From the first curbside collection programs in the late 1960s, to the thousands of curbside recycling programs today, the material going into curbside collection bins or rollcarts has changed a great deal. Today's waste and recycling streams are more diverse, with numerous grades of paper, plastics and various metals added to programs over the years as collection and processing technologies advanced to where massive amounts of mixed materials can effectively be sorted. Paper (newsprint, in particular) had dominated recycling collection volumes, but the turn of the century brought greater numbers of people consuming media on devices rather than in print. From 2000 to 2013, newsprint shipments, to take just one grade, declined by 50 percent. This precipitous drop left many materials recovery facilities (MRFs) with excess operational capacity and staff time. That phenomenon, coupled with strong overseas demand for plastics, led many MRFs to begin acceptance of bulky-rigid non-bottle plastics, expanding again the list of materials to be collected in residential curbside recycling.
展开▼
