NYC Doesn't Even Hit 20% In Amount Of Residential Waste That It Recycles; Business About 25%

If you are a New Yorker and sort your recycling at home, as city law mandates, you probably wonder, as you rinse bottles and stack junk mail and scrub yogurt containers: Does all this effort make a difference?

Well, yes, but not nearly as much as it could. New York City recycles only about a fifth of its garbage — 18 percent of trash from homes and about 25 percent from businesses — according to the city’s Department of Sanitation. Yet seven years ago, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg vowed to double the residential recycling rate to 30 percent by 2017.

The numbers fall far short of New York’s potential. If everything recyclable were sorted and recycled, some 68 percent of residential trash and 75 percent of commercial trash could be kept out of landfills, according to the Sanitation Department. And while city leaders have sought to improve recycling for decades, New York still lags major cities like Seattle and San Francisco, which recycle more than half of their waste — numbers attained over decades of policies that include stronger requirements than New York’s.

The cascading effects of not recycling enough — such as clogged trash chutes in public housing, garbage that must be trucked out of the city, and organic waste left to decompose and spew planet-warming methane gas — ultimately undermine ambitious targets the city and state enshrined in law last year to radically reduce contributions to climate change.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/nyregion/7-reasons-recycling-isnt-working-in-new-york-city.html