Evansville, Indiana – According to Brian Whitsell at Tri-State Recovery Resources, most plastics 3-7 are pulled from the Republic Services recycling stream and landfilled. Other than possibly #5 (Polypropylene) plastics that are going to Berry Global, most of the rest simply gets sorted out and sent to the Laubscher Meadows landfill according to the news article.
Evansville, we are not alone! According to a NPR article, recycling facilities may accept all kinds of plastics today but end up only recycling about 5% of it. A similar article in the Smithsonian Magazine pointed out that in 2021, China stopped accepting American waste and many plastic recycling programs in the US shuttered thereafter. In other recent news, a UN report has placed plastic trash and recycling at a crisis level.
This is important to note because on top of these warnings, Evansville is running out of landfill space. Some of this has to do with how much we are landfilling today and what we are NOT now recycling today. For example. in 2021 Laubscher Meadows saw 249761.57 metric tons of trash being delivered to the landfill. This was a record amount according to the latest statistics released by the EPA.gov website. With a new updated 2055 closure date now being predicted, this Evansville Curmudgeon asks, where will the next landfill be? When will our community start the study and the conversation about our current unsustainable problem of either reducing our waste or finding more landfill space? This problem is here to stay!