California is far from reaching its recycling target — and that’s OK

Californians have been conditioned to consider recycling to be an unchallengeable proposition. It’s a moral imperative. Those who don’t cling to the faith are heretics. Yet fewer are practicing what they preach. 

Data from CalRecycle show that of the 77.2 million tons of waste generated in 2024, only 32.4 million tons or 42% was recycled. The rest, 44.7 million tons, was dumped in landfills.  This is far from the state’s goal to reduce, recycle or compost 75% of all the waste produced, a target mandated by 2022’s Senate Bill 54.  In 2024, 10.2 million tons, or 13%, was exported overseas, with another 1% going to Mexico. This is significant: Much of this state’s waste is sent to countries where stewardship of the garbage stream is far too casual. Rather than recycled, it’s often lost into the environment.  Plastic, that bane of California policymakers and activists, is hardly recycled.

“A new report issued by the state’s waste agency shows plastic yogurt containers, shampoo bottles and restaurant takeout trays are being recycled at rates only in the single digits,” reported the Los Angeles Times.

No type of plastic is being recycled at a rate higher than 23%, as Californians throw out “290 Olympic pools worth of plastic” every day. 

Should Californians be angry at themselves? Upset with their neighbors who aren’t as diligent as they are? Maybe even report them to authorities?  No to all. Recycling is not economically efficient nor is it even sensible. 

Recycling has been in “a crisis moment” for years. Cities around the country have been shutting down recycling programs citing cost as the sole and sometimes contributing factor. The economics, according to researcher Howard Husock, are “upside down.” Governments in the waste disposal business, he says, “incur significant costs, over and above what they would have to pay in the absence of recycling.”  

They have to pay workers, and buy equipment, to separate “additional refuse collection (or payment to a contractor to provide the service)” and also pay “firms to accept recyclables.” 

Recycling plastic (and glass) had become so uneconomical that recycling chain rePlanet shut down all 284 of its California sites in 2019. Evergreen Recycling announced a year ago that it was closing part of its Riverside center due to “economic factors.” 

One of the stated goals of recycling is to limit the volume of garbage in landfills. But this misses an important point: Modern landfills aren’t the filthy city dumps of previous generations. 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says they’ve “come a long way in the last few decades.” They “are well-engineered and managed facilities for the disposal of solid waste … located, designed, operated and monitored” to ensure they don’t spoil the environment. 

And there’s plenty of space to build more. 

“All the trash generated by Americans for the next 1,000 years would fit on one-tenth of 1% percent of the land available for grazing,” says author and journalist John Tierney, who, as a New York Times Magazine science columnist became rather infamous in 1996 for having the temerity to point out that “Recycling Is Garbage.” 

There’s no reason to write off this acreage as being “lost forever,” either, writes Tierney, because, once filled to capacity, sanitary landfills are repurposed, “typically covered with grass and converted to parkland.”  

Leaving waste in landfills is also cheaper. The landfill fee for municipal solid waste in Orange County, for instance, is only $60 per ton. In Los Angeles County, the fee is less than $100 a ton. Landfill costs in San Jose are only $28 per ton, while recycling is $147 per ton, according to Okon Recycling, a Dallas-based waste company.  

While it doesn’t fit the narrative, recycling has its own untold dirty story. An overlooked source of the microplastics that have been accumulating in the environment and in our bodies is the shredding step of the plastic recycling process, says a university study. 

And it’s not usual for recyclable material to be shipped over hundreds or even thousands of miles before it reaches its fate, which is often in a landfill — or the ocean.  California has exploited the “positive emotions associated with recycling” with a policy hammer to pressure compliance, as if it were an absolute good with no downside. This needs to change, both for practical reasons and the mental health of the millions for whom recycling is a matter of righteousness. 

Kerry Jackson is the William Clement Fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute and co-author of “The California Left Coast Survivor’s Guide.”