Maggie Clarke, Chair of MSWAB’s Long Range Planning and Waste Prevention and Reuse committees, was recently quoted in a Fortune Magazine article summarizing America’s recycling challenges.
Published January 28, the article explained that America’s waste haulers are struggling to find buyers for recycled materials after China imposed their “National Sword” policy in 2018. Author Tracey Lindeman asserted that the changing economic realities are forcing municipal policymakers to rethink existing infrastructure schemes and adopt best practices for collecting, cleaning, and reprocessing materials.
MSWAB successfully advocated for these practices when insisting that NYC maintain its dual-stream system rather than switching to a single-stream approach with higher contamination rates. The article states:
Changes to China’s recycled paper market was a central reason why New York City quietly backed away from a plan to switch to single-stream recycling a few years back. The city had considered single-stream because it had hopes of increasing its participation rate, explained Kathryn Garcia, New York City’s sanitation commissioner —a move that local experts like Maggie Clarke, a chair of two committees at the Manhattan Solid Waste Advisory Board, advised against. “We gathered a lot of information from elsewhere where these communities had signed up for single-stream and then had buyers’ remorse [because of high contamination],” Clarke said.
You can find more information about NYC best practices on our Recycling Resources page.