Recycling Council Emphasizes Importance of Supply

Colin Staub • July 30, 2024

Resource Recycling


With industry-wide attention on building up recycled material end user demand, the Northeast Recycling Council is urging materials recovery stakeholders not to forget about ensuring there is adequate supply.


The organization last week published a “Guide to Increasing Recycling Supply,” a resource for stakeholders across the recycling chain. It lays out a number of ways different stakeholders have successfully built up local material supply and covers all traditional municipal recyclables.


In announcing the guide, NERC noted that “supply and demand issues are primary components to recycling market development.” But the organization expressed that the industry dialogue has skewed largely in one direction of late.


“For many years, increasing demand for recycled materials has taken precedence over supply issues,” NERC wrote.


The council in 2023 formed a supply side policy committee aiming to “explore, discuss, and write a policy guide about supply side strategies to increase the supply of post-consumer materials to the marketplace.” The new publication is the result of that process.

A majority of the Northeast U.S.-focused guide’s case studies are government-led strategies to increase supply, but it also highlights efforts spearheaded by nonprofits, MRF operators and, in areas with container deposit systems, redemption centers.


It points to Prince George’s County’s public outreach campaign in Maryland, which included bilingual communication efforts in high-contamination service areas where county officials theorized a language barrier was hampering proper recycling practices. The case study provides several lessons county regulators learned from the campaign. For instance, when trying to reach non-English speaking residents, recycling staffers had to get creative: “Attending school meetings to promote proper recycling did not necessarily work because non-English speaking residents were not attending the school meetings, hence, the decision was to visit local supermarkets where parents shop.”

In another example, the guide highlights efforts by the Massachusetts state recycling organization, MassRecycle, to counter the “negative influence of recycling misinformation in the media.” This came after a wave of public attention on problems within the recycling world in 2022, including from a Greenpeace report and the resulting coverage in an NPR story. MassRecycle was concerned the news coverage would mislead local residents into believing the bulk of their recyclables were not being correctly processed, so the organization began a coordinated effort to respond.


“Media stories implying that recycling is landfilled led to the need for professionals to defend both recycling and their personal roles,” the organization wrote in the case study.


That effort included MassRecycle board members giving media interviews with a formulated approach: They would vet the media outlet to ensure they felt it would provide a balanced article, they would avoid acronyms, they would clearly lay out industry background information, and they would limit their discussion to recycling within Massachusetts.


NERC says the supply guide will be a living resource that will expand as more case studies come in.


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By Sophie Leone • May 27, 2026
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Commodities market hurts county recycling revenue

By Brian Shane | OC Today-Dispatch • April 30, 2026
(May 1, 2026) Worcester County collected millions more pounds of recycling last year, but generated less revenue – and taxpayers are covering the difference. The shift reflects a sharp drop in the market for recyclable materials, which has undercut what the county can earn from selling paper, plastic and metal. County officials say they sometimes hold materials for weeks or months, waiting for a buyer, Public Works Director Dallas Baker told the county commissioners. “Cardboard still sells really well. Metals sell really well. Plastic is kind of horrible,” he said at an April 14 budget work session. “For most of the year, plastic might not sell at all – like, you have to pay somebody to come take your plastic.” The county is projecting $150,000 in recycling revenue for fiscal year 2027, against more than $1.2 million in costs – a shortfall absorbed by the county’s general fund, according to Enterprise Fund Controller Quinn Dittrich. He added that recycling revenue has declined in the last two fiscal years, falling about $80,000 in 2024 and $15,000 in 2025. Low prices for plastics are driving the decline, according to Bob Keenan, the county’s recycling manager. Vendors are offering just a few cents per pound for plastic. “There is simply no market in it,” he said. “There are warehouses and warehouses of plastic that (vendors) can’t get anybody to buy.” Other materials have also lost value, Keenan said: Corrugated cardboard has fallen from $125 a ton to as low as $60. Mixed paper has dropped from $120 a ton to $70. Aluminum sells for $1.09 by the ton through a broker, though market prices are closer to 80 cents. At the same time, recycling volume is up. Last year, the county collected 1,985 more tons of recyclables – that’s almost 4 million pounds – than in 2024. Totals for 2025 came to 12,236 tons for residential recyclables and 24,707 for commercial, according to Keenan. He noted that the county has been promoting recycling through outreach, in part by hosting 14 school field trips in the last year to its Newark processing facility. “We send them home with a lot of literature about what you can and can’t recycle,” Keenan said. “I want people to know what we do, and that we’re not throwing their recycling away.” Worcester’s revenue decline mirrors a broader trend. A March 2026 report from the Northeast Recycling Council found recycling commodity values hit a five-year low in 12 states, including Maryland and Delaware. Industry reports also show at least five U.S. plastic recycling facilities have closed since early 2025 as demand has weakened. Ocean City officials faced a similar reality years ago. The resort pulled the plug on its traditional recycling program in 2009 after determining it was too costly to maintain. In its final year, the city spent $1.2 million on recycling and brought in $200,000 in revenue, according to Public Works Director Hal Adkins. Since then, Ocean City has contracted to truck its rubbish to waste-to-energy incinerators outside Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. “It was just not sustainable,” Adkins said. “It doesn’t make money.” Read on OC Today-Dispatch.