EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announces new national goal for recycling—increasing the U.S. recycling rate to 50 percent by 2030.
Administrator Wheeler made the announcement at the November 17th opening of the EPA's annual Recycling Summit, saying, "This ambitious national recycling goal will help guide investments and commitments from across the recycling system.”
Peter Wright, EPA Office of Land and Emergency Management Assistant Administrator, added:
“Without national leadership on this issue, recycling has lingered in the low 30 percent range for the last twenty years. The economic and environmental benefits from recycling are clear, and we’ve made a lot of progress, but much more needs to be done to obtain the benefits of increasing the national recycling rate to 50 percent by 2030. We appreciate every organization that has submitted comments on our draft National Recycling Strategy, participated in the recycling stakeholder groups over the last three years, and every organization that has issued a public commitment to continue to help us reach the national goal.”
They shared three key objectives of the draft National Recycling Strategy:
- Reduce Contamination in Recycling: Reducing the percentage of the wrong materials in the recycling stream helps ensure clean recyclable materials, such as paper, glass or plastic, can be processed and made into new products.
- Make Our Recycling Processing System More Efficient: Making our processing system more efficient will help more of the material that is intended to be recycled get recycled.
- Strengthen the Economic Markets for Recycled Materials: Strengthening the economic markets for recycled materials will help manufacturers make more products using recycled materials and encourage demand from consumers for more products that are made with recycled materials.
Read the full EPA press release here.