In 1990, American landfills buried about 25 million tons of grass, leaves, and branches a year. By 2018, that figure had fallen to roughly 10.5 million tons, even though households and businesses were generating slightly more yard waste than they had three decades earlier, according to EPA’s material-specific data on yard trimmings.

Yard trimmings are the rare waste stream where the collection and reuse system mostly worked. Many municipal recycling programs have launched successful side businesses selling compost and soil made from recovered yard waste.

State landfill bans, a generation of municipal composting programs, and the simple act of leaving grass clippings on the lawn turned what had been the single largest organic material in the trash into one of the most-recovered. The country now composts or mulches 63 percent of its yard waste.

But “mostly worked” leaves an asterisk: the material still going to landfills is disproportionately the fast-rotting grass and leaves that generate methane faster than landfills can capture it.

A Quarter of the Landfill, Reclaimed

The scale of the yard-waste collection success is easy to miss because it happened slowly. In 2018, the U.S. generated 35.4 million tons of yard trimmings—grass, leaves, and tree and brush trimmings—12.1 percent of all municipal solid waste. Of that, 22.3 million tons were composted or mulched, which represents a 63 percent recovery rate. That is one of the highest diversion rates of any major material in the waste stream, and it represents a near-total reversal from 1990, when only 4.2 million tons were composted and more than 25 million tons went to landfills.

Three forces drove the change. Many states have restricted or banned yard trimmings from landfills, some for decades—Pennsylvania since 1990, Minnesota since 1994, and West Virginia since 1997, as the Institute for Local Self-Reliance documents—and California now requires yard materials to be diverted statewide under its organics law, SB 1383, which took full effect in 2022. Municipal composting and curbside collection gave residents somewhere to send yard debris when it is separated from other household waste.

And grasscycling, which means leaving clippings on the lawn instead of bagging them, quietly removed a large share of the material from the stream before it ever reached a truck.

The payoff is more than empty landfill space. Composting returns nutrients and carbon to the soil, and because it is a fundamentally local process—organic material is usually collected and processed in the same county, city, or neighborhood—it also supports local jobs, as EPA notes in its overview of composting.

The Methane Asterisk

Nevertheless, 10.5 million tons of yard trimmings are still landfilled each year, representing 7.2 percent of everything in U.S. landfills. They matter more than their tonnage suggests. Municipal solid waste landfills are the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States, responsible for about 14 percent of the national total in 2022. Organic materials, such as food waste, yard trimmings, wood, and paper combined, make up 51.4 percent of what gets landfilled, and when they decompose without oxygen, bacteria convert them into methane, a greenhouse gas 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Yard waste’s particular problem is timing. It decomposes before landfill gas-collection systems are installed and activated as the space is filled and capped, often years later after organics are buried. Fast-decomposing, wet material like summer grass clippings largely breaks down before that capture equipment is running, which means much of its methane escapes uncollected.

“ If there is no immediate gas capture system, it is likely that all of the fresh wet materials will have significantly decomposed before the gas collection system gets turned on,” wrote University of Washington soil scientist Sally Brown in a BioCycle analysis of landfill gas environmental impacts.

Not all yard waste behaves the same way, and the difference changes how it should be handled. Woody material, including branches and wood chips, is high in cellulose and other slow-degrading compounds; in a dry sanitary landfill it can sit nearly inert, effectively storing its carbon rather than releasing methane. Grass and leaves are the methane drivers.

What It Costs Your Household

A household that bags yard waste and sets it at the curb often pays twice: once to haul the material away through bag fees, sticker tags, or collection charges, and again to buy back the same nutrients as fertilizer, mulch, and compost.

The avoided purchases add up at retail prices. A 40-to-45-pound bag of compost runs $3 to $10, bulk compost is $20 to $50 per cubic yard, and mulch is $15 to $65 per cubic yard before delivery, according to HomeGuide’s 2026 cost data. A household that composts its own leaves and clippings sidesteps much of that spending.

Grasscycling closes that loop on the lawn. Clippings left in place supply up to 25 percent of a lawn’s annual fertilizer needs and contain roughly four percent nitrogen, two percent potassium, and 1 percent phosphorus, according to University of Missouri Extension. Mowing a little taller to make grasscycling work also produces deeper roots and reduces watering.

For most households the direct dollar savings are modest—tens of dollars a year, not hundreds—and they depend on whether you garden enough to use what you make. The labor savings from skipping the bagging, and the soil and water benefits over time, are where the real value compounds. Leaving biomass in your yard means those nutrients don’t need to be replaced by synthetic fertilizers, which could save hundreds of dollars a year.

The Template Other Organics Haven’t Matched

The contrast with food waste shows how far the yard-waste model still has to travel across the rest of the organics stream. Food is the single most common material in U.S. landfills and is responsible for 58 percent of landfill methane emissions, yet only about 5 percent of wasted food is composted.

Yard trimmings, in other words, are the proof of concept. Landfill bans, accessible collection, and a behavior change as simple as leaving the clippings where they fall moved a major organic material from the dump to the soil in a single generation. The methane asterisk is a reminder that the job is not finished, and that the fastest-rotting share of what is left is the part most worth diverting first.

What You Can Do

• Leave clippings on the lawn. Mow when the grass is dry and remove no more than a third of the blade so small clippings fall to the ground and break down quickly.
• Mulch leaves in place. Run a mower over fallen leaves rather than bagging them; the shredded leaves feed the soil and suppress weeds.
• Compost at home. Check out our guide to the types of composters available and how to balance your compost with carbon-rich “browns” (dry leaves, wood chips) with nitrogen-rich “greens” (grass, food scraps) at roughly a 2:1 ratio of browns to greens, and keep the pile as moist as a wrung-out sponge.
• Use curbside or drop-off collection. Where it is offered, keep yard waste source-separated and out of plastic bags so it can actually be composted.
• Buy and use local compost. Closing the loop on the nutrients cuts both fertilizer and water use.
• Push for policy where composting is needed. If your state or city still landfills yard trimmings, support landfill bans and curbside organics programs, the policies that drove the national turnaround.
• Find a local option. Look up nearby composting and yard-waste drop-off through Earth911’s recycling search.

The post Yard Waste: Composting’s Success Story With a Methane Asterisk appeared first on Earth911.

Earth911’s Earth Action series shares one practical step at a time to invest in the Earth and make your own life more sustainable.

Action: Bike to Work

Transportation Impacts

Transportation generates about 28% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions — more than any other sector. North America’s car culture also gives the United States one of the largest per-capita carbon footprints of any major economy, well above the global average and rivaled only by a handful of other industrialized and oil-rich nations. On average, American drivers still cover roughly 13,500 miles a year — more than four round-trip drives from New York to Dallas — and collectively logged a record 3.28 trillion miles in 2024.

New cars are cleaner than ever, averaging a record 27.2 mpg for model year 2024, but they still burn gasoline every mile. Not many lifestyle changes could reduce our environmental impact as much as driving fewer miles.

Bike to Work Day

National Bike to Work Day is a project of the League of American Bicyclists, which has promoted National Bike Month every May since 1956. It lands on the third Friday in May — May 15 in 2026 — at the end of Bike to Work Week (May 11–17), and the League now frames the whole month around all the ways and days people bike, from National Ride a Bike Day on May 3 to a commute, a coffee run, or a spin around the block. (Colorado does its own thing, holding its statewide Bike to Work Day on Wednesday, June 24, 2026.)

While the League is inspired more by a love of cycling than by any particular environmental interest, the month-long celebration provides the support and encouragement to help you get on a bike at least once.

And there is no question that cycling is a more environmentally friendly way to get around. It doesn’t just cut down on vehicle emissions, cycle-friendly cities are safer for everyone. A study of 12 large U.S. cities found that those with the most protected bike lanes had 44% fewer road fatalities across all users — drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists alike — with Seattle’s fatal crash rate falling more than 60% as it built out that infrastructure. The health payoff is enormous, too.

In Copenhagen, famously bike-friendly, the World Economic Forum estimates that every kilometer cycled returns roughly 75 cents to $1.55 to society, adding up to $1 to $2 million in combined health and economic benefits every day. And because getting sick carries a heavy carbon footprint of its own, healthier cyclists are cutting more than just tailpipe emissions.

Lasting Change

You might bike every day for a month, every day of Bike Week, or just every year on Bike to Work Day, May 15.

Maybe this weekend your action is simply to dig your bike out of the garage and give it a tune-up so it’s ready the next time you feel like giving it a try. Whatever action you start with, you’ll only make a dent in your transportation footprint if it helps you make a regular change. But don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t convert you into a full-time bike commuter. You might end up riding every day but only in summer, or biking to work once a week. If your job is too far to bike, maybe you can ride as far as the train station. Or choose a different frequent car trip to replace with cycling.

If biking isn’t physically possible for you, get creative with other eco-friendly transportation options like carpooling or taking public transit. Bicycles are one great option, but the point is to lower your transportation footprint, so use this as a chance to rethink the way you get around.

Related Reading on Earth911

• Earth Action: Cut Out a Car Trip
• Biking to a Better World

Editor’s Note: Originally published on May 20, 2022, by Gemma Alexander, this article was updated in June 2026.

The post Earth Action: Ride a Bike for Your Health and the Planet’s appeared first on Earth911.

Deodorant or antiperspirant is something most of us apply daily, often without a second thought about the difference between the two. Antiperspirants are designed to stop you from sweating; deodorants are designed to stop you from smelling. That distinction matters, because it shapes which ingredients end up against your skin every morning — and which ones you might want to leave on the shelf.

If you want to simplify your routine and cut synthetic ingredients, the natural-deodorant category has matured dramatically since this guide first ran. Formulas work better, packaging has gone plastic-free, and aluminum-free options now fill mainstream shelves. Here is how deodorant and antiperspirant differ, what the science actually says about the ingredients people worry about, and seven natural deodorants worth trying.

Deodorants vs. Antiperspirants

The difference comes down to function. Antiperspirants use aluminum-based compounds — aluminum chloride, aluminum chlorohydrate, or aluminum zirconium — to temporarily plug sweat ducts and reduce wetness. Deodorants do not block sweat at all; they work by neutralizing or masking the odor that bacteria produce when they break down sweat. A natural deodorant lets you perspire normally while tackling the smell.

You may have heard that the aluminum in antiperspirants is tied to breast cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. It is worth being clear about where that stands. The American Cancer Society says there is no clear link between antiperspirants containing aluminum and breast cancer, and notes that sweat glands are not connected to the lymph nodes; sweating cools the body rather than flushing out toxins. The National Cancer Institute reached the same conclusion in its review, and the Alzheimer’s Association has described the antiperspirant–Alzheimer’s connection as a long-running myth. A 2024 toxicology review keeps the question open as a research topic but states that aluminum at the concentrations regulators permit in antiperspirants is not classified as a carcinogen.

None of that obligates you to use aluminum. Plenty of people prefer to skip it, want simpler ingredient lists, or are drawn to plastic-free packaging — all reasonable, values-driven reasons to choose a natural deodorant. The case for switching just rests on those preferences rather than on disease risk.

Ingredients People Choose to Avoid

Beyond aluminum, several ingredients common in conventional deodorants and antiperspirants are ones natural-product shoppers tend to screen out, some for documented irritation or hormone-disruption concerns, others as a precaution. Here’s a plain-language guide to the most-discussed ones:

• Parabens: Synthetic preservatives that can mimic estrogen in lab settings. Most major deodorant brands have phased them out, but the Environmental Working Group still flags methylparaben for endocrine concerns.
• Propylene glycol: A texture-softening agent that can cause skin irritation and allergic reactions in some people. Notably, several deodorants marketed as “natural” still contain it, so it’s worth reading the label before you buy.
• Synthetic fragrance (“parfum”): A catch-all term that can mask undisclosed ingredients, including phthalates. Fragrance-free or essential-oil-scented formulas sidestep the ambiguity.
• Triclosan: An antibacterial agent the FDA removed from over-the-counter antiseptic washes in 2016 and from consumer hand sanitizers in 2019, citing antibiotic-resistance and thyroid concerns. It is no longer common in deodorant, which is the point — the deodorant industry has moved on.

The PFAS Problem in “Natural” Deodorants

There is a newer wrinkle earlier versions of this guide didn’t cover. Independent lab testing commissioned by the consumer-advocacy group Mamavation, on products purchased between February 2023 and February 2024, detected organic fluorine — a marker for PFAS — in several deodorants, including Dr. Teal’s, Each & Every, Hello, Hey Humans, Lume, and a Secret antiperspirant, at levels from roughly 11 to 34 parts per million. The amounts are small and may reflect unintentional contamination rather than added ingredients.

Why care about trace amounts? PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — are called “forever chemicals” because they resist breaking down in the environment and in the body, so exposures accumulate over time instead of clearing. In April 2024 the EPA set the first legally enforceable national drinking-water limits for several common PFAS, concluding there is effectively no safe level for two of them. Expert reviews of PFAS toxicity have associated the chemicals with thyroid disease, elevated cholesterol, liver damage, and kidney and testicular cancer. A daily product that sits on the skin is a small exposure on its own, but it adds to a lifetime of others — which is exactly why persistence matters.

Read the label, not the marketing

The word “natural” is not defined or enforced by the FDA, so any product can use it. The reliable signals are a complete published ingredient list and third-party certifications, such as USDA Organic, Leaping Bunny (cruelty-free), or Certified Vegan. Every pick below meets at least one of those bars.

7 Natural Deodorant Picks

Whether you prefer a stick, roll-on, cream, spray, or refillable system, these seven options are free of aluminum compounds and screen out the synthetic ingredients above. Availability and formulas were verified in June 2026.

This guide contains affiliate links. If you purchase through one, Earth911 earns a small commission that helps fund our Recycling Directory.

1. Crystal

Crystal, made by French Transit, has produced mineral-salt deodorant since 1984 and is one of the simplest formulas on the market — its classic stick is a single ingredient, potassium alum, which creates a barrier that inhibits odor-causing bacteria without blocking pores. The line is free of aluminum chlorohydrate, parabens, silicones, phthalates, and artificial fragrance, and is vegan and cruelty-free. It now spans sticks, roll-ons, the original stone, and mineral deodorant sprays, in scents from unscented to lavender.

Shop Crystal on Amazon

2. Erbaviva

Erbaviva’s spray deodorants are USDA Certified Organic, vegan, and cruelty-free, built on quickly-evaporating organic grain alcohol and organic essential oils — jasmine and grapefruit, lemon and sage, or lavender and geranium — that help fight underarm bacteria. The non-staining mist can also be used on fabric and yoga mats.

