Plastics labeled with resin codes between 1 and 7 used to all be eligible for recycling. Now, there's no market for some types of plastic, and nearly a quarter of what gets sent to sorting facilities ...

When I visited my friend in Scotland, I was amazed to see how little waste from her family of four actually went into the garbage can. Besides their good habits of buying items with minimal packaging, ...

So many of us have grown up learning not to throw away plastics - right? -like, that they belong in the recycling bin, not the trash. Well now, California is suing ExxonMobil and saying that that is a ...

Plastic is a fast-growing segment of U.S. municipal solid waste, and most of it ends up in the environment. Just 9% of plastic collected in municipal solid waste was recycled as of 2018, the most ...

Recycling is not a myth — it’s a movement that’s keeping materials in use, creating jobs and protecting Wisconsin’s ...

In Seattle, as in most cities around the country, there are a number of items that you aren’t supposed to put in the curbside recycling bin: bubble wrap, for instance, or multilayer plastic packaging ...

At the Republic Services Recycling Center on Cole Road, waste whirs on a conveyor belt past workers who scramble to pull contaminants off the line. Trash goes in barrels at the workers’ sides, and ...

Editor's note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that residents could bring No. 7 plastics to the city's recycling drop-off center on Mt. Wayte Street. That is not the case.

This article originally appeared on ProPublica. Last year, I became obsessed with a plastic cup. It was a small container that held diced fruit, the type thrown into lunch boxes. And it was the first ...