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Abstract
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported that in 2015 only 67.8million tons or about 26% of the total waste generated was recycled, while the waste generated
continued to rise. It is clear from the numbers above that the success of current recycling
programs is limited. Increasing populations will continue to put pressure on our existing
resources, compelling governments at all levels to take additional action to increase recycling
efforts to transition from a linear model of make, use, and dispose to a closed-loop circular
economy system, emphasizing reduce, reuse and recycle. Additional challenges arising from
China’s National Sword Policy have further exacerbated the recycling crisis.
Within this context, my research evaluates recycling programs at the county level in the
state of North Carolina. The first part explores county level factors that affect recycling rates.
Factors span across the economic, demographic, social, geographic, technical, and programmatic
aspects of recycling programs. The second part of my study focusses on exploring the economic
and environmental merits of recycling. Specifically, this section explores the GHG emissions and
wage creation from recycling certain materials as compared to landfilling them, and the causal
mechanism between recycling, and GHG emissions and employment generation. Qualitative
interviews with stakeholders in the recycling community inform the findings of my quantitative
analysis.
I found that recycling is moving away from being a behavior based on individual taste
and preferences to a mainstream behavior—part of everyday life. We must view recycling not
only as an individual altruistic action but also as a means to decrease the cost of goods, lower
landfill costs, combat climate change, and reduce resource and energy use while engaging the
community. Most important is the need for standardized measures for recycling, new ways to
measure recycling performance, and greater consistency in solid waste management policies so
that scholars and program analysts can conduct more comparative studies.