Recycling is often promoted as a cornerstone for environmentalism. But in practice, most recyclable material never enters the system at all.

Global plastic production has surged over the past 70 years, increasing from 2 million metric tons annually in 1950 to more than 450 million metric tons today. Alongside that growth, one statistic is frequently cited: only 9% of plastic is recycled.

But that 9% is not a measure of how effective recycling is once materials are properly sorted — it's a measure of how much plastic we attempt to recycle in the first place.

While 73% of U.S. households have access to curbside recycling, only 43% actively participate. More than 77% of Americans say they believe recycling has a positive impact, yet 76% of recyclables are lost at the household level according to data from The Recycling Partnership.

There is a major disconnect in the recycling system with only 17% of Americans saying they feel well-informed about how it works.

Recycling rates and guidelines
According to Kara Napolitano, a recycling educator at Circular Services, the operator of Sunset Park Material Recovery Facility in Brooklyn, New York, items that are correctly placed in recycling bins have a strong likelihood of being processed.

As one of the larger plastic recycling facilities, it is able to handle products that might not be feasible in other areas of the country.

The recycling center is also located on a different site than the New York City landfill. This means that if the facility needs to send things to landfill, it must pay for it, an incentive to recycle harder and less common products in the hopes of some form of profit.

Some materials are recycled more often simply because they’re easy to recognize and sort. Cardboard has the highest recycling rate at 32%, followed by aluminum at 30%.

What happens to the plastic that "can't" be recycled
While recycling prolongs the lifespan of plastic, most plastics can only be recycled once or twice before their polymer chains degrade. After this point, the material becomes too weak to be made into new, high-quality, profitable, plastic products.

As a result, items such as plastic wrappers and snack bags are considered non-recyclable under most local guidelines and typically end up in landfills. However, innovative companies like TerraCycle work to change this.

The reality is that very little is inherently "non-recyclable" according to TerraCycle CEO Tom Szaky. More often, materials end up in landfills because recycling them isn't financially viable. TerraCycle partners with brands that fund the processing of their own hard-to-process waste and turns it into material used for products like outdoor furniture and decking, plastic shipping pallets, watering cans, fleece, storage containers and bins, tubes for construction applications, flooring tiles, playground surface covers and athletic fields.

TerraCycle runs free programs with brands including Babybel, Taki's, Taco Bell, and Little Bites, all with the aim of giving products that would traditionally be thrown away after one use a second life. Consumers can also pay a fee for more of their individual waste to be recycled.

While companies like TerraCycle work to help, it is still essential to reduce single-use plastic in order to minimize waste. And while progress has been made — such as banning plastic bags and increasing the use of paper packaging — there is still more to be done.

More ways to limit plastic and excess waste
Microplastics aren't the only non-biodegradable products sitting in landfills.

Historically, returned baby gear products with large plastic components and strict safety features all ended up in landfills. That's where a company called REBEL comes in.

REBEL partners with retailers to intercept returned items that would otherwise be sent to a landfill, extending the lifecycle of products and reducing unnecessary waste.

Although generous return policies are convenient, they come at an expensive environmental cost. Many returned items are never resold; the cost of inspection, repackaging, and restocking products can be high and time-consuming, and often leads companies to discard usable goods.