Shop Erbaviva on Amazon

3. JK Naturals

California-based JK Naturals handcrafts stick deodorants from certified organic ingredients — kokum butter, coconut oil, neem, witch hazel, and steam-distilled essential oils like lavender and peppermint + tea tree. The line is 100% natural and aluminum-free, with adult and teen formulas. Because it’s a kokum-butter base, warming the stick against skin for a few seconds before applying gives a smoother glide.

Shop JK Naturals on Amazon

4. Native

Native, now owned by Procter & Gamble, is the best-selling natural deodorant in the U.S. and is aluminum-, paraben-, and phthalate-free. Its formula has been reworked since this guide last ran: the current sticks use coconut oil, shea butter, and tapioca starch, the brand is now vegan, and its standard line has moved away from baking soda — with a dedicated baking-soda-free Sensitive line for reactive skin. Native also offers plastic-free paperboard packaging that ships in a recycled paper mailer.

Shop Native on Amazon

5. Wild

Wild built its reputation on a refillable system: a reusable case paired with compostable refills made from bamboo pulp, eliminating the single-use plastic tube. The formula is aluminum-, paraben-, and sulfate-free, made from 98% natural-origin ingredients, and is both Leaping Bunny (cruelty-free) and Vegan certified. Each refill lasts roughly four to six weeks. For an Earth911 reader, it’s the strongest pick on packaging waste.

Shop Wild on Amazon

6. Schmidt’s Naturals

Schmidt’s Naturals, a Portland, Oregon brand now owned by Unilever, is one of the most widely available natural deodorants, with plant- and mineral-based formulas that are certified vegan and cruelty-free. Its “never list” excludes aluminum, propylene glycol, parabens, phthalates, and artificial fragrance. Sticks built on arrowroot powder, baking soda, coconut oil, and shea butter come in scents like charcoal & magnesium and bergamot & lime, and a baking-soda-free Sensitive line addresses the irritation some people get from baking soda.

Shop Schmidt’s on Amazon

7. Humble Brands

Humble Brands, made in Taos, New Mexico, keeps its formula to a handful of ingredients — non-GMO cornstarch, MCT coconut oil, candelilla wax or beeswax, and either baking soda (original) or magnesium hydroxide (sensitive, baking-soda-free). It’s aluminum-, paraben-, and propylene-glycol-free, Leaping Bunny certified, and a 1% for the Planet member. The sticks ship in fully plastic-free, plant-based paperboard packaging.

Shop Humble Brands on Amazon

Making the Switch

If you’re moving from an antiperspirant to a natural deodorant, a few practical expectations help:

• Expect an adjustment period. Without aluminum plugging your sweat ducts, you will perspire more at first. Most people find odor control settles within a couple of weeks.
• Match the formula to your skin. Baking soda is an effective odor-neutralizer but irritates some people. If you get redness, switch to a baking-soda-free or magnesium-based formula — Native, Schmidt’s, and Humble Brands all make one.
• Reapply as needed. Deodorants don’t stop sweat, so a midday touch-up on hot or active days is normal. A travel size or spray makes that easy.
• Choose less packaging. Refillable systems (Wild) and plastic-free paperboard (Native, Humble Brands) cut the roughly 100-plus plastic tubes a person can go through in a lifetime — most of which can’t be recycled curbside because of mixed materials.
• Recycle the container correctly. Empty sticks are usually mixed plastics; check what your local program accepts using the Earth911 recycling search tool.

Editor’s note: Originally published on March 1, 2019, by Lisa Beres, this article was extensively updated in June 2026.

The post Why You Should Ditch Antiperspirant: 6 Natural Deodorants That Work appeared first on Earth911.

Tires get recycled more than almost anything else Americans throw away. About 79% of worn-out tires get a second life, according to the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association in its latest report. That beats paper (68%), aluminum cans (45%), and plastic bottles (29%). It sounds like a win. The catch is in the fine print.

Americans toss out more than 250 million tires a year. That 79% is one of recycling’s proudest numbers. But it mixes three very different things together: rubber that becomes new stuff, rubber that gets burned for fuel, and a huge amount of tire material that nobody counts at all because it wears off your tires and washes down the storm drain while you drive.

This installment of our Where Waste Comes From series breaks down what that 79% really means, what it leaves out, and what tires cost you and the country.

What “Recycled” Really Means Here

Here’s the first surprise. The biggest thing we do with old tires is burn them. Shredded tires get torched for energy in cement plants, paper mills, and power plants. That ate up 33% of all scrap tires in 2023, the single largest use. Tires burn hot, and they’re cheap fuel, so the rules count that burning as a “good use.” Incineration does keep tires out of landfills; burning isn’t really recycling. The rubber is gone for good, and the pollution goes up the smokestack.

Real recycling is happening too, it’s just at a smaller scale. Ground-up rubber goes into things like running tracks, playground surfaces, molded products, and a kind of road pavement called rubber-modified asphalt. These reuses are now the second-biggest consumer of used tires at about 28%, having grown 29% since 2019. A little more goes into construction fill. Here’s the rough breakdown:

The Trend the Number Hides

A 79% recycling rate sounds like a system that’s winning. The bigger picture is complicated. USTMA admits that we’re making old tires faster than we can find uses for them. People drive more miles in heavier vehicles, and the markets for used rubber haven’t kept up. The recycling rate has bounced around over the years — it was higher in the mid-2010s — and the latest report shows more tires going into landfills.

However, there is a real good-news story under all this, and it’s worth saying plainly. Giant piles of abandoned tires, the kind that bred mosquitoes and caught fire back in the 1980s, have mostly been cleaned up. They dropped from more than a billion tires in 1990 to fewer than 48 million in 2023, a 95%-plus cleanup, and the recycling rate climbed from just 11% back then.

The question now is whether we can handle a quarter-billion new tires every year without leaning on incinerators to do it.

The Waste You Can’t Even See

Every recycling number measures the whole tire you hand to the shop. None of them measures the tire that’s already gone. As you drive, your tires slowly wear down. That missing rubber doesn’t vanish, it sheds onto the road as tiny bits called tire wear particles, then washes into storm drains and streams. Around the world, an estimated 6 million tons of tire bits enter the environment each year, making tires one of the largest sources of microplastics in water.

And this isn’t just litter. Tires contain a chemical called 6PPD that keeps the rubber from cracking. When it hits the air, it turns into a related chemical, 6PPD-quinone, which can be deadly. In a 2020 study in the journal Science, scientists found it was the reason huge numbers of coho salmon were dying in city streams after rainstorms, even in tiny amounts. The 79% number says nothing about any of this, because road dust never shows up at a recycling plant.

One of the biggest piles of tire waste is the one no rate tracks.

What Tires Cost You

Tires are an expense most people forget to budget for. In 2025 a single new tire ran about $192, and a full set of four usually costs somewhere between $460 and well over $1,200 — before you pay to mount, balance, and align them. Most tires last 40,000 to 70,000 miles, or roughly three to five years of normal driving.

The easiest way to spend less, not to mention waste less, is to make the tires you already have last longer. Just keeping them properly inflated can add thousands of miles. That’s money in your pocket and rubber out of the trash.

What You Can Do

Make your tires last longer

• Check your tire pressure once a month. Low pressure wears tires out faster than anything else — keeping them filled to the right pressure can add thousands of miles.
• Rotate your tires every 5,000 to 8,000 miles and get an alignment if the car pulls to one side or the tread wears unevenly. Tires that last longer are tires you never have to throw away.
• Shop for how long a tire lasts, not just the price tag. A longer-lasting tire often costs less per mile and makes less waste.

Get rid of old tires the right way

• Let the shop take them. When you buy new tires, the installer usually has to handle the old ones — that small disposal fee pays for the recycling system.
• Never dump or stockpile tires. Find a drop-off spot through the Earth911 Recycling Search instead of letting them pile up.

Cut down on the invisible pollution

• Drive a little gentler. Hard starts and hard stops grind off more rubber, and more of those tiny tire bits. Easier driving saves your tires and keeps road dust out of local water.
• Back local efforts to filter street runoff and find a safer replacement for 6PPD. Both are already in the works, and both need public funding to grow.

The post Do Tires Tower Over Other Recycled Materials? appeared first on Earth911.

This is the third in a series of articles about reducing the amount of the most common materials in household waste.

Metal is the fifth most common material in U.S. household trash, behind paper, food, plastics, and yard trimmings, according to the EPA’s most recent national data. Unlike those other heavyweights, metal is inert in a landfill and doesn’t burn, so every can, pan, or appliance that ends up buried just sits there indefinitely while we mine fresh ore to replace it.

That waste is almost entirely avoidable, though future generations may thank us for provisioning mines with ample supplies of metal. Most metal is infinitely recyclable, meaning it can be melted and reformed repeatedly without degrading. Because mining metal is among the world’s most environmentally damaging industries, keeping what’s already been mined in circulation is one of the highest-leverage things a household can do. And companies working to eliminate plastic waste often lean on metal as the durable, recyclable alternative, which makes handling it well even more important.

Sustainability is a journey, not a single choice. Wherever you are on yours, here are the next steps to keep metal out of the garbage.

Metal Waste

Metals are consistently among the most valuable recyclable commodities — you might even be able to make money recycling your scrap. They fall into two families. Ferrous metals such as steel and iron contain iron, can be identified with a magnet, and rank among the most recycled materials on Earth. Nonferrous metals include aluminum, copper, lead, zinc, and tin, along with precious metals like gold and silver and the rare earth elements used in electronics.

Aluminum cans are the most recycled and by far the most valuable beverage container in the U.S., worth roughly $1,338 a ton in the recycling stream compared with $215 for PET plastic and a negative value for glass, the Aluminum Association reports.

Here’s the catch worth: even our best-recycled metal is slipping. Americans recycled just 43% of aluminum cans in 2023, the lowest rate in decades, down from an average around 52% since tracking began in 1990, according to the Aluminum Association and the Can Manufacturers Institute. On average, each of us threw away the equivalent of 15 twelve-packs of cans — about $1.2 billion worth of aluminum in total — instead of recycling them.

But all of us have different habits, and stepping up a level can make a big difference for the environment and our wallets.

Good

It’s good to start with the simplest step: participate in your curbside recycling program. Nearly every curbside program accepts aluminum and steel cans, and many take larger pieces of scrap metal too. Even if your community has no curbside service, search the Earth911 recycling locator to find a metal recycler near you.

If you live in a state with a container deposit return program, often referred to as a “bottle bill,” use it. Deposit return is the single biggest lever on the recycling rate: the 10 states with deposit programs recycle aluminum cans at an average of 68%, versus just 22% in states without them, and eight of the top 10 states for can recycling have a deposit law on the books.

Better

If you’re already recycling your cans, start working on some of the trickier metals.

• Metal lids from steel cans and glass jars, plus steel or aluminum bottle caps, require special handling to be recycled safely — they’re too small to sort loose.
• Reuse aluminum foil for as long as it’s functional. When you can’t reuse it anymore, clean off any food and ball it up so it’s large enough to be captured for recycling.
• The chemical coating on nonstick cookware makes the metal nonrecyclable. As nonstick pans wear out, replace them with cast iron — your cast iron will outlive you.
• Metal paint cans, oil cans, and propane tanks are considered household hazardous waste in most communities. Limited recycling programs exist for propane canisters and leftover paint; use the Earth911 search to find out whether one operates near you.
• Learn how to care for ferrous metals to minimize rust. It extends an object’s useful life and makes recycling easier at the end of it.
• Reuse is just as important as recycling. Whenever possible, buy second-hand. Metal is durable enough to survive several generations of use before it needs to be recycled.

Best

When you’re aiming for zero waste, avoiding metal entirely isn’t the goal. Metal is often the durable, recyclable alternative to worse materials. But if you’re willing to put in the effort, you can do better than “better.”

• Close the loop by buying products made with recycled metal — though it works differently than other materials, because metals don’t carry “recycled content” labels. Aluminum cans now average about 71% recycled content, according to the 2024 industry survey (down slightly from 73% reported for 2016–17). Steel is harder to pin to one number because it depends on how it’s made: basic-oxygen-furnace steel includes roughly 23–30% recycled scrap, while electric-arc-furnace (EAF) steel can be 80% or more recycled content. EAF production now accounts for about 70% of U.S. steel and is headed toward 90% by 2040, so nearly all American steel carries meaningful recycled content, and structural steel often tops 90%.
• For some products, like jewelry, suppliers work specifically with recycled metals. Seek them out.
• Few products are made from a single material. Learn to disassemble items at the end of their life so you can separate the recyclable metal from the parts that have to be thrown away.
• The rare earth elements in electronics make up a tiny share of metal waste but carry an outsized environmental cost — and they’re almost never recovered. Only about 1% of the rare earths in end-of-life products get recycled; the rest is landfilled. Neodymium-iron-boron magnets, the single biggest use of rare earths, get shredded with the devices that hold them, although newer copper-salt recovery methods can recover 90 to 98% of the rare earths from discarded magnets. Take the time to learn about electronics recycling, and fix broken gadgets instead of replacing them.
• Before buying something new, ask whether you really need the smart version or whether a simpler, more easily recyclable low-tech option will do.
• Tossing things in the trash is easy; responsibly disposing of old items is hard. After disassembling a gas grill or similar item for its recyclable parts, a different option starts to look more appealing: use less, period. Understanding a product’s full life cycle often makes buying a new one a lot less tempting.

Related Reading

• Good, Better, Best — Reducing Textile Waste
• Good, Better, Best — Cutting Down Paper Waste
• Good, Better, Best — Eliminating Plastic Waste

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by Gemma Alexander on April 20, 2020, and was substantially updated in June 2026.

The post Good, Better, Best — Reducing Metal Waste appeared first on Earth911.

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:00

Hello, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thank you for joining the conversation.

Today, we’re going to take another dive into the circular economy, this time about how we manage our waste collection and processing systems. The U.S. waste management industry moves more than 290 million tons of municipal solid waste a year. It’s a potential trillion-dollar market, yet much of it still runs on paper, tickets, clipboards, and spreadsheets. Roughly 10,000 independent haulers handle a significant share of American collection and materials transfer, and they work in a business where a single truck costs $300,000 and profitability depends on route efficiency. Yet most of these haulers lack access to the digital infrastructure that other logistics-centric industries adopted a decade ago.

