Advanced Recycling Can Save American Families Millions, Congress Should Help Scale It

Every week, millions of Americans do their part to recycle: they rinse their plastic containers, sort them, and put them in recycling bins. It’s a simple routine built on the belief that small actions make a difference. But this good-faith effort from the public can only get us so far.

Today, less than 10 percent of plastic waste gets recycled. The rest goes to landfills.

The problem isn’t effort. It’s the system those efforts depend on. Traditional recycling systems were never designed to handle many of the complex and mixed plastic products we use today, including shopping bags, bottle caps, and food containers. As a result, most plastic waste still ends up in landfills, and every ton of it comes with hefty costs on everyday Americans.

Cities and counties pay “tipping” fees per ton of waste when it’s sent to a landfill or an incinerator. The more waste there is, the higher these fees are. That’s not a trivial line item in municipal budgets. It’s a recurring, seven-figure expense that could instead go toward schools, roads, public safety, or other community initiatives.

Thankfully, advanced recycling offers a practical, fiscally responsible solution. It can more than double our recycling rate while collectively saving communities across the country hundreds of millions of dollars in tipping fees every year. And unlike most things in Washington, it has bipartisan support and addresses costs at the local level, where the burden is most visible.

Advanced recycling uses chemistry to break down plastics into their basic building blocks. Compared to incineration, where plastic waste is simply burned, this innovative technology converts plastic into new materials by heating it in the absence of oxygen. This allows it to handle plastics that traditional recycling systems cannot, including packages contaminated with food or oil residue, flexible plastics like shopping bags, and everyday items like clothing and packing peanuts.

In practice, that means delivering meaningful environmental benefits for communities across the country, particularly low-income neighborhoods disproportionately exposed to the impacts of waste facilities. The more plastic waste advanced recycling can divert, the better off these communities will be. 

If we can scale advanced recycling, the savings could be significant. Our own analysis at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) shows that scaling this technology could save municipalities up to $328 million in “tipping” fees each year. Even under a near-term scenario where the U.S. builds 44 facilities, the national plastic recycling rate could rise from 9% to 19%, while diverting an additional 3.7 million tons of plastic from landfills each year. Because advanced recycling can be integrated into existing refineries, expansion is faster and less costly than starting from scratch.

Those gains will be felt locally. In Harris County, Texas, alone, annual savings from “tipping” fees could reach $22 million, and in Los Angeles County, California, savings could approach $6 million.

Beyond these benefits, advanced recycling can help boost domestic production and foster more resilient local economies. That is because it converts plastic waste into valuable, high-quality inputs for a variety of industries: from fuels, lubricants, and essential chemicals to packaging that preserves food freshness and keeps pharmaceuticals safe. As more recycled content comes to market, this can strengthen domestic supply chains by creating more usable inputs here at home. This matters for manufacturers, workers, and consumers alike.

That is what makes scaling advanced recycling so appealing. It offers public benefits without requiring a large new federal spending commitment. It’s also a pragmatic policy opportunity with the environmental and fiscal cases pointing in the same direction.

With 21 states already passing legislation to update their recycling definitions to include advanced recycling, and more states considering similar legislation, it’s clear that local lawmakers are looking for ways to expand recycling while easing pressure on municipal budgets. Washington has an opportunity to join them.

What is still missing is a clearer federal framework to support the collection, sorting, and transport of plastic waste at the scale needed to make these advanced recycling facilities economically viable. At the federal level, advanced recycling legislation has drawn bipartisan support with the recent introduction of H.R. 7502, the Recycled Materials Attribution Act of 2026. The robust support for this bill’s passage was also clear during a recent House Energy & Commerce Committee hearing. Now is the time for the Senate to build on that bipartisan momentum and get these efforts across the finish line.

America doesn’t have an unsolvable plastic waste problem. It has a recycling gap that smarter policies and modern technologies can close. Washington now has a chance to act on a genuine bipartisan win: one that saves money, reduces waste, and helps communities across the country without a price tag.

Stuart (Stu) Malec is the Vice President of Public Affairs for the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI).