How a lawsuit against TerraCycle shows the limits of recycling trash in the U.S.
By Alan Yu | November 30, 2021 | WHYY PBS
Every day, a warehouse close to Trenton takes in hundreds of boxes of waste that’s hard to recycle — things like pens, cellphone accessories, children’s toys, and coffee capsules.
The warehouse belongs to TerraCycle, which was founded to recycle waste that is difficult for municipal programs to deal with. Kevin Flynn, global vice president of operations, said this warehouse, and the 29 others like it around the world, are like landfills except everything in them can be recycled.
“Everything you see here couldn’t normally be recycled through a traditional … municipal recycling facility,” Flynn said.
Consumers and companies collect their hard-to-recycle waste in cardboard boxes and send them to these material-recovery facilities. Workers check the contents and separate them into components, to make them easier to recycle. For example, workers separate used Yankee Candles into glass, plastic lids, and everything else. The companies making the products pay TerraCycle for the cost of recycling.
TerraCycle’s mission is to eliminate “the idea of waste.” That’s a big problem in the United States, which produces more plastic waste than any other country and sends most of it to landfills.
But there are limits to TerraCycle’s program and maybe to recycling itself, as a recent lawsuit highlighted.
Jan Dell founded The Last Beach Cleanup, a nonprofit based in California that’s working on the plastic waste problem. Last year, when she saw a chip bag with the TerraCycle logo on it, Dell thought she would try the program, and collect and mail back some of the bags. Instead, she said, she ended up on many waitlists, and found other people on Reddit who had the same experience.
“This isn’t being honest with consumers if you [are] telling everyone that these products are all recyclable, but there’s actually limits,” Dell said in an interview with WHYY News.
She sued TerraCycle and some of its partner companies, such as Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble, Colgate, and Nestle, arguing that the TerraCycle labels were misleading.