Now that society recognizes the immense value in waste—that it’s not just something to dispose of as quickly and quietly as possible, to manage for profitable reuse in a growing circular economy—the waste management industry is in the midst of a vast upgrade.

And our guest today is Mike Marmo, the CEO and founder of CurbWaste, an end-to-end operating system built for independent waste haulers. Mike is a fourth-generation waste industry professional. His great-grandfather started in the business, and Mike started his career working at a family transfer station in New York. Then he built his own collection and disposal hauling company called Curbside, and when COVID shutdowns wiped out three months of construction-dependent revenue, he pivoted to focus on the software platform his hauling company had built. He sold that hauling business in 2021 and has spent the years since building CurbWaste into a platform that now serves more than 150 haulers across 40 states, from five-truck family operations to 200-vehicle regional fleets.

CurbWaste brings order management, real-time dispatch, route optimization, automated invoicing, driver apps, and e-commerce into a single cloud-based platform. Its CurbPOS point-of-sale system for transfer stations tracks inbound and outbound materials with scale integration, and uses weighted averages by material type to generate automated LEED diversion reports and Recycling Certification Institute certified documentation. In other words, it helps a hauler qualify for environmental incentives that gives contractors and developers defensible, third-party verifiable proof that their construction waste was actually diverted from a landfill. And that, too, creates another economic opportunity.

The per-load, per-material chain-of-custody data is what the emerging extended producer responsibility programs that we’ve discussed many times need, as seven states now require producers to fund and document the collection, sorting, and recycling of their packaging. So if you put this operating system under the circular economy, you start to track the value flow, and that means more value can be recognized and rewarded.

In October, CurbWaste closed a $28 million Series B round led by Socium Ventures—that’s the venture capital arm of Cox Enterprises—bringing its total funding to $50 million. The investment is fueling AI-powered business intelligence tools designed to give independent haulers the kind of data-driven decision making that larger competitors like Waste Management and Republic Services have built in their own proprietary systems.

We’ll talk with Mike about what it takes to digitize an industry that’s resisted technology adoption for decades, how CurbPOS’s materials tracking could extend from LEED compliance into EPR reporting and regional materials flow planning, and whether a network of independent haulers on a shared platform can become a connective tissue for an emerging circular economy supply chain. And finally, what is AI actually delivering for waste operations today compared to the hype we’re hearing?

You can learn more about CurbWaste at curbwaste.com—CurbWaste is all one word, no space, no dash.

So, can a software platform that modernizes independent hauling also help build the data infrastructure for the circular economy? Let’s find out right after this quick commercial break.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome to the show, Mike. How you doing today?

Mike Marmo  4:42

I’m doing well. How are you doing?

Mitch Ratcliffe  4:44

Doing well. It’s a beautiful day here in Southern Oregon, and I know in New York City you’re getting through the snow.

Mike Marmo  4:51

Yes, it’s really cold.

Mitch Ratcliffe  4:53

I want to start off with this question, and it goes back to the fact that your great-grandfather started this business, or started in this business. Walk us through the paper and digital processes that recycling operations have been using, and how CurbPOS changes their day-to-day work.

Mike Marmo  5:07

Yeah. So my family had grown up in this, you know, been in this business. I had grown up in this business. Actually, my first job, I was a scale operator starting at a transfer station. And when I was working there, everything was pen to paper. You know, we used a traditional scale ticket. We would put it through this, you know, the EXP printer.

And, you know, within that first year of really working there, I started to realize how difficult it was and how much manual work was happening. You know, a lot of the requests that we were getting at that facility—it was a C&D facility—a lot of the requests we were getting were for LEED, or for something that was related to a regulatory compliance effort, and to get all that information was fairly difficult. So we, you know, at that point, I really understood kind of where the waste industry was relative to the technology around me and my regular day-to-day life, and when I started a waste company, and then ultimately ended up starting a software company, I really saw it at scale, working with a lot of companies around the country that are starting pen to paper or operating off kind of archaic systems.

And so when we originally built CurbWaste and then the CurbPOS product, which is for the transfer stations and recycling centers, we really hyper-focused on automating tasks and making sure that everything was as digital as possible for aggregation of data. So I think we’re starting to see adoption along the way, and I think the waste industry is progressing, but ultimately, I think a digital experience is necessary. And I think it’s for the future of the industry and for the future of the way that we operate in our waste streams. I think it’s critical.

Mitch Ratcliffe  6:45

When you pivoted from moving trash to selling software, how did that change your view of the system that you’d been working in?

Mike Marmo  6:52

Yeah, so New York, obviously, is fairly unique. We were operating the five boroughs, and there are many limitations, regulatory compliance. It’s very difficult to navigate logistically—you know, so many people, and limited parking, limited space, very tight. So you know, when you’re operating in that bubble, you don’t have a lot of options on how you have to operate. You have to be really, really good and really, really pointed.

But then once we moved into the software space, and we started to see, you know, around the country, how people operate, the term I like to use always is “local,” because it really is. You know, we’re all fundamentally doing the same thing. We’re all picking up garbage. We’re all bringing it to facilities. They’re processing materials. But the way they do it, or the nuances around that workflow, are very different, depending on where you are.

And the example I’ll use is like, you know, you have New York City—again, that’s like a very tight space, limited space, lot of people. And then you’ll operate with a company down in Alabama or Mississippi that has a big urban sprawl, and they have different types of issues, different types of problems. And so everybody’s trying to do the best they can from a service perspective. But ultimately, it really is dependent on where you are regionally. And I think that’s where dynamic software and the ability to be dynamic really provides a lot of value overall.

Mitch Ratcliffe  8:04

The old approach to this business was you had a landfill and you had a certain number of years to fill it, and so you were managing filling a hole rather than extracting value from the waste stream. How have you seen that transition change the focus of the business that you’re trying to support with software?

Mike Marmo  8:21

So I think, I mean, maybe I can take a step back into the history a little bit. To your point, I think waste used to be volume-based. It was very much like, I charge a price per yard, I dump for price per yard. And there was a simplicity in that. But I think it also led to—kind of, the way that pricing was done was, again, very volume, and it was very simple.

When the industry moved into weight and it started to weigh materials—and obviously within that, the kind of correlation of commodities being pulled out and the value in the global supply chain—there was a shift in the industry where some of the waste haulers still were pricing or stuck in a volume-based framework, but the facilities were pricing off of tonnage.

And there was an evolution that happened over time. So what you end up seeing is like, if you order a dumpster, for example, and a dumpster has a certain amount of price and allowable tonnage, and then you’re pricing off a matrix format for additional tonnage—the industry shifted. There was a shift in the way that the industry actually started to work.

So now what ends up happening in that framework is, some landfills, you know, big facilities, certain markets have a lot of land and a lot of sprawl, and they have big holes with long lifespans. Whereas other markets don’t have any landfills, or have many landfills closing because they’re running out of space, and they’re moving to intermodal, or they’re moving to, again, like MRFs. There’s been more focus on bringing materials back into the supply chain. So I think we’re still seeing that shift happen. It’s still moving in that direction.

And I think, again, like I always say, waste is a utility that’s not measurable, and I think that’s the main problem. And in order to do this well, you need to have a unit of measurement, a single point of truth. And so that’s why I think software comes into play. It’s able to aggregate a bunch of data—operational data, but also data that’s related to the material and waste streams—and be able to measure what’s going on, and then be able to make better business decisions and better regulatory decisions on the long term.

Mitch Ratcliffe  10:23

CurbPOS tracks inbound and outbound materials at these transfer stations. When a truck dumps a load, what’s the data capture process, and how granular does it get in terms of the materials that you can classify and identify? And then what does that enable in terms of value extraction?

Mike Marmo  10:38

It all depends. It really depends on the market. Some, it hits the floor and then it just gets, you know, taken out to the next place. Other markets will obviously run it across a belt, pull out commodities. So there’s something measurable that’s happening.

I think, you know, the age of technology now, you can do things like material recognition—AI being able to do material recognition and get components of that. Obviously, the certification bodies like RCI and LEED that are helping to kind of audit and make sure that there’s an evaluation period of whatever they’re saying they did, or whatever they’re pulling out of the stream.

But the inbound-outbound correlation is really what matters. Because when you’re coming onto the scale and you’re getting weighed and you’re putting it on the floor, once it hits the belt, we can then take the outbounds and create that mapping of, okay, this material, amount of material came in that day, this load hit the floor, and then this is what was distributed out. And then we can show you what a recycling rate was. I still think there’s more to be done there. I do think that cameras and AI can measure that when it hits the ground, but I think the industry is moving in the right direction overall.

Mitch Ratcliffe  11:52

Let’s step back a little bit from the industry to, let’s say, a five-truck family operation that’s never used anything except maybe QuickBooks to do some invoicing. What is the actual on-ramp to CurbPOS look like for them? How does it change their business?

Mike Marmo  12:09

Yeah, so I think if you’re a hauler, you’re going to be on the CurbWaste product. If you’re transitioning to be on the CurbPOS product—but really, around implementation, I think that’s actually a natural point where people start thinking about software as a hauler. You know, you really want to be cost-efficient in the early days, and so sometimes software might be out of the price range. But I think as you start to grow, and you’re seeing that incremental growth, what most haulers are looking for at that point is efficiency and visibility.

So what software is able to do—operationally, it’s allowing you the ability to be efficient and to be able to see what’s working and what isn’t, and then it’s also giving you insights into what’s measurable, so that you can keep investing in the things that are working. That’s hard in the waste business overall, but it’s a good way to start.

When you go through change management, change is hard all the time. Like, if you have a process that’s working, and it’s, you know, the kind of old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” You hit a certain point where you have to make a decision about what you want—what is the motivating factor of the business? So are you trying to grow, or are you just trying to maintain where you are? Most people that are entering business and entrepreneurship are trying to grow. So then it becomes about scale. It becomes about, I need to maximize and focus on the most important thing, and I can’t do everything. And eliminating manual tasks allows you to scale more efficiently.

So you go through the buying process and you find the right fit for the software that you need in the moment of which you need it. But you also need to consider what you can scale into as you grow. And then you go through a process of entering orders, getting training, training the drivers, training the staff, making sure everybody understands how the system works. But then there’s a transition period. We stick with them, we make sure that everything is going the way that we hoped it would go, what the project plan said, and you’re supporting them along the way. But at a certain point, the system is running for you, and then they’re off to the races and they continue to scale.

Mitch Ratcliffe  13:53

One of the major changes in the industry that’s driving this transition is the introduction of extended producer responsibility laws, which require, for instance, you’re measuring material type, the weight, its recyclability, and whether it’s recycled, and getting verification of that diversion from landfill. Was that in your head when you started thinking about developing CurbWaste, or is this an opportunity that’s just sort of emerged conveniently at the same time?

Mike Marmo  14:20

100%. When we got into this, the grander vision was the interconnectivity of the supply chain from a data perspective. So the way I kind of like to normalize it is, you have a generator, you have a collector—a hauler—you have a disposal site, and then ultimately end use, right? But it’s end of life. So does it go back into the supply chain through the circular economy? Does it end up in the hole? Whatever that is. There’s usually that period of time where the life cycle has ended.

So the way we thought about it was, well, where can we focus energy from a software perspective? I view the haulers and the transfer stations and the disposal centers as the core of the data set. So we really want to be hyper-focused on aggregating data and providing value in those areas. But ultimately, the idea was to interconnect the generation piece to the rest of it. So when we started, we really stayed focused on that part—the collector and the disposal. But now we’re starting to migrate into the generator piece, to really connect the data sets. And to your point, show where material is being generated, how it’s being generated, where it’s going, and ultimately where it ends up. That’s the measurement of the utility. That’s the waste meter. And that’s what we’re trying to achieve.

Mitch Ratcliffe  15:31

We’ve had a number of sorting and hauling folks on the show, as well as a lot of other thinkers on this topic of the circular economy. So building on this reality in which you’ve got verification that materials have been moved to a particular place and at a particular pace, do you imagine it’s possible to actually plan regional material flows, to really turn the circular economy on in its full flower?

Mike Marmo  15:55

Yes, I do. It’s a lofty goal. A lot has to happen. But I do believe that that’s possible. And the analogy I like to use is something like Amazon. Amazon was able to understand from a retail component, like, what buyer behavior was. They were able to leverage data around buyer behavior, and then they were able to integrate themselves into the supply chain—the freight forwarding, the warehousing, the ultimately last-mile delivery.

And they do it so well. The reason why you’re able to get something in the same day is because they were able to connect all those pieces and understand the output. I believe that the waste industry can achieve that. And so that was a core part of what we are trying to do. You have to walk before you run. You can’t do everything all at once. And again, this is a business, right? Like, if I sign up a hauler and I can’t run their business, then the workflows—you have to build a foundation before you build the house. But I think the long-term vision is the ability to do exactly what you just said.

Mitch Ratcliffe  17:03

Millions of people come to Earth911’s database to find out what to do with specific materials, and one of the things they’re interested in is getting the right material to the right place, so that it is actually recycled. And what you just described in the context of Amazon, for instance—should we not be thinking about putting everything in a single bin? But could we, in an economically viable way, actually have specialized collection that would produce a cleaner load?

Mike Marmo  17:33

Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I saw as a waste hauler that I struggled with was, we’re making decisions—whether regulatory or whether it’s, you know, just in general—like, if you’re trying to be a good actor and try to do the right things, but it’s not rooted in much data. And so what I tried to say was, well, if we can’t measure it, then how do you action it?

And I think the first step, the first thing that everybody should be paying attention to is, how do we measure this? Like, what are we actually looking at? What is the scope of the effort? I don’t think anybody could tell you that, but I think there are ways to do it. And I think, as you have—we like to refer to ourselves as a system of action. You have to have a single point of truth. And when you have a single point of truth, you can then make action against it. So data is the most important thing right now. Data aggregation is the most important thing.

To your point, you did say something that’s really important that I think gets missed as well, which is, it has to be economically viable. There has to be ROI associated. And so a lot of times, what ends up happening is you get a compliance or regulatory effort that doesn’t really take into account the business criteria, and then people are resistant to it, because the business still has to run—it’s a for-profit entity. We want to take the opposite approach. We want to provide value and find ROI in the haulers’ work. Work alongside them, work alongside the transfer stations, work alongside the landfills. Understand how they’re thinking about their business, and really get down into the KPIs of their ROI, and then funnel that back up to the generators and say, here’s how they make money, here’s what’s valuable to them. How can we work together to make that make sense?

I think there’s a way to do that, and it’s just about visibility. It’s transparency, it’s visibility, it’s getting people on the same page. And working together is really what we need to do.

