Recycling: An Opaque Industry

The Recycling Industry in the United States is a for-profit industry. They profit from taking recyclable material, refining it, and reselling it to companies at a cheaper price than producing the material from scratch. If you look at the demand side of the recycling industry, an array of multi-billion dollar companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are incentivized to buy recycled goods and reduce their materials costs. If you look at the supply side, ~300 million tons of trash are generated annually in the United States. Estimates suggest that up to 75% of that is recyclable. On paper, it seems clear that maximizing the amount of trash the US recycles is in everyone's interest. One issue though, less than a third of the trash ends up recycled. Areeb, co-founder of Glacier, breaks down the multi-layered reasoning behind why the Recycling industry is unable to handle this volume of trash, and what Glacier is doing to address this.