The National Picture
The Environmental Protection Agency has counted what America throws away for more than 35 years, and its national overview, current through calendar year 2018, sketches a system that recovers a third of its trash and buries half. That year the country generated 292.4 million tons of municipal solid waste, or 4.9 pounds for every person each day.
Of that stream, roughly 69 million tons went to recycling and another 25 million tons to composting, a combined haul of almost 94 million tons. The EPA puts the resulting recycling and composting rate at 32.1 percent. Nearly 35 million tons, 11.8 percent, were burned with energy recovery, while more than 146 million tons, half of everything generated, went to landfill.
What Is in the Pile
The composition of the waste stream has shifted with how Americans live. Paper and paperboard, long the biggest category, has swung from 28.4 percent of generation down to 23.1 percent since 2010, a decline the EPA ties partly to reports moving to electronic delivery. Food waste now ranks as the fourth largest material, an estimated 63.1 million tons, equal to 21.6 percent of everything tossed.
Yard trimmings tell a policy success story. They came to 35.4 million tons in 2018, or 12.1 percent of generation, a smaller share than the 16.8 percent they held in 1990 even as the total grew, because state laws discouraged sending grass and leaves to landfills and pushed backyard composting and leaving clippings on the lawn.
Plastics run the other way. Generation reached 35.7 million tons in 2018, 12.2 percent of the total and up 4.3 million tons from 2010, driven by durable goods and packaging. As a share of the trash Americans make, plastics have climbed from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 12.2 percent, wobbling between 12.2 and 13.2 percent in recent years.
The Quiet Side of the Ledger
Beyond recycling and composting, the EPA tracks other food management pathways that rarely make headlines: animal feed, bio-based materials and biochemical processing, co-digestion and anaerobic digestion, donation, land application and wastewater treatment. In 2018 those routes handled another 17.7 million tons of food.
The agency’s count covers what consumers discard, from bottles and corrugated boxes to sofas, computers, tires and refrigerators, but leaves out construction and demolition debris, sewage sludge from municipal plants, and industrial waste that is not hazardous, streams the EPA now estimates separately. By the agency’s own accounting, the era of rapid growth in American recycling is over, and the 2018 numbers remain the reference point for how much of the pile the country actually turns back into something useful.
Sources
- National Overview: Facts and Figures on Materials, Wastes and Recycling | US EPA
- U.S. municipal solid waste recycling rate 1980-2018 | Statista