Mitch Ratcliffe  19:05

So here’s a hypothetical. Let’s say you look to the one organization in the world right now that has the greatest visibility into what’s flowing into homes, and that’s Amazon, like we were just talking about. Could you partner with Amazon to say, we know you’re delivering this much cardboard, this much plastic waste, and so forth into this region, and then plan a hauling solution in response to that?

Mike Marmo  19:29

That’s right. That’s the end goal. That’s probably the last step, the last piece of the puzzle. But that’s exactly what you want to do. You know, waste is being created when it’s being manufactured, right? Like, ultimately, when it starts, at that point is when we know what the waste stream is going to look like. But again, if you have nowhere for it to funnel in, and you have nowhere to measure it, it’s disjointed. You have to have an integratable solution to be able to even do that. So yes, that is the goal. But ultimately, we have to start at the foundational level.

Mitch Ratcliffe  19:58

Yeah. We’re moving to a more planful economy, and there’s a lot to unpack in that idea. Let’s take a quick commercial break. We’re gonna come back to this fascinating conversation. Folks, stay tuned.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s return to my discussion with CurbWaste CEO Mike Marmo. He’s a fourth-generation waste industry veteran whose AI-augmented CurbPOS system automates recycling operations. So, Mike, until recently, the waste management industry has been resistant to digitization. Let’s just put it that way. And there’s a massive change ahead. What do you see in terms of a new generation of leadership and the way they think emerging as this industry grows?

Mike Marmo  20:43

Yeah, I think tech adoption in general runs through cycles, right? You have your early adopters, people that see the value. Usually, that’s someone that understands that they have to differentiate. That’s helping at the market. I was at that at one point—when you’re competing with 200 haulers in New York, you have to figure out a way, right? So tech, for me, was the way that I differentiated myself.

So you start with those, and what you’re really doing is you’re proving the ROI, you’re proving the case. You’re building case studies around, okay, this is providing value in this particular area, but you’re also identifying the meaningful pain points of what they’re experiencing. I think a lot of times, if you talk to a waste hauler, maybe generally they’ll say, like, things are working. But if you really get down into it, pull back the layers, there’s always a pain point. There’s always something they’re trying to solve for.

But when you see margin shrinking, you have to either try to drive net new revenue, or you have to be able to save in a certain area. So then what ends up happening naturally is that people start paying attention and they say, okay, this person is growing. They’re growing 30% year over year. What’s driving that growth? And eventually you get adoption. In that way, you get that mass adoption. But some people don’t want to take the risk. They want the other people to take it first and have that proof point. But then it kind of accelerates, and that’s when you start to get into that hyper-growth, hyper-adoption phase.

I think we are very, very close to that. I think what’s happening is people are paying attention to what’s going on. From a tech perspective, it is moving at hyper speed at this point, and so the world is evolving at such an incredibly fast rate that anybody that doesn’t adopt will ultimately fall behind at some point. So I think the waste industry historically has been a little behind, but I don’t anticipate that being the case for the long term.

Mitch Ratcliffe  22:23

When you raised your Series B, you said that you wanted patient capital that understands that this industry won’t transform overnight. And in the context of what you just said about everything changing at hyper speed, why patient? And how does that transformation happen in practice? And what do you see as the timeline?

Mike Marmo  22:41

It’s pretty simple. I think I alluded to this earlier. You have to build the foundation before you build the house. You can’t build the roof first, right? You have to build the foundation. And a lot of waste haulers—you have a varying degree of waste haulers around the country that are like two-to-three-truck operations all the way up to 30,000-truck fleets, right? So you have to meet them where they are. If you cannot run the business for them in a meaningful and impactful way, then you’ve already failed. There’s nothing that you can do that will really help them unless you pick a niche part of their business. And we have a lofty goal of being an operational management system. We want to be able to run the entire business on the platform.

So you have to start there. And when I say patient capital, there’s a lot of effort that goes into building those workflows, not just surface level, but adding depth, adding nuance and depth, to make sure the system is dynamic but rigid. You don’t want data to be wrong, and you don’t want it to get convoluted, but you want it to be dynamic enough to meet the need in the market. So that takes time. You have to learn. You have to listen. You have to pay attention to what’s going on. You have to be a really, really good partner to the waste hauler. They have to trust you and believe in you.

So that part of it is like the first step into the rest. But in conjunction with that, you have to be forward looking. You have to be looking at the things that they’re not paying attention to, the things that they don’t know, because they’re in the weeds dealing with the day-to-day. They’re dealing with servicing their customers, they’re dealing with the community, they’re dealing with building the business that they’re focused on. So it’s our job as a tech partner to be able to say, this is where the industry is moving, here’s what this is going to lead to, here’s the vision, and hopefully get people to sign up to that and believe in that.

So when we brought in a partner, we articulated that. I think a lot of times, when you bring on venture capital or any funding, they’re expecting this major hyper growth. But if you want to achieve what we’ve been speaking about thus far, you need to get things right, and you need to make sure that you’re building the foundation correctly.

Mitch Ratcliffe  24:40

You’re leaning into AI. Does that mean that you’re training models to become an expert in managing waste or hauler processes? Where’s the focus of your training?

Mike Marmo  24:51

It’s really in a couple different areas. I think what we really preach out there in the market is, AI for the sake of AI means nothing. Like, AI is cool. It’s great. It can provide you really meaningful value in certain areas of your life. And I think it’s going to be transformative, without a doubt. But in our industry, waste haulers don’t really care about necessarily putting something in because it’s flashy and nice and cool. They want it to provide value.

And so when we think about AI, we think about manual tasks. We think about repeatable tasks. We think about infinite-scale areas of their business that we’re solving an immediate pain point, or that they can scale with for the remainder of time, because that thing is going to happen all the time. So an example of that would be, how are we ingesting orders from multiple channels to create efficiencies? How are we setting up call centers? How are we transcribing phone calls for customer support and customer success?

And then I think what you’re referring to on the learning side is the gluing of traditional machine learning and algorithmic types of optimizations—for example, like route optimization—gluing it to historical behavior and being able to say, here’s the nuances, here’s when the person never puts their garbage out on time, here’s where this street is closed, but it doesn’t show you that in the map. Just certain things that dispatchers know, that tribal knowledge, that they understand their market, that an algorithm is not going to understand. And that’s where AI can layer in and learn behavior and then make better recommendations.

So it’s not an overnight thing. You have to have the data. It’s only as good as the data. So we’re really focused on the infrastructure architecture, making sure that we’re aggregating that data appropriately, and then learning on that data in order to make sure that we’re giving them the best option for success, or the best decision-making process, or the most optimal insight that we can provide.

Mitch Ratcliffe  26:42

So what’s an example of an AI-driven recommendation that one of your haulers has used to make a decision that they wouldn’t have otherwise?

Mike Marmo  26:50

Yeah, I think, like, operationally, or just anything that we can do that’s kind of AI-powered—

Mitch Ratcliffe  26:56

One that was a material difference for the hauler. What do you point to as an example when you’re talking to other haulers?

Mike Marmo  27:04

Yeah, let’s—I’ll probably say two. I think first, let’s just talk about—we’ve talked about change management. I think right now, internally, we’re really hyper-focused on making sure that we can create a really nice change management experience of adopting software. So we do a ton around AI data migrations, so that when we’re taking data out of a system, we’re able to map it in a quick and easy way that they can understand it, but also do structured cleanups of that data to make sure that they’re getting what they want into the new system. It seems like a small thing, but it’s a very challenging thing when you’re going through a long change management process. So that’s an immediate impact to the hauler, that they feel more comfortable in that change.

The second thing is, anything agentic that we build is going to provide value to the pain point that they’re trying to solve for. So whether that’s migrating data from one place into another—being able to take data out of a CRM or being able to put it into an ERP—meaningful value. You’ve just eliminated a manual task that they would have to do over and over and over again. That’s repetitive, that’s manual, and it applies. So it’s a really good method in providing ROI, because you can just say, that work is never going to be done again. That agent will work in that and do that for you with conviction.

But I think longer term, things like we talked about—service verification, material recognition, route optimization—those are efforts that we have to make meaningful investments in, that’ll be coming down the pike.

Mitch Ratcliffe  28:29

You know, as I listen to your description of this, and I think about the U.S. recycling system, which is, as you’ve pointed out, filled with small, private recyclers and haulers looking for ways to plug into, for instance, the growing extended producer responsibility infrastructure that’s emerging around us—I’m reminded of eBay. Is CurbWaste aiming to become a marketplace layer where those independent operators can begin to identify and plug into broader materials flows?

Mike Marmo  29:00

It’s on our radar. Like I said, I think a marketplace, to me, again, is really indicative of the behavior and the learning and understanding what’s going on. So right now, core focus is just visibility. I think we have to create the transparency layer first before anything else.

But yes, I would say, a marketplace, the ability to understand who’s best—like, RCI is a great example. I mean, RCI, when you’re partnering with LEED and you’re trying to find RCI facilities to establish those LEED points, that’s an area where we can help and say, this facility is in this area. Partner. We’re driving revenue for our customer base. We’re saying this RCI facility is on our platform. We can measure it. We can automate that process. We can get that LEED report to the right person in the right moment and give that level of visibility through dashboards or anything that we’re building at a customer-facing level.

Again, that’s work that doesn’t have to be done manually. That’s something that can happen in automation. That’s probably the first natural step. And we are doing some meaningful work with RCI and LEED. But long term, I think, yes, to your point, we want to get to a visibility layer, a waste meter layer, for anybody that wants it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  30:10

That transparency that you’re describing is going to be particularly important to producer responsibility organizations, the entities that are standing up to fulfill EPR requirements. Are you talking with them about how you can facilitate the management of their specific materials?

Mike Marmo  30:28

Yes, we are very much in discovery and in conversation with people that are obviously interested and incentivized to want to work with us and try to achieve this vision. So we do talk to people, and we do try to understand, what visibility do they want? What would they love to see? What is a utopian point of view? I mean, product is always something that we’re always forward looking on, right? What’s being built today is actionable. It’s already been validated. Now it’s about, what are we going to build in the future? We’re probably talking a few years down the road. I think we still have a lot to do on the workflow side. But yes, we are always keeping these teams informed and making sure that they’re aligned with where we’re going.

Mitch Ratcliffe  31:06

You’ve raised $50 million to date. Do you see a substantial amount of capital sitting out there waiting for this efflorescence of data visibility to take hold, so that they can begin to mine the material value in the economy?

Mike Marmo  31:21

Yes. I mean, our Series B was led by the venture arm of Cox Enterprises, and it was a very big part of their thesis. They saw the vision. They aligned with it. We were able to move quickly. But it really was rooted in the fact that they’ve been seeking this type of solution internally. They’ve been trying to figure out how to get more visibility into their own efforts as it relates to sustainability. So yes, I think we will continue to build. We have to fund the business in order to build the products and achieve the dream that we want to. We do believe that this can be a very big business, but ultimately, we are still aligning on that mission statement and that vision of giving the true visibility and measurement of the waste industry.

Mitch Ratcliffe  32:00

We’ve been looking kind of over the horizon without a clear timeframe. But let me ask you this: in 10 years, will we have an AI-enabled circular economy running, or will it still be in the process of being constructed?

Mike Marmo  32:12

I think it will be there. Yeah, in 10 years, I think it will be there. I think, you know what I know internally of where we are—we are not that far off. We have spent the last four years on the workflows. We are starting to see the data benefit of that. I think in the next 10 years we will 100% have it.

Mitch Ratcliffe  32:33

So how does that change the economy of the United States?

Mike Marmo  32:37

You know, that’s the part that I’m not 100% sure. I’ve been operating under the mission statement of this dream and this vision. I do think that it’s going to ultimately make us rethink how we think about waste.

You know, you have electricity, right? You can measure it. You can go onto your portal and see how much you’re consuming. You can measure water. You can measure all the things that you’re using on a day-to-day basis. The waste industry is a part, a core part, of our infrastructure. It’s a core part of our society. You can even look historically and say, when waste stops getting picked up, it can crumble a society. It can crumble a city. I mean, New York City went through that in the strike, and recently in Boston they went through it.

So there’s meaningful implications to the societal impact that waste has. And sometimes I think that gets taken for granted. And I think what we really want to focus on is showing that—getting all the waste haulers in our community, which I really think we’re building, is a really great community of waste haulers that are forward thinking, that want to be a part of that mission, and try to show people how critical this industry is, and also all the things and all the information and insights that can come out of it.

So yeah, it’s very mission-driven. It’s a very personal journey. It’s a very mission-driven journey. But ultimately, I think we have to break it down into its parts, phase out what the goals are, and then get to a point where we can show people how important it actually is.

Mitch Ratcliffe  34:05

This is a huge vision. How can our listeners keep track of your part of the story?

Mike Marmo  34:10

Well, I mean, obviously we post whatever we have to post on our website, so that’s a good place—at curbwaste.com—but also, anybody can reach out to us. I mean, we are very much trying to be an advocate of the industry, and we’re very much trying to be people that can be thought leaders and really speak about what we’re trying to achieve here. We’re very transparent, we’re very honest, we’re very true to who we are. So we love interacting with people in the space. We have people come to our office often. We have people talk to our team often. So for me, it’s reach out. Reach out on LinkedIn, reach out on the website. You can reach out by any means necessary.

Mitch Ratcliffe  34:48

Mike, thanks very much. It’s been a really interesting conversation.

Mike Marmo  34:52

Thank you. I really appreciate you having me.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe  35:08

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Mike Marmo. He’s CEO and founder of CurbWaste, and a fourth-generation waste industry professional who’s building the CurbPOS system, an end-to-end operating system for independent waste haulers. You can learn more about the company and its work at curbwaste.com—CurbWaste is all one word, no space, no dash.

Mike said something during the conversation that I encourage you to sit with: waste is being created when it is being manufactured. Now, that’s a deceptively simple observation, and it reframes everything with regard to how we think about the leftovers of the take-make-waste economy. The moment a product rolls off the line, its waste stream is determined—its packaging, what you need to do with it, the end-of-use disposition of the product itself, and the materials that will need to be collected, sorted, and either returned to the supply chain or, unfortunately, sometimes buried in a hole. If you can accept that premise, then the waste management industry isn’t simply a downstream result of the current economy. It’s a mirror that we need to look into to see the potential value to be recovered next week, next month, next year, or decades from now, when materials can no longer serve their current purpose.

