Bills aim to increase Michigan’s recycling rate and send less material to landfills

<p>“Sending waste to landfills is more expensive than it seems," a recycling advocate told Michigan lawmakers recently, "It costs money to store and manage trash, it also takes valuable material like plastic and aluminum out of the supply chain and away from manufacturers who could reuse it." <br> <br><a href="https://www.michiganrecycles.org/"> Michigan Recycling Coalition</a> Executive Director, Kerrin O'Brien went on to tell legislators that a package of bills recently introduced in the state house aims to reverse that by rewriting Michigan solid waste law to emphasize recycling and composting material over sending it to landfills. The bills aim to increase the state's recycling rate, provide curbside or drop off recycling for most Michiganders, and strengthen oversight of landfill and composting facilities. <br> <br> “Current state law says that Michigan counties have to demonstrate that they have enough disposal capacity to meet the needs of 100 percent of the waste that's produced in that county. So our solid waste laws are really keyed into making sure that we have the disposal capacity needed rather than the capacity for other methodologies, like recycling and composting, to more productively dispose of that waste. And frankly, we've been more focused on ensuring landfill capacity. We're really not investing in using our materials more productively. Since the legislature back in 2018 put money into recycling, however, policy needs to follow through on making sure we have the framework that we really need in place to assure that we can step up to do more recycling and composting.”<br> <br> “Right now the state of Michigan recycling is poor,” says <a href="https://www.environmentalcouncil.org/">Michigan Environmental Council</a> Policy Director Sean Hammond.” We compare very poorly to not only our neighbors, but the whole country. We're looking at about a 15 to 18 percent recycling rate, that's the lowest in the Great Lakes and one of the lowest in the country. It is really disappointing given that