In the United States, about 94 million tons of municipal solid waste were recycled and composted in 2018, the most recent year with comprehensive EPA data. That works out to a 32.1 percent recycling and composting rate, meaning roughly two-thirds of what Americans throw away ends up in landfills or incinerators. Globally, the picture is even bleaker: only 6.9 percent of all materials flowing through the world economy are cycled back into use, according to the 2025 Circularity Gap Report.
U.S. Recycling by the Numbers
Americans generated about 292 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2018. Of that, 69 million tons were recycled and another 25 million tons were composted. The combined 94 million tons sounds large, but it still leaves the majority of trash headed somewhere less useful.
Not all materials are recycled at the same rate, and the gaps between categories are enormous. Paper and cardboard lead the pack. Corrugated boxes hit a 96.5 percent recycling rate in 2018, largely because businesses and shipping companies have efficient collection systems. Newspapers came in at 64.8 percent, and paper overall reached 68.2 percent. Those high numbers pull up the national average significantly. Without paper and cardboard, the recycling rate for everything else would look much worse.
Plastic: The Biggest Gap
Plastic is the material most people picture when they think about recycling, and it’s the one where recycling fails most dramatically. Of all the plastic ever produced worldwide (more than 8 billion metric tons as of 2018), only 9 percent has been recycled. The rest has been incinerated (12 percent) or accumulated in landfills and the natural environment (79 percent). That means 91 percent of all plastic waste in history has never been recycled.
The reasons are partly economic and partly chemical. Plastic degrades in quality each time it’s reprocessed, unlike glass or aluminum. Many types of plastic aren’t accepted by local recycling programs, and contamination from food residue or mixed materials makes entire batches unusable. Even when plastic is collected for recycling, it often ends up downcycled into lower-value products that themselves aren’t recyclable.
Glass Recycling Varies Wildly by Region
Globally, about 21 percent of all glass produced gets recycled. Container glass (bottles and jars) does better, at roughly 32 percent. But the range between countries is striking.
The European Union leads, with an average collection rate for glass bottles of 80 percent as of 2021. South Korea recycles about 86 percent of its glass bottles. Japan sits at 71 percent. The United States, by contrast, manages only about 34 percent nationally. The difference comes down largely to policy. U.S. states with bottle deposit programs, like Oregon (73 percent) and California (67 percent), recycle glass at rates comparable to European countries. States without those programs average just 24 percent.
Electronic Waste Is Growing Fast
E-waste is the fastest-growing waste stream in the world, and recycling hasn’t kept pace. In 2022, the world generated a record 62 million metric tons of electronic waste: old phones, laptops, appliances, batteries, and cables. Only 22.3 percent was documented as properly collected and recycled. The volume of e-waste is rising five times faster than the documented recycling rate, according to a United Nations report.
This matters because electronics contain valuable metals like gold, copper, and rare earth elements, but also hazardous materials like lead and mercury. When e-waste isn’t formally recycled, it’s often shipped to developing countries where informal workers dismantle it by hand, exposing themselves and their communities to toxic chemicals.
Why the Global Rate Is So Low
The 6.9 percent global circularity figure from the Circularity Gap Report measures something broader than just recycling bins. It tracks how much of all the material entering the global economy (metals, minerals, fossil fuels, biomass) gets cycled back into productive use rather than consumed once and discarded. That number has actually been falling, down from 7.2 percent in previous years, because the total volume of materials consumed keeps growing faster than recycling infrastructure can absorb.
Several forces keep recycling rates low. Virgin materials are often cheaper than recycled ones, especially when oil prices drop and make new plastic inexpensive to produce. Contamination is a persistent problem: a single greasy pizza box can render an entire bale of cardboard unrecyclable. And the economics of collection are challenging in rural or low-density areas where trucks must travel long distances for relatively small volumes of material.
Product design also plays a role. Many consumer goods are made from mixed materials (think a juice box with layers of paper, plastic, and aluminum foil) that are technically possible to separate but not cost-effective to process at scale. Until products are designed with end-of-life recycling in mind, collection programs can only do so much.
What Actually Gets Recycled Well
A few materials stand out as genuine recycling success stories. Aluminum cans can be recycled indefinitely without losing quality, and recycling aluminum uses 95 percent less energy than producing it from raw ore. Steel and other metals also recycle efficiently. Paper and cardboard, as noted, recover at high rates in the U.S., particularly in commercial and industrial settings.
The pattern is clear: materials that retain their value through reprocessing and have established markets for the recycled product get recycled at high rates. Materials that degrade, cost more to sort than they’re worth, or lack buyer demand pile up. Your recycling bin isn’t the bottleneck. The market for what comes out the other end is.