Mike also pointed to what happens when waste stops moving. In 1968, New York’s sanitation workers walked off the job for nine days—just nine days—and 100,000 tons of garbage piled up chest-high on sidewalks. Rats swarmed into the city’s best neighborhoods, and New York declared its first public health emergency since the 1931 polio epidemic. And just last summer, when Teamsters struck against Republic Services in the greater Boston area, trash went uncollected for more than two months across 14 communities. Dumpsters overflowed behind restaurants. The rodent population exploded, and schools faced the start of their school year buried by rotting waste. As Mike put it, when waste stops getting picked up, a society can crumble.

And that fragility reveals something profound about society’s relationship with the materials from which it is constructed. We’ve built a civilization on the assumption that waste must disappear—that it’s someone else’s problem, and that it is best put out of sight and kept out of mind. We’ve treated waste as dirty, shameful, and beneath notice. That cultural contempt has real economic consequences, because it means we’ve systematically underinvested in the infrastructure that manages the material afterlife of everything that we produce and consume.

Now just imagine what happens when waste is no longer something to dispose of, but something that it’s important to recover. When the 290 million tons of municipal solid waste moving through U.S. systems each year is finally understood not as a cost center, but as part of the supply chain—a feedstock stream worth tracking, optimizing, and monetizing with the same sophistication we bring to any other logistics challenge. That’s when the world CurbWaste wants to enable and its staggering economics will come into being.

Accenture research projected that the circular economy could generate $4.5 trillion in additional economic output by 2030 and as much as $25 trillion by 2050. The United Nations Development Program has endorsed that same $4.5 trillion figure, noting that the transition would simultaneously cut emissions, create stable jobs, and open new green markets all over the world. Market analysts are converging on figures that describe an enormous circular economy. King’s Research projects it will reach nearly $2.9 trillion by 2031, while a more conservative estimate from Next Move Strategy Consulting pinpoints $1.3 trillion in projected value by 2030—so that even the lowest projections represent a doubling or tripling of the current waste market’s value in just five years.

The point is that we’re dramatically underinvesting relative to the opportunity. CurbWaste’s CurbPOS is just getting started on the path to connecting waste generators to local haulers, closing the loop that Mike described, from the point a product is manufactured to the end of its life and, ideally, back into the supply chain.

Mike’s Amazon analogy is the right way to frame this. Amazon took the time to understand buyer behavior first, when they were just selling books, and then they connected warehousing, freight forwarding, and last-mile logistics based on the knowledge of the consumer’s needs. The waste industry can follow the same logic: identify what’s being generated, where it flows, and where it ends up, ready for collection. Then the challenge is plugging the myriad gaps in our collection infrastructure by connecting independent operators—new startups—to materials that they can monetize, using a shared digital infrastructure. Right there you can see the necessary transparency layer, the marketplace layer, that turns a fragmented collection system into the connective tissue for a circular supply chain.

And that’s the signal that can transform waste into value, and that will drive new revenue for state and local collection and processing companies under extended producer responsibility programs, and ultimately lead to planned regional materials flows that citizens don’t pay for, that companies exploit because it’s profitable.

So when waste stops being considered the dirty result of our consumption and starts being recognized as valuable—when society looks at what it throws away with the same interest it brings to what it buys—we will have a fundamentally different relationship with the material world. One that recognizes that the people who move and manage our waste are operating a utility as essential as electricity or water. And that’s the story that will help unfold and explore here on Sustainability In Your Ear.

So stay tuned. And folks, would you take a moment to check out our archive of more than 540 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear? We’re in our sixth season, and I guarantee you there’s an interview that you’ll want to share with one of your friends. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. Folks, you’re the amplifiers that can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends, your family, and co-workers. They can find Sustainability In Your Ear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer.

Thank you for your support. I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.

The post Best of Sustainability In Your Ear: CurbWaste’s Mike Marmo Is Building the Waste Logistics Layer of the Circular Economy appeared first on Earth911.

In South Africa, informal waste pickers recover between 80% and 90% of all plastic and paper that actually gets recycled. There are about 140,000 of these reclaimers, who walk through cities and landfills, pulling trolleys and selling what they collect to make a living. Each person can keep up to 24 tons of material out of landfills every year. Together, they saved municipalities R750 million (about $45 million) in landfill costs in just one year, yet they do this work without recognition, protection, or a formal role in the waste system.

Sifiso Gumbi began as a reclaimer at 19, collecting scrap metal in Soweto after school. After 15 years in the informal recycling economy, he founded Urban Surfer South Africa, a Johannesburg-based social enterprise that believes the people already doing recycling work should be supported and equipped, not replaced. Urban Surfer creates essential tools like PPE and collection trolleys with personalized number plates, helping reclaimers become recognized workers in their neighborhoods. The organization also runs four recycling hubs where reclaimers can sort and bale their materials to sell at better prices, cutting out the middlemen who used to buy their collections for much less than market value.

Urban Surfer tracks everything with GPS-enabled trolleys and a live dashboard, and this approach has increased reclaimer incomes by up to 300%. In this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Sifiso talks about why dignity is key to better recycling rates, how aluminum can prices show what gets collected and what ends up in landfills, and what it would take to expand this model across South Africa and the continent.

One key idea keeps coming up in the conversation: reclaimers are like an R&D department that no one asks for advice. In South Africa, aluminum cans sell for 28 to 30 rand per kilogram, and reclaimers collect them so thoroughly that Sifiso says finding one on the street is as rare as finding a dollar bill on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, materials with lower value end up piling up in landfills, which are quickly filling up in Johannesburg and Gauteng.

Companies that want their packaging recovered can learn from the people who decide every day what is worth picking up. Data is also important. Urban Surfer tracks every kilogram by material type and price at its hubs. As carbon and plastic credits become more common, reclaimers will have verified, real-time records of the work they have already done. Sifiso is honest about the challenges: four hubs are not enough for Gauteng, and there are always limits on land and equipment funding.

But the bigger challenge is building trust between waste pickers and a public that still sees them as vagrants, and between the informal workforce and the policymakers and companies whose programs will only work if rebates actually reach the people doing the collecting. This conversation asks whether a truly circular economy can be built by supporting the people who are already making it happen.

To learn more about Urban Surfer and to explore partnership and sponsorship opportunities that equip reclaimers with trolleys, protective gear, and recycling hub infrastructure visit urbansurfer.co.za.

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Interview Transcript

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:10

Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today. We’re going to talk about waste pickers.

The way most of us picture recycling is a municipal one — a truck, a sorting facility, a system run by a city or a company — but across much of the world, that’s not the right picture. In South Africa, the overwhelming majority of plastic and paper that actually gets recycled is recovered not by any formal program, but by informal waste reclaimers, an estimated 140,000 people who move through cities and landfills on foot, pulling trolleys, collecting and sorting recyclable material, and selling it to survive. Each one diverts as much as 24 tons of waste from the country’s landfills every year. Collectively, they’ve saved municipalities hundreds of millions of rand in landfill costs and built the backbone of a recycling economy, all without recognition, protection, or a place in the official system.

It is some of the most environmentally valuable work being done anywhere, and it’s performed by some of the most marginalized people in the country. Reclaimers face social stigma and frequent harassment, and they work in unsafe conditions, exposed to chemicals and traffic. And because they are unorganized, they are often exploited by the middlemen, who buy their materials for a fraction of what it’s worth. The environmental service they provide is quite literally free, and the people providing it are largely invisible to the public they serve.

Our guest today has spent 15 years trying to change that. Sifiso Gumbi is the founder of Urban Surfer South Africa, a Johannesburg-based social enterprise built on the simple conviction that the people already doing the work of recycling should be supported, equipped, and recognized, not replaced. Urban Surfer designs and provides the tools of the trade, starting with a collection trolley developed alongside reclaimers over two years and 50,000 kilometers of real-world use, and that’s complete with a personalized number plate that gives its owner a sense of belonging and a measure of public legitimacy. The organization runs sorting and baling camps that connect reclaimers to offtake agreements and producer responsibility rebates, cutting out the middlemen and raising what reclaimers actually earn. It offers training, protective equipment, and mental health support, and it tracks the whole operation through GPS-enabled trolleys and a live reporting dashboard, turning work that was once invisible into measurable, documented impact.

Running underneath all of this is a word that Sifiso returns to again and again in his speeches and writing: dignity. Urban Surfer’s mission is framed not first in tons diverted, but in belonging — the right of a reclaimer to be seen as an essential worker rather than a nuisance, with a special focus on women and youth, who make up much of this workforce. That framing has earned Sifiso recognition as South African Environmentalist of the Year and Entrepreneur of the Year, a TEDx Johannesburg stage appearance, and the endorsement of city and provincial governments that now rely on his data to plan their own waste systems.

So, we’ll talk with Sifiso about what 15 years among reclaimers has taught him that no policy paper could, why he believes dignity and recognition are inseparable from recycling rates, and how a better trolley changes the way a person is treated on the street. We’ll also dig into how his camps and offtake deals reshape reclaimers’ income, why he built a data infrastructure into grassroots work, and how he persuades corporations to see reclaimers as partners rather than a line item. Then there’s the big argument that his work makes: that a genuinely circular economy has to be built on the people who already live in it, not by bypassing them.

To learn more about Urban Surfer, visit urbansurfer.co.za — Urban Surfer, all one word, no space, no dash. That’s urbansurfer.co.za. What would it take to see the people who already recycle most of a nation’s waste not as invisible labor, but as the foundation for the circular economy? Let’s find out right after this brief commercial break. Welcome to the show, Sifiso. How are you doing today?

Sifiso Gumbi  4:36

I’m doing amazing. How are you, Mitch?

Mitch Ratcliffe  4:38

I am well. I am well. Now, you’re in Johannesburg, and you’ve spent 15 years working alongside informal waste reclaimers in South Africa. Can you take us back to that moment when you first realized that there was an opportunity and a need to organize informal recycling?

Sifiso Gumbi  4:53

I was 19 when I realized, because that’s when I was really starting out, you know, into the whole space as a waste reclaimer. And the one thing I realized was that I could actually grow within, you know, the industry, because I could just see all around me. Growing up — I come from Soweto — we used to have a massive challenge with illegal dumping sites, and on close examination of all the waste, you know, that was being dumped, it was actually waste that one could, you know, actually recycle. And what I then realized was that, you know, there will always be waste for as long as there are people, because for as long as there are people, there’ll always be consumption. And I just saw this as an opportunity that really guaranteed a career for me, because all I needed was, you know, access to the waste.

Mitch Ratcliffe  5:41

You literally saw a greenfield opportunity in waste — that there was just so much of it lying around of value that it could be, if organized correctly, a lot more valuable to the waste reclaimer, and there’s sufficient profit for you to grow an organization.

Sifiso Gumbi  5:59

Absolutely, that’s what it was. I didn’t realize the many challenges I was going to come across as, you know, an informal reclaimer.

Mitch Ratcliffe  6:07

For listeners who have never seen South Africa, can you explain the society in which a reclaimer works, and what a typical day looks like for one of them?

Sifiso Gumbi  6:16

So, a typical day for a reclaimer — they start their day very early. We do have a waste management system here in South Africa. Each metro has one, and each local municipality has one. So, how it works is that there’s a municipal bin truck that comes through on every business day to collect waste. The municipal bin truck will come and collect a bin, it gets tipped into a truck, which is a compactor truck, and that truck takes all of that waste to the landfill. So they usually come in the morning, so your typical waste picker has to get to the bin before the municipal truck gets there.

So a day in the life of a South African waste picker consists of waking up very early, so that you can get to people’s bins before the municipal truck gets there, you know, open those bins and literally go through such bins to recover recyclable waste material before the municipal bin truck gets there. And then from there you load it up in a makeshift trolley using bulk bags that, you know, are normally used for sugar, soy, maize, even manure. I think maybe you do use those bulk bags in America, but that’s what waste pickers use here in South Africa. So they use them as containers to load up all the collected recyclable material.

Then from there, the material is taken to informal waste sorting sites. You know, they don’t sort where they collect. So where they collect, they just collect everything and just tie it up into the bag, load it up on the trolley, pull the trolley to, you know, whatever informal setting they have — any piece of land that they find, they use for sorting. So there the sorting takes place: you know, the plastics are separated, the paper is separated, the metal is separated, aluminum is separated. And then once the material is separated and carefully segregated, it is then, once a week, sold off to the buyback centers or the neighboring recycling companies.

Mitch Ratcliffe  8:27

So does that produce a better-sorted load for the recycling off-takers, the organizations that buy the material? It sounds like it’s competing with the municipal system to do a better job of sorting.

Sifiso Gumbi  8:39

The municipal system is not concerned about the recovery of waste for recycling. The municipal system is mainly concerned with the recovery of waste for disposal, so that the waste is removed from, you know, people’s backyards and, you know, people’s bins. So that’s what it’s all about, you know. For the longest time — the City of Johannesburg, the City of Ekurhuleni, the City of Tshwane, I can think of all the major metros and all the local governments — we’ve relied heavily on the use of landfill space, which we are now running out of. So, the system was really simple: collect and dispose. Waste pickers are the only ones that are collecting for value, you know, and collecting with the intent of recycling, because that’s their livelihood. They actually make their money from the recycling. The municipality really doesn’t, and they didn’t really care about that, you know, because they make their money anyway.

Mitch Ratcliffe  9:33

So, in a way, this is a self-organizing solution for recycling that was simply being ignored by government.

Sifiso Gumbi  9:39

Absolutely. It’s been around for more than 30 years, largely informal — I would say totally and absolutely informal. If you look at the current South African statistics, when it comes to recycling, the main contributors are waste pickers. The reason why we have a recycling rate at all is due to the efforts of, you know, informal waste pickers.

Mitch Ratcliffe  10:01

So these people do really, really important work, and your tagline is empowering people and transforming waste, but you talk a lot about dignity, not just recycling rates. Why is dignity at the center of how you think about this work?

Sifiso Gumbi  10:17

Because that’s where we have to start. Before we get to anything else, we need to first recognize waste pickers, not only as essential environmental custodians, but firstly as people. Dealing with waste reduces you to a level, especially in this country — and I think it may be the same thing in other countries — it reduces you to a state where people don’t even see you as a human being. They see you as a vagrant, they see you as the scum of the earth, because no one wants to, like — I mean, if you think about it, no one wants to deal with rubbish, no one wants to deal with waste, no one wants to handle all of that grimy stuff, you know. So when you do, instead of being recognized and applauded for, you know, such a huge sacrifice, one is usually seen as being of the same value as that waste you are dealing with.

