Study: US Plastic Recycling Gap Is About Access, Not Waste
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- University at Buffalo researchers found that US communities generate similar amounts of plastic packaging waste regardless of income or education, yet recycling rates diverge sharply by wealth — with infrastructure access, not behavior, driving the gap.
- The study, published in Communications Sustainability, mapped all 419 major material recovery facilities on the US mainland and measured the distance from roughly 130 million buildings to the nearest one, layering in census data on income and education.
- High-recycling regions including California, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and Maryland are 30% to 55% wealthier and 14% to 19% more college-educated than underserved areas, with most residents living within 30 miles of an industrial recycling facility.
- Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, Oklahoma and parts of Arkansas generate high plastic waste but have few nearby facilities, leaving Southern and Southeastern residents with structurally limited recycling access, co-author Aditya Vedantam said.
- Sparsely populated states like Montana and North Dakota have extremely limited recycling infrastructure, and Wyoming has no large-scale plastic recycling facilities at all.
- States with bottle bills — refundable deposit laws on beverage containers — post plastic packaging recycling rates roughly twice the national average, suggesting policy combined with infrastructure can close the access gap, according to co-author Janet Z. Yang.
- The US generates more plastic waste per person than any other country while its recycling rate lags other nations, framing the access gap as a "plastic justice" and environmental justice issue, the researchers said.
Why it matters: The US produces the most plastic waste per capita in the world yet recycles a shrinking share of it, and this study pins the blame on where 419 industrial facilities are sited — not on whether people are willing to recycle. Southern, rural, and lower-income communities are structurally locked out, and researchers point to two concrete levers: building facilities in underserved regions and expanding bottle-bill laws that already correlate with double the national recycling rate.
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