Does Recycling Even Work?

Here's what the data says

When I was growing up, recycling was probably the closest thing I had to a religion. Not in a spiritual sense, but in a daily-and-weekly-practice sort of sense. Way before it was cool, my father sorted paper into all kinds of different textures and levels of recyclability (my first word might as well have been “corrugated”).

If the daily sorting was prayer, recycling night was church: the weekly pilgrimage of taking divided and rinsed materials to the edge of the driveway was a dutiful exercise in hope that my gesture, however small, might make a difference for our planet. My obsession with recycling continued into college, where for a not insignificant amount of time I sincerely pondered whether I could major in “teaching people to recycle” (I could not).

And it’s continued through today: I cannot think of so much as a piece of paper that I haven’t hung on to until I’ve gotten to a place to recycle it (including, incredibly, while on international long-haul flights — I know). As I write this, I have a box in my kitchen filled with thoroughly rinsed toothpaste tubes and sunscreen containers to carry down — in person — to a specialty recycling program for cosmetics containers, because they apparently require different treatment from other types of containers.

Yet so many people around me don’t recycle. When I was pondering inventing my own major about the subject, I had a boss who always said she “didn’t have time to recycle” (I still don’t understand it). My mother-in-law’s entire neighborhood in the Midwest couldn’t agree on a recycling service, so they just don’t have one. And they are not alone: by one estimate, only 43% of American households recycle at all. Not only does this vary by state, with some coming in at fewer than 10% of households recycling, but even among households that do recycle only about half of recyclable materials are, on average, recycled.

So, who is right? Am I noble, selfless, and saving the world, one diligently washed can of crushed tomatoes at a time? Or is recycling an exercise in delusion, and it’s the 57% of Americans who aren’t bothering with this frivolous activity who see the light? Luckily, we can find out by applying a social science lens to this question.

1. What do we mean by “work”?

There are a lot of things we might hope to accomplish with recycling, such as curbing climate change, reducing physical waste in landfills, helping ourselves feel like we’re at least doing something for the environment, and even creating jobs. From an environmental perspective, researchers mostly evaluate the extent to which recycling reduces greenhouse gases (GHG), which are the primary driver of climate change.

There are several ways recycling can contribute to reducing GHGs. First, it can mean less raw material extraction, which can require all kinds of GHG-exacerbating activities, including drilling, cutting down trees, and transporting raw materials to be manufactured. Second, the manufacturing process itself in some cases can be less energy-intensive if we’re reusing materials rather than working from new ones. Third, recycling reduces the amount of waste that ends up as regular garbage, which means fewer GHGs emitted if your trash is incinerated, as well as fewer GHGs from decomposition in a landfill.

2. Okay, so does recycling reduce GHGs?

The short answer is mostly yes, with some caveats. The more complete answer is that it varies considerably by what material is being recycled and where the recycling is done. And, overall, recycling has a relatively small impact on GHGs compared with high-impact behaviors, including flying, driving, eating meat, and (brace yourselves, natalists and tradwives) having big families.

The chart below shows the average climate impact of various activities measured in terms of the metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) equivalent (tCO₂e) saved per year. I’ve left off the biggest intervention according to the researchers who collected this data, which is having one fewer child, because the climate impact is so high (58 tCO₂es) that it makes the rest of the chart unreadable. (But just know that not having children makes me a climate hero, okay?)

On average, recycling does help mitigate climate change, but there are other individual actions that have a bigger impact

Estimated metric tons of CO₂ equivalent (tCO₂e) saved per year from each behavior below

Source: Wynes and Nicholas (2017)

Three questions might arise from looking at this chart. First, does it matter what we are recycling? Surely recycling a soda can has a different mix of costs and benefits from recycling a mattress or a car battery.

Second, while recycling on balance may not have much of an impact compared with, say, ditching your car or saying no to a trip to Paris, isn’t it a lot easier to recycle? How can we think about not just the absolute value but also the relative value of recycling?