So the first thing, you know, we try and advocate for is the humanization and dignity of reclaimers. And how do we do that? Firstly, it’s by kitting them out, or providing them with the correct PPE, so that they are presentable and they are more approachable and they are more visible and they’re more humanized. Because most waste pickers you come across, they deal with waste on a daily basis, so of course they won’t look as glamorous as someone who drives an Uber or someone who works at a restaurant or someone who works at a hotel or someone who works at a factory, you know. They’re waste pickers, they deal with waste, you know. So usually, you know, because they don’t earn even as much, you know, their clothing items are usually soiled, the way they look is usually dirty, because of the work that they do. You know, if you deal with a mechanic, a mechanic looks like a mechanic — he will be covered in oil. If you’re dealing with a waste picker, a waste picker will look like a waste picker, because he has to deal with waste on a daily basis, you know. And because of that image, you know, the public perception around waste pickers is really, really negative.

So we advocate for their dignity and recognition first, before anything else. We want people to understand the work that waste pickers do, we want people to understand that waste pickers are humans, we want people to understand that they’re doing an amazing job, not only for these communities that do not see them as people, but for the environment as a whole.

Mitch Ratcliffe  12:30

What you’re describing is so important to understanding where the opportunity to raise up people lies in the circular economy. I’ve been involved in a little bit of this kind of work in South America, and the organization that I was consulting with paid a generous rate to trash pickers. They supported local programs that included decorating their trolleys, which gave them a real sense of pride that recognized their humanity, as you’re talking about. Tell us about how you work with a group of reclaimers to develop the trolleys that make their work easier.

Sifiso Gumbi  13:07

The first trolley that we developed was an amazing solution, and I’ll touch base on that as I expand into the whole picture that I’m going to paint for you. Most waste pickers use makeshift solutions. From the trolleys that they use — it’s all makeshift — to the PPE that they come across. They don’t have any PPE, you know, so if they find an apron that, you know, is protective gear, anything to use — from even a, we call them balaclavas here in South Africa, some people call them ski masks, you know — they wear those as protective wear. So it’s all very makeshift.

So we decided to engage them and understand, you know, what type of trolley they would, you know, like to have, and you know, what features it would have. And we realized that most of the reclaimers we were, you know, interviewing at the time were camping in open fields. And they did that because one would leave their respective township to go and try and, you know, make a living from recovering waste from the affluent neighborhoods like Sandton and Bryanston, you know, all these fancy suburbs, you know, that are away from the townships. That’s where they usually find the most waste. And because it’s so far from the township, they were now forced to, you know, camp in the open, you know, to store their recyclables, sort their recyclables, and then maybe sell their recyclables. So they couldn’t, after collecting, take their recyclables back to their townships, because the townships are like 30 kilometers away, or even more.

So, one of them said — I think several of them said — you know, if I could perhaps be able to sleep inside my trolley, that would be amazing. And so we designed a trolley that, firstly, could accommodate a bulk bag that was specifically designed to store recyclable material, you know, that could fit the trolley and carry as much as 300 kilograms onto the trolley. Secondly, we then came up with a solution to have a foldable tent that one can, you know, keep in a compartment on the trolley as they go out to collect on their daily activities, and then later on, one could be able to deploy that tent over the trolley, and they could have overnight shelter as they camped in whatever spaces they had found to store their recyclables in and camp. So when we started out, all of our trolleys had shelter — those temporary tents they could put up at night, impermeable to water, so they were protected whenever it was raining, and quite warm enough for winter.

But with that solution, what we found was that most of the reclaimers became really comfortable with that functionality in their trolleys, and they then ended up using those trolleys as mobile homes instead of using them for recycling. So what they would do is that they would park those trolleys, you know, with the tent fully set up, and then take their makeshift trolleys and go into the field to collect recyclables, which created a massive problem now for the municipality, because all of a sudden now you have all these, you know, temporary homes springing up all over the show, and we unfortunately had to cut that solution.

Sifiso Gumbi  16:30

So, what we now do is the trolleys that we roll out to reclaimers, they have personalized plates that have the waste picker’s nickname, you know, for relatability, and they also have a back panel that usually has a logo of, you know, whatever sponsor, you know, comes in to help us, you know, on a project that supports reclaimers. So what we found is that people really love the number plates and the look of the trolley, so it allows the public to get to know their neighborhood reclaimer without necessarily talking to them — because you see the trolley, it’s written “Sifiso,” then you’re like, oh, that guy is Sifiso, he’s been operating in my area the entire time. And then the other thing we have — we have GPS trackers fitted on each trolley, so as to track the movements of all the reclaimers. We are very big on data, so that we know where they are at any given time, and should there be any case in any neighborhood that they operate in, we are able to maybe, with authorities, share that. Okay, maybe at this point one of our reclaimers was there — perhaps ask him what happened there. So the reclaimers have become an added security feature, or like an intelligence network for civilians, you know, in that.

Mitch Ratcliffe  17:46

Could you also use that system to deploy people to where there is uncollected material?

Sifiso Gumbi  17:52

Absolutely, we can. As a matter of fact, we are getting requests, you know, from community associations to come and collect from them, so whenever they do, we just send through the nearest reclaimer.

Mitch Ratcliffe  18:07

You have the sorting and baling camps — are these sort of ad hoc homes for these communities of mobile workers? Tell us about how that works, and particularly, how do you aggregate enough material that you can pay them a better rate than the middlemen who would have purchased this material before?

Sifiso Gumbi  18:25

So we have recycling hubs that we’ve set up with the idea and clear understanding that, you know, most of the reclaimers we support not only just need collection equipment and PPE, but they also need working facilities where they can store their material and sort it. So now, what we have added into those facilities is processing machinery, so that the reclaimers don’t only just sort the material, but they are able to have access to a baling machine, which then compacts their material. And once the material is compacted, they can sell it to the recyclers, the recycling companies, at a better price, because they are no longer selling loose material.

So one thing we also organize for the reclaimers is corporate collection sites where they can collect from and have more access to waste. So we try and give them as much access to collection volumes as possible, because the more waste they collect, the more money they make. But the challenge is that we are only sitting on four recycling hubs so far, and there are so many waste collectors in Gauteng alone, not even mentioning in the country, so we’ve barely scratched the surface. So these recycling hubs are a great need for many of the other, you know, waste collectors, and it’s a bit of a challenge right now for us to, like, get access to land. And even if we do get access to land, we’re in constant need to perhaps get a funder to help us buy equipment, to help us set up the structures on site, and to bring in all the other necessary infrastructure to make a recycling hub operational.

Mitch Ratcliffe  20:07

I hear the beginning of an approach that would allow companies to partner with informal recyclers to collect even specialized materials, like e-waste, for instance, to create a local closed-loop system. But that also suggests that needs to happen everywhere. Do you see Urban Surfer as a model for an infrastructure to enable the circular economy globally?

Sifiso Gumbi  20:31

100%. So, the one thing that we’ve been able to crack on the ground is we have managed to become the bridge between the formal side of things and the informal side of things. So informal recycling people work as individuals — they are barely organized, they’re just concerned with their survival. So, how we’ve come in, we’ve now become the bridge between the private sector and the informal sector, we’ve become the bridge between the government and the reclaimers on the ground. So definitely, from what we have done in our own capacity, with a very small team and quite limited resources, I think our model is well proven and is well positioned to be the blueprint for replicating the same solution globally.

Mitch Ratcliffe  21:22

This is a fascinating opportunity. I want to take a quick commercial break, and we’re going to come back to continue the conversation. Stay tuned, folks.

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s continue the conversation with Sifiso Gumbi. He is the founder of Urban Surfer, which organizes informal recyclers in South Africa. Sifiso, the first time I became aware of informal trash pickers was actually in San Francisco, and it was common for older Asian women to pick bottles out of everybody’s trash before it was collected, just as you described earlier. But what I noticed is they all got on buses and then went to the most dangerous neighborhood in the city to sell their bottles, and I always wondered why nobody enabled them to drop it at an aggregation point where they would be able to collect sufficient volume to make a good profit on the material, while paying those women a fair rate for what they had collected. You’ve built this GPS-tracked trolley system, you’ve got live reporting — that’s a lot of technology for grassroots work. Following on the conversation we were having before the break, how do you see using technology, or technology’s ability to let us see into deep, complex problems, to organize a new recycling system?

Sifiso Gumbi  22:40

Listen, Mitch, we are living in a digital age, and I think the aggregation of data is quite essential, especially when you are dealing with projects like the ones we are involved in. Firstly, we saw it quite important for us to have a live data reporting system and also to fit GPS trackers on the trolleys of all the reclaimers that we support, because, one, if we are working with a project sponsor, we need to have a system that is able to measure the impact and the progress of each project that we have activated. It is important, one, to know how far waste pickers travel, where they collect, how frequently they collect from those neighborhoods. That, for one, gives us the pattern and actually gives us the general idea of, okay, which neighborhoods produce the most waste, because waste pickers only target the neighborhoods that produce the most waste, you know. So, for future reference, that data can help us maybe engage such communities more, and perhaps workshop them on how to better separate their waste, so that they help the reclaimers to collect more waste. Right.

Secondly, we record all the volumes that are brought in by our vast network of reclaimers. In all of our recycling hubs, we record the volumes of what recyclable materials they bring in — is it plastic, is it paper, and what quantity? And then, secondly, we record how much they’ve made from each recyclable item. So there’s a lot of, you know, solutions that have been brought in, like carbon credits, plastic credits, and because we already have all the data, we are in a position to bring those solutions in and have them as add-on incentives for reclaimers through the data that we collect from them — which includes the miles they cover, the volumes they recover — that can be packaged and perhaps accredited as a carbon credit that reclaimers can almost immediately start benefiting from, or it can also be credited as a plastic credit that waste pickers can start benefiting from, and which they should be benefiting from. They did the—

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:01

Work.

Sifiso Gumbi  25:02

They did the work, you know. So it was important for us to collect the data from the very beginning, so that when all of these solutions come to the fore, we already have all the data, and this is transparent data, this is real-time data. There’s absolutely no greenwashing, and these are accurate volumes. So, with that data, we are hoping maybe in the future to use it as leverage to have waste pickers benefit, you know, from all there is to benefit within the climate resilience and sustainability space.

Mitch Ratcliffe  25:38

You’re describing a remarkably advanced view into the reverse logistics economy, and I can imagine reclaimers organizing to address what we would think of in Uber terms as surge opportunities — a major football match, for instance — you could send people in to collect particular sets of material, and you have almost unprecedented visibility into local material flows. Are you also thinking about using that data as the basis for providing research, both to government and to corporations, about where those materials might be for profitable recovery?

Sifiso Gumbi  26:16

Absolutely. I mean, if we’re really talking about closing the loop, the best people to talk to, as far as R&D is concerned — let’s say you have a new product on the market, and you are looking for the best packaging solution. For one, the packaging for your product — you must make sure that it can be easily recovered for recycling, and the best people to engage on that are the waste pickers themselves, because they’ll tell you that, okay, this I can definitely recover, and this is how much I will get from it. So, if I’m well incentivized on that, you’ll definitely get to see the circular economy activated with whatever packaging material you put out into the environment. But because currently no one is really engaging, you know, the main volume drivers on the ground, people are mainly concerned with certifications, ISO standards, and this and that. But if you take a closer look at what is currently being produced as packaging material for most of the items that we consume as households, it’s only a limited portion that actually circles back into production. The rest is piling up in our landfills. And why is that? Because there isn’t any incentive for the waste pickers to collect that, you know, as a recyclable material. There isn’t.

Now, in South Africa, the best material, or the hot material, like, right now, to collect as a waste picker is aluminum cans. Aluminum cans are collected so effectively and aggressively, it is difficult to find one on the ground, just as it is difficult for one to pick up $1 in today’s economy, like, on the floor, right. Why is that? It is largely driven by the incentive behind collecting just a kilogram of aluminum cans. Currently, in South Africa, you collect a kilogram of aluminum cans, you can get up to 28 rand, or even 30 rand a kilo. Now, if you have 30 rand, that is enough to buy you a bunny chow and even a Coke.

Mitch Ratcliffe  28:23

What you’re describing is a world where we actually pay attention to the flow of materials, ultimately recognizing the value of the people who do that work. As you talked about earlier, the reclaimers face a lot of hardship — there’s the stigma of the job, the dirtiness of the job it’s associated with — but they’re harassed, a lot of them struggle with mental health issues because of the tensions of the work, and I found this in some of the philanthropic consulting I’ve done: people in many of these communities don’t trust outsiders. How do you help them work with these corporations in a way that they don’t feel like they potentially are going to be exploited?

Sifiso Gumbi  29:00

And that’s where we step in, you know. I get interviewed quite a lot. There’s a lot of media houses that want to come and interview, you know, reclaimers, you know, on site, but because they’ve been ridiculed and humiliated by the public so long, whenever someone comes and wants to stick a camera in their faces, it feels as if they are just parading them like freaks to the public, you know, because of the current stigma that is still active even today by the public. It is very difficult for them to trust anyone, and we have now established ourselves to a point where we are one of the main mouthpieces for them. And as much as I would like for them to open up a bit more, I think it will take more engagement on the ground — engagement by industry drivers, you know, CEOs, you know, ministers. We need to see more ministers visiting waste-picking camps. We need to see more CEOs engaging with waste pickers on the ground. They need to start feeling comfortable with the powers that be, even with the general public, you know, because they still aren’t, you know.

I still get a lot of, I still get a lot of hate, man. People say, “Hey, you need to make sure these people get out of the road, you need to get these people away. These people are vagrants, these people are dangerous.” You know, so we need a whole lot more engagement, we need a whole lot more interaction, you know, just with the public, with waste pickers, you know, at the heart of the discussions, at the heart of the engagement. I think we need to first get that right. We need a reconciliatory exercise: first reconcile the waste pickers with the public, and then reconcile the waste pickers with the policymakers, then reconcile the waste pickers with, you know, the relevant corporations that are interested in supporting their work. We need to get to that first before they can ease up to the idea of allowing anyone to come and be in the space and understand the work that they do.

Mitch Ratcliffe  31:00

Looking at projections about the value of the circular part of the economy — the collection and reuse components — the projections are, even just in the United States alone, between $1.5 and $2.2 trillion a year in value. Globally, it’s probably two or three times that. If you organize this class of people and give them the economic power, do you see those ministers in particular, but also corporate leaders, as feeling threatened by the rise of that power? Is that something that you need to help them overcome?

