At a recent Congressional hearing, two Senators lamented the gap between paper and plastic recycling. After all, the US EPA says paper has a 68 percent recycling rate compared to nine percent for plastics. They wanted to know why.
The answer is fairly simple. Paper and plastics are used to make very different products which are generated for recycling or disposal very differently. Recyclable paper products are also easier to identify and sort.
Let’s start with the different uses of paper and plastic products. Paper is used primarily to make packaging while plastics are made for a far more diverse spectrum of uses.