Finally — and this is probably screaming at you right now — why are we zooming in on individual behaviors when, if we really want to move the needle on GHG emissions, we need to address large corporations, governments, and other structural drivers of climate change? Also, even if we do look at individual behavior, shouldn’t we focus on the wealthiest people, who are, on balance, responsible for far more emissions than regular folks? These are all excellent questions. We’ll address each in turn.

3. How much does it matter what you’re recycling and where you’re recycling it?

In general, quite a bit. When it comes to materials, recycling aluminum and steel is the most effective. Recycling paper and cardboard can be effective, but its effectiveness varies considerably with the type of fibers in the material and how often it’s been recycled previously (unlike aluminum, paper can be recycled only a fixed number of times, and each one costs more). This information then needs to be compared with the counterfactual of how much “virgin” paper would have been produced instead, as new paper production can also create nonfossil biofuels from its pulp byproducts. Glass can be effectively recycled, though its weight can make the costs outweigh the benefits if it needs to be transported long distances to a recycling facility. It also can contaminate an entire collection of recyclables when the recycled materials are placed into one container rather than separated by type.

Finally, plastics are extremely complicated. Different plastics contain different materials and mixes of materials, separating them can be difficult if not impossible, and the costs of mechanically or chemically processing these different mixes can be very high. Recent research on plastics recycling has highlighted the need for technologies to more effectively produce as well as recycle plastic.

We also need to consider where the recycling is taking place. Recycling in urban areas with denser collection routes, higher volumes of recycled materials, and shorter distances to facilities can contribute more than recycling in areas that are populated less densely. But even in those areas, infrastructure can make a difference. Some evidence suggests that “hub and spoke” systems, which streamline the process of getting materials to central processing centers, can increase the efficiency of recycling in non-urban areas.

A full accounting of the efficacy of recycling in any given area also needs to consider the counterfactual — where the material would end up if not recycled. If the materials would otherwise end up in a landfill, recycling tends to be a winner in reducing GHGs. Some recent research, however, suggests that if recycling is expensive to implement in a location — whether, for example, because of the costs of building a new recycling facility, developing the infrastructure for collection, or even persuading citizens to recycle in quantities large enough to make the investment worth it — it might not be that much more efficient than sending trash to an incinerator (which is better than putting it in a landfill). Moreover, all of this is going to vary depending on local economic conditions and policies as well as global demand for recycled materials.

Thus, even within the broad category of “recycling,” the value of my recycling an aluminum can in New York City compared with the value of a Nebraska farmer’s recycling a glass jar is going to be wildly different. Any broad measure of the efficacy of recycling will likely make simplifying assumptions that obscure variation across locations and materials.

4. How much does it matter that recycling is an easier activity to adopt than other pro-climate behaviors?

There are a few ways we might think about the “ease of adoption” of various climate behaviors. One is a concept called “behavioral plasticity,” which refers to the likelihood of persuading people to adopt a particular change. This is not trivial to measure, but in general researchers estimate it by assessing the proportions of people in various studies who have meaningfully changed their behavior. Other estimates focus on costs — how expensive is it to change a lightbulb compared with, say, buying a more efficient car.

A recent study approached this question by simply asking survey respondents how difficult or easy it would be for them to adopt certain behaviors. It then mapped those behaviors against data from a meta-analysis of the overall effectiveness of pro-climate activities. The results showed that while recycling indeed is not a high-impact activity, it is generally considered relatively easy to adopt.

Recycling is a relatively low-impact but also relatively low-effort behavioral change

Estimated behavioral plasticity (y-axis) compared with average climate effectiveness (x-axis) for common individual behaviors to combat climate change

Source: Adapted from Goldwert et al. (2025)

The big headline from the above chart, of course, is that I am a huge climate criminal because I regularly take long-haul flights and have adopted two dogs (though I’m also vegan, which I am contractually obligated to mention in every article I write).