Sifiso Gumbi  31:37

They shouldn’t be threatened at all, Mitch. They shouldn’t be threatened. I think it’s an exciting opportunity. I think even for, you know, the corporations — I mean, as it is right now, Coca-Cola can tell you how many cold drink bottles or cans they produce, but they can’t tell you how many cold drink bottles or cans they’ve actually recovered back. They can only tell you the kilograms that they’ve recovered back, right, but they can’t really tell you how many of what they’ve produced that they’ve actually recovered back. They don’t even report along those lines, you understand. But if they were to start supporting reclaimers, they will know exactly that. If I produced one bottle of cold drink, right, and from the factory it left and it went to one province in South Africa, and it was bought by a client, perhaps, in that province — what happened to that bottle after the client was done consuming the contents of that Coke bottle? They will know right to a T, and they would know that, hey, that bottle registered back into our factory.

Mitch Ratcliffe  32:40

Well, and we’ve had conversations with GS1, which is the global nonprofit that runs the Universal Product Code system, and they have the ability now to track to unit level an individual can — we made it here, it was picked up here. Do you think that the reclaimers could scan every can that they picked up in order to get to that granularity of reporting that you’re describing?

Sifiso Gumbi  33:04

Absolutely, if they’re incentivized for it, definitely. Because, I mean, GS1 — I know about GS1 very well — but their technology, which is amazing, if you ask me, can only go so far. They are missing that element of including the people that are actually tasked, or appoint themselves, as the first responders to the waste.

Mitch Ratcliffe  33:27

There’s a bigger idea in everything we’re talking about, and that’s that the people already doing this work should be built into a new system rather than replaced by it. Absolutely. How do you think about reclaimers as the foundation for the real circular economy? And this kind of goes back to the question I was asking about the threat that ministers might feel. They also represent, as they organize and become more prosperous, a new voting bloc — or is that exactly the voting bloc that people should be thinking about cultivating, because it represents the future of our economy?

Sifiso Gumbi  33:57

Mitch, there’s already more than 100,000 reclaimers — I could say half a million, just a ballpark figure — here in South Africa. South Africa has a high unemployment rate, especially amongst the youth and women, you know. And already there’s this massive opportunity in waste. There’s a massive opportunity in waste that, if formalized, could really present an opportunity for people to sustain themselves at a massive scale. Right, what does that do for a government? The government can start accumulating data that they can use for their reports whenever they meet at the next COP in Geneva. They can use that data to say, okay, we have empowered X amount of people, and they are collecting X amount of waste, and as far as our carbon objectives and our climate action objectives are concerned, this is where we are, and this is where we’re going. But currently, right now, it’s a top-down approach where people are just making estimations at the top. There isn’t any real work that is being done to support those on the ground who are actually doing the real work, you know.

So, it’s an opportunity for the ministers, it’s an opportunity for the business people, it’s an opportunity for everyone. I think there isn’t any threat. If anything, there’s a big opportunity — there’s a really positive story, you know, to be achieved from all this, and South Africa has an opportunity to become the leading country as far as that is concerned. And that can be used as a blueprint, you know, to get all the other developing countries within Africa to also steer their climate objectives, their carbon objectives, and also, you know, deal with their high unemployment rate. You know, it gives us an opportunity also to explore other technologies and explore what other recyclable material we can get — you know, what can we do with carbon waste, what can we do with this, what can we do with that. But all it needs is just a little bit of support for those on the ground, you know, understanding the foundation, you know, of those dynamics, and then from there, a lot will be achieved, Mitch, I promise.

Mitch Ratcliffe  36:05

I am really struck, particularly, by the opportunity for youth and women to build the foundation for economic progress. We’ve had Georgie Badiel, the model, on several times, and she has run a program in Burkina Faso through the Georgie Badiel Foundation where women are trained to build local solar-powered water wells. But Georgie’s point is that once they have that income, that ability, and those skills, which they can sell in other contexts — so, you know, people in town need something fixed, now these women know how to do it — that drives local economies and women’s services, hairdressers, things like that. So you actually start laddering up the local opportunity. How do you see reclaiming as potentially a path out of poverty for a young person or a woman?

Sifiso Gumbi  36:50

Look, it was a path out of poverty for me, because I started in high school, Mitch. I was able to buy myself sneakers every now and then, you know, all due to the fact that I was, you know, I would say, ambitious enough to see that, okay, I could make a bit of money from collecting scrap metal, you know — and I bought my first smartphone from that. So, there’s a real opportunity for families to feed themselves. There’s a real opportunity for even varsity students to, you know, be able to support themselves while going through varsity. There’s an opportunity for one to even establish a career in this thing, because, you know, I’m here, you know, getting interviewed by you today because I walked the journey, you know. I established a career for myself within it, so you can even grow within recycling, because, you know, it’s not just recycling — there’s a broader activity even beyond that.

Mitch Ratcliffe  37:46

The economy extends into that population, the population contributes back to the economy. It’s a virtuous circle.

Sifiso Gumbi  37:53

Absolutely. It’s really an opportunity that is so untapped, and it’s just waiting for everyone to come to the party.

Mitch Ratcliffe  38:06

Sifiso, when you’re standing in front of an audience, like when you presented at TEDx, what do you want people to take away? What’s the most important point that you would like them to understand about the opportunity that we’re talking about?

Sifiso Gumbi  38:18

What I really try and perhaps galvanize people around is to start caring about how we — or how you, as the public — affect the environment that we live in. You know, we live in a world where everyone is concerned about the materialistic value of everything. No one is really concerned about the material once they’ve had their way with it, or once they’ve used it, you know — out of sight, out of mind. You buy the bar of chocolate today, open it up, eat it, you throw away the wrapper. What memory do you keep? How sweet the chocolate was, how delicious it was. But no one ever pays any attention to what happens to the wrapper, because once you’ve put it in the bin, it’s out of sight, out of mind. Right now, there is a group of people that are actually concerned with what happens to that wrapper — that chocolate wrapper that you toss in the bin — because that wrapper is their livelihood. That’s their salary, that’s their bread.

What I want people to see is that those people are not vagrants, those people are not animals — those people are actually essential. I always equate their value to that of bees, because without bees there’s no pollination, without pollination there’s no plants, and with no plants, we all die. Without waste pickers there’s no recycling — yeah, in South Africa, you know, it’s a fact. Without waste pickers there’s no recycling, and without recycling, then all the landfills would have been filled up by now. Joburg is running out of landfill space. Gauteng, as a whole, is running out of landfill space. South Africa, as a whole, is in trouble, you know, with landfill space, and the only people that are delaying the crisis are waste pickers. So, what I always try and get people to see is that, hey, those people matter.

Mitch Ratcliffe  40:13

Dignity for a set of critical workers whose work is not currently recognized, but such an important mission. What’s next for Urban Surfer, and how can people find out more about the program and support the work?

Sifiso Gumbi  40:27

We are trying to get as much support to replicate, you know, the model nationally. We want to touch as many lives as we can, we want to support as many reclaimers as we can, equip as many reclaimers as we can. So, as far as the mission goes, what we’re largely focused on right now is just expanding nationally within the next few years, and perhaps, you know, throughout Africa, to also start supporting the other reclaimers, even outside of our borders.

Mitch Ratcliffe  40:59

Can people simply send financial support to help you accelerate the project?

Sifiso Gumbi  41:04

You know, that is actually something we’ve never thought about, like GoFundMe. We’ve never had, like, a donation wallet. We always, like — maybe whenever we find a project, we identify a group of reclaimers that need to be supported. What we would do then is we draft the proposal, and then we’d approach maybe corporate SA, or perhaps government, or perhaps public benefit organizations, or PBOs, or NPOs to say, hey, can you come in and support us? We’ve never really thought about how we can perhaps get the public involved as far as donating to the cause, you know. So, maybe that’s something worth considering.

Mitch Ratcliffe  41:39

I certainly think your site is packed with insight that people would be happy to support, and so I encourage you to think about that. But Sifiso, this has been an absolutely inspiring conversation. I thank you for your time.

Sifiso Gumbi  41:52

Thank you for providing the platform, Mitch, and for helping us, you know, crystallize, you know, the message and get it out there to the masses. I really appreciate the time and the opportunity. Thank you, Mitch.

Mitch Ratcliffe  42:11

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Sifiso Gumbi. He is the founder of Urban Surfer South Africa, the Johannesburg-based social enterprise that equips, organizes, and advocates for the informal waste reclaimers who recover most of that country’s recyclable material. And you can learn more about Sifiso’s work at urbansurfer.co.za. It’s a great site — check it out. There’s a lot of fascinating stories.

Let’s start with the fact that reframes our perspective on recycling, because we look at this from an advanced recycling — even though it needs a lot of work — perspective here in the United States. Between 80% and 90% of South Africa’s post-consumer plastic and paper that actually gets recycled is recovered by informal waste pickers, and that’s according to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. Sifiso put it plainly: the municipal system collects waste simply to dispose of it, and reclaimers collect it for the value, and that value is passed on to the rest of society in the form of materials that stay in circulation. The country has a recycling rate at all because more than 100,000 people decided, one trolley at a time, that other people’s bins were their livelihood. Now, it’s not a glamorous job, but neither was recycling when it started in the United States, and frankly, it probably isn’t considered that glamorous by most people today. South Africa’s system was self-organized over 30 years while the government ignored the issue, and Sifiso’s 15 years inside it began at age 19, when scrap metal collected after school bought him his first smartphone.

Material recovery is driven by incentives, and the proof is lying on the ground — or rather, it isn’t, as Sifiso said. Aluminum cans fetch 28 to 30 rand per kilogram in South Africa right now, and reclaimers collect them so thoroughly that he says finding one on the street is as rare as finding a $1 bill on the sidewalk. Materials with weak incentives pile up in landfills, and Johannesburg and Gauteng are running out of space. The lesson is simple: if you’re a company that doesn’t want to bury its customers in waste, when you’re designing your packaging to be recovered, ask the waste pickers what they’ll bend down for, and what picking it up must pay for them to be attracted to do so. They are the R&D department that nobody consults. And meanwhile, brands chase certifications without constructing the reverse logistics infrastructure that makes a recyclability claim legitimate. There’s so many things labeled as recyclable, but you have to have a system nearby you in order for it to be collected and processed. As extended producer responsibility programs expand, the incentive structures at the street level will determine whether those policies result in more material recovery or just more paperwork.

Next, let’s talk about that data layer that Sifiso talked about. Urban Surfer fitted GPS trackers to its trolleys, and they log every kilogram by material type and price across all of its recycling hubs. Sifiso built that infrastructure before carbon credits and plastic credits arrived on the market, and that means when those instruments mature, reclaimers hold verified, real-time records of work that they’ve already performed. As he said, we can have a recycling system with no greenwashing, based on actual transparent data that everybody could see. That’s the same verification standard that my recent guest, Martin Johnston of EarthRating.ai, argued that sustainability reporting lacks, and here it’s being built from the ground up by the people with the most to gain from that information being believed. The unit-level vision could go even further. A beverage company today can report kilograms recovered — it’s referred to generally as mass balance reporting — but it can’t tell you how many of its own bottles, or which bottles, actually came back. Reclaimers scanning what they collect as they collect it could close that reporting gap, but they need to be paid for that data, and it’s not expensive.

And the last and most important idea is that dignity is a design requirement, not a slogan, when building a circular economy.

Mitch Ratcliffe  46:12

Urban Surfer trolleys carry personalized number plates with each reclaimer’s nickname, so a neighborhood comes to know them as workers rather than strangers to fear. And the hard limits that Sifiso points out are trust and scale. Integration of last-mile services — or, in the circular context, the first mile of that return journey that packaging takes — requires a reconciliation of the public, policymakers, and recycling workers, and it’s time to unlock these opportunities to collect and keep materials in use, as well as pay a fair rate, to keep our world cleaner than it currently is. A circular economy can be built on the people who already live it, and that’s the argument that Urban Surfer makes with data, trolleys, and baling machines. So, we’ll be watching whether that model can be replicated nationally and across Africa, and whether EPR rebates and plastic credits actually reach the hands doing the collecting. Stay tuned.

If this conversation changed how you’ll think the next time that you toss a wrapper, share it with someone else who needs to meet the people on the other side of the bin. And you can help the show, too, with a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or any of the podcast host sites. You folks are the amplifiers who spread more ideas to create less waste, and our archive of more than 550 episodes is waiting on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness you prefer. Thanks for your support. We really appreciate you helping spread the word.

I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.

The post Sustainability In Your Ear: Urban Surfer’s Sifiso Gumbi on Organizing South Africa’s Recycling System appeared first on Earth911.

Graft a patch of skin from one wild cheetah onto another, unrelated cheetah, and the recipient’s body will not reject it. Researchers documented this in the 1980s, and the result told them something unsettling: the world’s cheetahs are so genetically alike that, to an individual’s immune system, every other cheetah reads as a twin.

We’ve written recently about the species that have disappeared, both the confirmed extinct and populations crashing toward genetic oblivion. There is a quieter loss happening inside animals that are still here. The North Atlantic right whale, the vaquita, and the cheetah are all still roaming the planet, albeit with less room to do so. The shocking truth is that none of them is genetically whole, and that distinction shapes what the science can do for them over the next century.

Survival and viability are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where this story lives.

The whale we can count to the individual

In October 2025, NOAA Fisheries and the New England Aquarium estimated that 384 North Atlantic right whales were alive at the start of 2024, a 2.1 percent rise from a recalculated 376 the year before, and a modest climb from the population’s all-time low of 358 in 2020. Researchers know these whales individually, by the callus patterns on their heads, in a photo-identification catalog built over decades. A species you can count one animal at a time is a species in trouble.

The arithmetic of recovery is harder than the headcount suggests. Fewer than 70 reproductive-age females remain, and the interval between calves has stretched from roughly three years to six or even ten. The 2025 calving season produced 11 calves; a genuinely productive year would top 20, and lasting recovery needs to be more than 50 births a year to raise the species from the brink of extinction. An Unusual Mortality Event declared in 2017, when 20 percent of the population died, is still ongoing, driven by vessel strikes and fishing-gear entanglement. Researchers estimate only about a third of right whale deaths are detected.

Underneath the visible threats sits an invisible one. The North Atlantic right whale carries among the lowest genetic diversity measured in any large mammal, a legacy of the whaling era that cut the population to a few dozen animals. There has been too much inbreeding, and low genetic diversity raises the odds that mating pairs share genetic profiles, which is linked to fetal loss and a reproductive rate roughly three times below the species’ biological potential.

