As the trash piles up, American cities are scrambling to figure out what to do with everything they had previously sent to China. But few businesses want it domestically, for one very big reason: Despite all those advertising campaigns, Americans are terrible at recycling. About 25 percent of what ends up in the blue bins is contaminated, according to the National Waste & Recycling Association. For decades, we’ve been throwing just about whatever we wanted—wire hangers and pizza boxes and ketchup bottles and yogurt containers—into the bin and sending it to China, where low-paid workers sorted through it and cleaned it up. That’s no longer an option. And in the United States, at least, it rarely makes sense to employ people to sort through our recycling so that it can be made into new material, because virgin plastics and paper are still cheaper in comparison.

I think that it's good that glimmer of recycling is wearing off, and people are becoming more conscience of material and waste. I always try to avoid purchases as much as possible, especially with excess packaging. I know when I own my own land, I'll probably use a lot of junk mail for livestock bedding, reuse containers feed scoups and other uses, use feed bags for trash bags, and ultimately burn a lot of paper and plastic -- taking the metals and few glass things I have to the recycling center every year or two.