My dogs, who are sleeping next to me as I write, would like to add that we should consider the infinite joy they bring to our lives even if they are a net climate negative (I suppose I am starting to see why people might not like the whole “don’t have children” argument about climate change).

But the other headline here is: okay, but what about the ultra-wealthy with their private jets and other ways of generating massive emissions? What about corporations or investors in fossil-fuel-emitting industries?

5. Aren’t we just blaming individuals for structural problems and inequities beyond their control?

Our final question is possibly the most difficult. Yes, we know that most GHGs come from industries like energy, agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation. Researchers have suggested that a focus on lifestyle changes is a distraction from these larger-scale problems — one that can even make individuals less supportive of climate change policies.

So it could be tempting to blame industries, absolve individuals, and call it a day.

But we also know that carbon-emitting industries produce things like food and cars, which individual humans use. This makes the accounting tricky (it’s difficult to avoid double or even triple counting if we try to isolate the climate impact of, say, the resources used to grow cotton, process it into a shirt, transport the shirt to a store, power the store, power your car to get to the store, and so on). A 2020 report from the United Nations nonetheless estimated that two-thirds of global emissions are linked to private households.

Of course, not all households contribute the same level of emissions. One recent study estimates that the wealthiest 10% of individuals are responsible for 50% of global emissions, while the poorest 50% of all people on earth are responsible for just 8% of emissions. Emissions also vary by country, and particularly by the wealth of that country. Emissions per capita in the United States, for example, are higher than those in India or China (though China’s overall emissions are higher than those of the US).

Thus, in many ways, yes, the idea of the “carbon footprint” as an individual responsibility is a distraction from broader issues around climate interventions. But that’s not the same thing as saying that individuals are entirely powerless. We have two levers at our disposal: personal and structural.

6. What we can do

The stark disparities between the emissions of industries and those of the very wealthy can make it easy to feel helpless and hopeless. While I sip from my soggy straw (and that’s only if I didn’t manage ahead of time to say, “No straw, please!”), feel guilty that I’m not sure how to recycle the plastic my berries came in, and stress out over the fact that they’re in a plastic container at all, super-wealthy people zip around in private jets, fossil fuel companies continue to pump out billions of tons of CO₂ equivalents, coal consumption is somehow re-climbing, and AI usage is skyrocketing. What’s the point of dropping this single crushed tomato can into one bin rather than another?

I don’t have easy answers for you (if I did, I’d have a Nobel Peace Prize, and maybe even a FIFA Peace Prize, plus we wouldn’t need this article). But one lens I’ve found helpful is this: it doesn’t have to be either/or. While the scale of emissions from many industries and wealthy people is enormous compared with the average person’s, that doesn’t mean individual actions don’t matter. In fact, there are two big things we can do: keep recycling (and doing any other climate-forward behavior available to us), as well as push for broader societal and government interventions.

I’m going to keep recycling because I live in a city that makes it relatively easy to do (plus I think I get fined if I don’t!). I’m going to think more carefully about whether I really need to fly somewhere or can take a train or join a meeting virtually. I’m going to keep being the heroic, noble, and eternally humble and modest vegan that I am. I’m going to turn down my air conditioning right now. (It’s worth noting that in the scheme of “reduce, reuse, recycle,” doing more of the first two can spare us a lot of the difficulties associated with the third.)

But I can also advocate the adoption of recycling programs in other parts of the country. I can push for legislation that, say, imposes taxes on private jet usage. I can use my skills with data and science communication to help others understand the importance of addressing this crisis. I can donate to my brother’s excellent nonprofit (I’m only slightly biased!) that rewilds urban areas while partnering with local schools to educate the next generation on local ecosystems.

I know I’m not doing enough. I know there are far worse emitters out there. And I know that hopelessness is not a way forward. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go cut up and rinse out some toothpaste tubes.