There is one piece of better news: genomic work finds evidence of purging, a process that has lowered the frequency of the most harmful inherited genetic variants and leaves more room for recovery than the diversity numbers alone would predict.

Fewer than a classroom

The vaquita, a small porpoise found only in the northern Gulf of California, is the most endangered marine mammal on Earth. A joint visual and acoustic survey in 2025 put the count of distinct individuals observed at most likely seven to ten, in the same range as the six to eight seen in 2024. The entire species would not fill a school classroom.

The same survey surfaced the most surprising fact: the vaquitas it found were surviving and reproducing, with at least one or two calves observed, and there was no sign of the catastrophic single-year drops recorded earlier in the decade. The animals remain concentrated in and near the sanctuary at the heart of the Vaquita Refuge. Their one lethal threat is human: entanglement in illegal gillnets set for totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder commands high prices as a medicine and gourmet delicacy in an illicit trade.

Genetics, counterintuitively, is the part of the vaquita’s situation that offers hope. A 2022 study in Science sequenced 20 vaquita genomes and found that the species has been naturally rare for hundreds of thousands of years, which left it with a low burden of harmful genetic variation. In summary, they are not susceptible to the damage caused by inbreeding.

Simulations in that work concluded the vaquita is not doomed by inbreeding and is highly likely to recover — if gillnet deaths stop immediately. The vaquita is the clearest case of a species whose genetics are not the obstacle. The obstacle is fishing nets set for archaic and exploitative reasons.

The cheetah’s deep bottleneck

The cheetah’s genetic story is the oldest of the three and the hardest to undo. The global wild population is estimated at about 7,100 adults and adolescents across 33 fragmented populations, occupying just nine percent of the cat’s historical range; 91 percent of those populations include 200 animals or fewer. But the cheetah’s defining problem predates the modern range collapse by thousands of years.

That skin-graft result from the 1980s pointed to a species squeezed through an ancient bottleneck. A 2025 genetic analysis of southern African cheetahs supports a gradual decline over roughly the past 10,000 years — most likely driven by climate-era shifts in vegetation and prey — and estimates their present-day effective population size at just 700 to 1,600, which reflects a genetic measure of how many individuals are actually contributing their genes to the next generation; it typically runs far below the number of animals you could count in the field. A population can look reasonably stocked and still carry the “genetic thinness” of a far smaller one.  The costs of that thinness show up in cheetahs as poor sperm quality, heightened disease vulnerability, and diversity that keeps eroding even where total numbers hold steady.

The Asiatic cheetah, clinging to its existence in Iran, shows where this story ends. Its effective population size has been estimated at 11 to 17, and researchers argue its survival now depends on urgently protecting the habitat corridors that let isolated animals find one another to increase the chance they will mate.

What was lost

Diversity itself. Genetic variation is the difference between individuals in a population, and it is not a luxury feature. A broad genetic menu is the raw material that natural selection runs on. A right whale or a cheetah population with little variation has fewer options stored away for whatever comes next.

The capacity to adapt. A new disease, a warming ocean, a shifting prey base — a diverse population contains individuals that happen to cope well with changes, and they become the next generation. A genetically narrow population may simply have no members equipped to adapt to change. This is why a species can be present and counted yet functionally unable to respond to change. Climate change is driving ecosystem changes that many species, even with large populations, struggle to cope with.

Time. Diversity is rebuilt by mutation over many generations, on timescales that dwarf any conservation budget. You can stop a ship or cut a net this year. You cannot restock a gene pool this century. That is the heart of the bottleneck problem.

Three bottlenecks, three clocks

These animals reached the same narrow path to survival by very different routes. The cheetah’s bottleneck is prehistoric, written into the species long before humans were a factor. The right whale’s was industrial, its world reshaped by centuries of commercial whaling and sea-going freight. The vaquita’s is unfolding inside a single human generation, the byproduct of an illegal fishery operating where it should not.

Yet the genetics also refuse a tidy moral. The vaquita and the right whale both show signs of purging, the quiet removal of the worst inherited variants, which means a small population is not automatically a doomed one.

The lesson is not that low diversity is a death sentence. It is that genetic poverty removes a species’ margin for error and then leaves the outcome to us. For the vaquita and the right whale, the limiting factor is human intervention in their ecosystems.

What you can do

None of these are backyard problems. The levers are fishing gear, shipping rules, habitat policy, and international enforcement, which means individual action matters mostly as pressure on the institutions that hold those levers. With that said:

• Source seafood that doesn’t kill what it isn’t targeting. Bycatch in nets — the species the fishermen don’t want — is the proximate threat to both the vaquita and the right whale. Use a guide like Seafood Watch and avoid products tied to gillnet fisheries; support enforcement against the illegal totoaba trade driving vaquita deaths.
• Back ropeless gear and slow-speed zones. On-demand (“ropeless”) fishing gear and seasonal vessel speed limits are the concrete tools that reduce right whale entanglements and strikes. Support the regulations and the fishermen adopting them.
• Defend habitat connectivity for big cats. For cheetahs, corridors that reconnect fragmented populations are the only practical way to move genes between isolated groups. Support organizations working on rangeland coexistence and protected-area linkage.
• Fund the genetic insurance. Biobanks, genome sequencing, and breeding programs managed explicitly for diversity are how we preserve options we can’t yet name. They are unglamorous and chronically underfunded.
• Protect the legal scaffolding. The Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and international agreements like CITES are what keep these species on anyone’s agenda. Engagement with that policy is the highest-leverage action on this list.

Editor’s Note: Our next installment of Environmental Losses moves from individual species to whole systems, beginning with the ocean’s most biodiverse ecosystem — the coral reef — and the cadence of bleaching that has collapsed the recovery time reefs need to survive.

The post How Humans Created Genetic Bottlenecks Inside Threatened Species appeared first on Earth911.

A solar panel installed this spring will likely still be generating electricity when today’s kindergartners graduate from college. Panels are built to last 25 to 30 years, and the earliest rooftop and utility installations from the 2000s solar boom are now reaching the end of that run.

That first wave of end-of-life panels is the leading edge of a much larger, ongoing challenge, to recover and reuse the materials that convert the sun’s energy into electricity. Nearly everything inside those panels can be recovered and sold back into the supply chain. Today, very little of it is. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) projects that global solar panel waste could reach 78 million tons by 2050.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expects the United States to generate as much as one million tons of panel waste by 2030 and up to 10 million tons by 2050, the second-largest national total in the world. IRENA estimated in 2016 that the raw materials reclaimable from end-of-life panels will be worth about $450 million globally by 2030 — enough to build some 60 million new panels — and will grow to $15 billion and roughly 2 billion panels’ worth of material by 2050.

What’s In a Solar Panel

Strip a crystalline-silicon module, the type that dominates the solar panel market, down to its components and most of what you find is glass. A panel is roughly 75 percent glass by weight, framed in aluminum and built with copper wiring, polymer layers, a plastic backsheet, the silicon cells themselves, and a junction box. The greatest value sits in the small fraction of these materials: silver, copper, high-purity silicon, plus tin and antimony, and in thin-film panels, tellurium and indium.

Older panels also carry trace lead in their solder, which the reason some are classified as hazardous waste when they break down, as Inside Climate News has reported. Thin-film modules from First Solar and a few others use cadmium telluride, which is stable in the panel but adds its own end-of-life handling requirements. Thin-film remains a small share of the market, under 5 percent globally, so crystalline silicon is the focus of most recycling efforts.

Recovering these materials matters well beyond saving landfill space. Recycled aluminum takes roughly 95 percent less energy to produce than aluminum smelted from ore, and recovered silver and silicon reduce the mining and refining that go into every new panel.

Several of those metals also sit on the U.S. critical-minerals list. The EPA notes that panels can contain aluminum, tin, tellurium, and antimony, with gallium and indium in some thin-film modules, much of which the country currently imports. Recovering them at home converts a disposal headache into a small but genuine piece of supply-chain resilience, and it does so close to where new panels are increasingly being manufactured.

Why So Few Panels Actually Get Recycled

The first obstacle is economics. Sending a panel to a landfill costs about $1 to $5; recycling the same panel runs roughly $15 to $45, according to National Renewable Energy Laboratory figures cited by Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN). Arizona State University researcher Meng Tao, who studies PV recycling, has put the gap plainly to MIT Climate: recycling a panel costs around $20 and yields about $10 to $12 in recovered materials. For a single rooftop system, the math today rarely favors recycling without subsidies.

The technical challenge compounds the financial one. The EPA describes recycling as three escalating steps: remove the aluminum frame and junction box; separate the glass from the silicon wafer using thermal, mechanical, or chemical methods; then purify the silver, silicon, copper, and other metals. Removing the frame is straightforward, and a lot of recycling stops there and the rest gets shredded and sold as low-value glass cullet, C&EN notes. Teasing the glass from the cells and then separating the silver and silicon is far harder, and no single commercial process yet recovers all of it cleanly.

Consequently, the United States currently recycles only about 10 percent of decommissioned panels, while the European Union recovers around 85 percent, according to Public Citizen. The encouraging counter-trend is the rapidly decreasing cost of panel recycling: one industry analysis from Solar Power World reports that the true-recycling costs declined by 42 percent over the past three years, and the most advanced facilities now recover up to 95 percent of a panel’s value.

Reuse offers a partial release valve. Panels that fail early or get swapped out during a system upgrade often still work, and a growing secondhand market resells them at a discount for off-grid, agricultural, and overseas projects. Keeping a working panel in service, or passing it to someone who will, sidesteps the cost-and-complexity problem entirely, which is why reuse remains a bigger share of outcomes compared to recycling.

Public investment is starting to bend the curve, too. The U.S. Department of Energy has funded a slate of PV recycling projects aimed at closing the gap, even as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has projected that, without faster action, the country would still recycle only about a tenth of its panels by mid-century. The first matters because the second is not inevitable.

The Companies Building a Recycling Industry

A recent market map from MarketsandMarkets lists more than a dozen leading players in solar panel recycling, and reading it closely shows how young and mixed the field still is. It blends three kinds of company: panel manufacturers with their own take-back programs, dedicated PV recyclers, and global waste-management firms moving into the category.

First Solar anchors the first group. The U.S. thin-film manufacturer has run a closed-loop process since 2005, recovering more than 90 percent of each module’s materials in its panels, including the semiconductor itself, for reuse.

Among dedicated recyclers, SOLARCYCLE opened a high-throughput facility in Georgia in 2026 that recovers about 96 percent of a panel’s value — silver, copper, aluminum, and glass — and is scaling toward processing up to 5 gigawatts of panels a year, Solar Washington reports. We Recycle Solar runs a utility-scale plant in Yuma, Arizona, and plans to roughly quadruple its capacity by 2028. In Europe, ROSI, a French company, uses a thermal-and-chemical process to recover high-purity silicon and silver — the toughest materials to reclaim — and recently raised more than $20 million to build a 10,000-ton-per-year facility in Spain. Veolia and Germany’s Reiling round out the European side as larger waste and glass recyclers expanding into PV.

The arrival of so many well-capitalized firms signals that the waste stream is finally large enough to support an industry. The catch is that most of this capacity sits in Europe or at the utility scale, where project owners can absorb the cost, which leaves rooftop owners with fewer easy options for now.

Solar Recycling Companies in 2026

The Policy Gap

Much of the distance between 10 percent and 85 percent comes down to rules. The EU’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive requires panel producers to finance the collection and recycling of every panel they sell in Europe. The United States has no equivalent federal framework.

That is beginning to change, slowly. In October 2023, the EPA announced it would add retired solar panels to its “universal waste” rules, a streamlined category for widely generated hazardous materials such as batteries and pesticides. The proposed rule was originally due in 2025; the agency’s current timeline pushed the proposal to February 2026 and a final rule to August 2027. Until it takes effect, panels can be landfilled as ordinary trash in most states.

A handful of states have moved on their own. Washington created a manufacturer-funded stewardship program that requires producers to take back panels at no cost to the owner, and California classifies end-of-life panels as universal waste requiring specialized handling, as Earth911 has documented. Texas and North Carolina have begun restricting panel disposal as well. For now, what happens to a retired panel depends heavily on where it was installed.

Federal law already reaches panels through the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Whoever discards one is technically responsible for determining whether it qualifies as hazardous waste — a determination that hinges on whether metals such as lead leach above regulatory limits in a standardized test. Many intact silicon panels pass and are not hazardous; some, especially older modules with lead-based solder, do not.

For a homeowner, the EPA’s guidance is more straightforward in the meantime: contact your installer or state environmental agency rather than guess.

What You Can Do

Whether you own a single rooftop array or manage a portfolio of sites, end-of-life options are improving. A few practical steps:

For homeowners and individuals

• Keep panels in service as long as they perform. Most modules keep producing well past their warranty period; replacing them early creates waste with little benefit.
• Reuse or resell working panels. A secondhand market exists for functioning modules, often sold at a discount. Reuse outperforms recycling on both cost and environmental impact.
• Let your installer handle logistics. If you are replacing panels, ask whether your installer offers take-back; many will palletize and ship modules to a recycler.
• Find a qualified recycler. Look for a dedicated PV recycler or an electronics recycler certified to the R2 or e-Stewards standard, which the EPA recommends.
• Know your state’s rules. Washington and California have formal programs; elsewhere, contact your state environmental agency before disposing of panels.

For businesses, installers, and project owners

• Build decommissioning and recycling into project contracts and budgets from the start, rather than treating end-of-life as an afterthought.
• Choose recyclers certified to SERI’s R2 or e-Stewards standards, and favor those that recover high-value materials over operations that simply downcycle the glass.

For communities and policymakers

• Support extended producer responsibility and universal-waste rules, and weigh in during the EPA’s public comment period on its proposed solar panel rule.

The materials inside a solar panel were mined, refined, and assembled at a real environmental cost. Recovering them closes the loop on an energy source designed to be clean from start to finish, and the infrastructure, companies, and rules to do it are finally catching up to the wave.

The post Recycling Solar Panels In 2026: Investments Paying Off appeared first on Earth911.

The late, renowned scientist and conservationist Jane Goodall reminds us that we all have an impact on the world, but it’s up to us to choose if our impact is positive or negative. Goodall said, “What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” Let’s cooperate for the health of our planet and those who call Earth home.

Earth911 inspirations. Post them, share your desire to help people think of the planet first, every day. Click the poster to get a larger image.

This poster was originally published on March 20, 2020.

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