishwasher before tossing them in.

So when I see people chucking plastic water bottles and soda cans out of car windows or throwing perfectly recyclable items in the trash, I get frustrated. And when I see news reports about massive floating islands of plastic garbage polluting our oceans, I can’t help but wonder: If we’re all supposed to be recycling, where is all of this plastic waste coming from?

A Google search led me to a 2018 study by the University of Georgia that determined that only 9 percent of plastic that is produced ever actually gets recycled and that the majority of it ends up in landfills or in the natural environment. I also learned that China, which for many years was the main buyer of recyclable materials from the U.S., passed a waste import ban in 2018 that has caused a drastic decline in the market for recyclables and will, according to the same study, leave 111 metric tons of plastic waste unaccounted for by 2030.

It all starts to feel overwhelming. Does all the effort I spend on recycling do nothing more than give me a false sense of my own ability to make a difference in the face of this seemingly insurmountable global crisis? I needed to know. So I set out on a mission to find out what really happens after my recyclables are hauled away from the curb, and to answer the question burning in my brain: Is recycling a waste of time?

I started by reaching out to some of the municipalities in our area that provide curbside pickup of residential recyclables: Sarasota County, the City of 

Sarasota and Manatee County. Despite grim environmental forecasts, all the local recycling supervisors I talked to affirmed that, while there are always challenges to overcome, community- wide recycling remains a worthwhile endeavor that has a positive impact on our environment.

“Recycling still plays a crucial role in waste reduction and significantly decreases the amount of material that makes its way to landfills,” says Eric Morales, the recycling supervisor for Manatee County. “But,” he adds, “recyclable materials aren’t always processed perfectly. Human error is the main culprit in the efficiency and success of any recycling program.”

Getting as many residents as possible to even consider recycling is the obvious first benchmark for any successful program. In Sarasota County, 94 percent of households recycle, while within Sarasota’s city limits, the rate is 75 percent. In Manatee County, it’s just 56 percent.

The other hurdle is in limiting a  municipality’s “contamination rate,” which refers to the percentage of collected recyclables that are rejected and sent to the landfill, either because they are not on the list of accepted items or because they contain too much food debris to be processed. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, as much as 25 percent of all material in recycling bins in the U.S. is contaminated, and local municipalities aim to keep their contamination rates even lower—under 20 percent. The City of Bradenton, like an increasing number of municipalities nationwide, actually suspended its curbside recycling program in 2022, in part due to its extremely high contamination rate of 60 percent. (The city does, however, still maintain 11 drop-off locations for residential recycling.)

To raise participation rates while lowering contamination rates, many local recycling services have shifted from dual-stream recycling, in which consumers must separate recyclables by type into two bins, to single-stream recycling, in which all materials are placed into one bin. According to Hunter Jensen, the program coordinator for Keep Sarasota County Beautiful, Sarasota County saw a 16 percent increase in residential recycling participation in 2022 after shifting to single stream two years earlier.

But single-stream recycling presents challenges. People often place items in bins that are not recyclable, hoping that they might be—it’s called “wish-cycling.”

“The biggest disadvantage to single-stream recycling is the quality of recycling that we receive,” says Jensen. “People see that bigger cart and they think they can put more into it, but some of the things they are putting in there are ‘maybes.’”

Hoping to learn more, I moseyed over to Sarasota City Hall to sit down with Todd Kucharski, the city’s public works general manager. Kucharski believes that one of the biggest challenges that recycling programs face is the confusion caused by requirements that vary from area to area.

“We don’t have a national standard for recycling materials,” Kucharski says. “If you went to California or 

Idaho, the requirements for recycling might be different because of how they are processed and where the processing is done, and certain materials might not be accepted. We have a lot of seasonal residents in our area who come here from other places. They have to be reeducated to understand how recycling works in Sarasota.”

To combat this, the city places informational stickers on top of all recycling bins to alert consumers to what they can and can’t recycle. “Our drivers are also our ambassadors,” says Kucharski. “If they see an issue with how a resident is recycling, they can take the opportunity to educate them about it.”

The city, like most municipalities, doesn’t process its own recyclables. It contracts that task out to Manatee County’s Waste Pro, one of several private companies that work with local governments in the region. “Our contract states that if a load comes in and it’s 20 percent contaminated, it can be rejected and it has to go to the landfill,” says Kucharski. As of press time, he told me, “We are proud to say we have not had a single truck rejected.” The city’s most recent audit, from January 2020, showed an overall contamination rate of just 16 percent.

Aside from “wish-cycled” items, some of the main drivers of high contamination rates are peanut butter jars, pizza boxes and plastic bags. “Peanut butter is tricky,” says Kucharski. “Like others, I do my best to get it all out of the jar, and it helps if you can let it sit with some dish soap for a little while. Some residents aren’t very patient, and they’ll just throw it in the bin without cleaning it. We appreciate residents doing the best they can, because if it’s completely covered with the stuff, it will be pulled out.”

“Pizza boxes,” Kucharski continues, “are harder to accept due to the greasy residue they usually contain. Some people cut the unstained tops off the pizza boxes and recycle those. We do accept pizza boxes that are clean, but they are few and far between.”

Another common mistake is placing recyclables into plastic bags, which can become caught up in sorting machinery and cause problems. “If you use plastic bags to bring your recyclables to the bin, be sure to dump them out,” he says. “We cannot accept plastic bags of any kind.” Styrofoam products are also not accepted for recycling—however, grocery stores such as Publix, Winn-Dixie and Walmart have bins where consumers can recycle plastic bags and Styrofoam, and office supply chains such as Staples accept certain items for recycling that are not collected curbside, like batteries, electronics, and ink and toner cartridges.

I was still skeptical. What really happens when the truck drives off with my recyclables? The city arranged for me to take a tour of a Waste Pro facility near the Sarasota Bradenton International Airport that receives between 2,200 and 2,500 tons of recyclable material every month. So one morning I donned a fluorescent yellow safety vest and hardhat and followed my guides (and my nose) to the place where the recycling magic happens.

The main processing area at Waste Pro is a noisy, cavernous space filled with the continuous hum and motion of machinery, a maze of moving conveyor belts and the constant beeping of collection trucks backing up at the rear of the facility to dump out their loads onto the “tipping floor.”

From there, front-end loaders push the waste onto a large belt that conveys it up to the first set of picking stations, where workers remove as many non-recyclable items as they can and toss them into trash bins. The waste stream then moves through a series of magnetized hoppers, screening cabinets and optical scanners that separate out metals, flat cardboard, paper and different types of plastics. Steel cans go to the metal scrapyard, while heavier glass and ceramic items fall into a giant glass breaker, which crushes them into small pieces. (All the reclaimed glass from Waste Pro is sent to a local glass recycling company called Strategic Inc., which happens to be located just a couple blocks away.)

Once the plastics, aluminum cans, cardboard and mixed paper are separated out, they arrive at baling machines, which compress them into dense bundles that await shipment from the warehouse. Everything that remains heads up one final conveyor belt and drops down into garbage trucks headed for the landfill. The whole operation runs continuously all day, five days a week, with two worker shifts per day.

After my tour, I spoke with Waste Pro division vice president Bob ten Haaf. He told me that recyclable materials are stock market-traded commodities whose values are indexed monthly, and prices can fluctuate greatly based on supply, demand and other factors. According to ten Haaf, Waste Pro deals mostly with third-party commodities brokers who arrange for the purchase and delivery of the materials, but they also sometimes sell directly to mills that turn raw materials into new products. “We do sell a lot domestically,” he says. “A lot of the plastic goes to carpet manufacturers. We used to sell a lot to China years ago, but now we’ve had to get more geared up in the United States for recycling. And believe it or not, I think a lot of that is due to Amazon. We can all laugh at Amazon, but they’re really good about recycling, and most of their single-use boxes contain a lot of reused cardboard.”

Per its contract with the city, Waste Pro gives Sarasota a share of its monthly revenue to help offset the costs of collection and processing. “Recycling’s not cheap,” ten Haaf says, “but it’s important and the city recognizes that, and we continue to do it. It’s a great partnership.”

“In Florida,” Kucharski adds, “we’ve learned that we can’t always rely on the outside. We have to be proactive, and more and more opportunities have popped up in this region for people to take these types of materials and reprocess them.”

Once the bales of recyclable plastics arrive at a mill, they are sorted by color, cleaned and sterilized, and then shredded into flakes or melted into pellets, which can be used to make new plastic products. My curiosity about the local connection led me to the website of Englewood’s Recycled Plastic Factory, a company that builds indoor and outdoor furniture from lumber made out of recycled plastic, including benches, bike racks, picnic tables and waste receptacles.

I may not be able to singlehandedly solve the world’s waste problem, but as I stand over the sink rinsing out empty orange juice containers, I’m reminded of the words of activist Rebecca Solnit: “The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything, and everything we can save is worth saving.” There will come a day when the toll that plastic takes on the environment becomes so great that the human race is forced to figure out a new solution. But I can’t figure that out all on my own. For now, I’ll keep putting my peanut butter jars in the dishwasher and taking my recycling bin down to the curb. I just can’t give up on the idea that every little bit each of us can do makes a difference.