New fund to accelerate recycling participation across seven U.S. states
Despite strong infrastructure, more than 50% of materials never enter recycling streams
The Recycling Partnership will work with industry partners Arconic, Milliken & Company Charitable Foundation, Niagara Cares, Procter & Gamble, and Primo Brands to create the Recycling Participation Fund — a solution to remove barriers that prevent everyday people from participating in local recycling programs. The fund will turn more than a decade of insight, field data, and real-world testing into stronger recycling solutions.
As Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) laws are being implemented across seven U.S. states, pressure is growing to meet ambitious recycling performance targets that cannot be achieved through infrastructure alone. Even in communities with established programs, more than 50 percent of recyclable material is lost in homes before entering the system, making resident participation one of the most urgent and underdeveloped levers for progress.
For producers, the fund offers a practical way to invest in the community-level conditions needed to improve recycling outcomes.
The Recycling Partnership has shown that progress is possible with a track record of over 200 behaviour-focused projects. For example, a nearly $9 million investment in Michigan in collaboration with MI EGLE boosted the state's recycling rate from 14 percent to 25 percent, surpassing the national average.
Recycling needs widespread participation to work
Through the new fund, the Recycling Partnership will leverage its research to progress understudied solutions and test new strategies to accelerate recycling participation in California, Texas, Arkansas, and other priority regions with an initial 10 community deployments on the ground within the first year.
The Recycling Partnership invites producers to invest in the on-the-ground interventions that will move materials out of homes and into carts.
"People want recycling to work, and they want to know their actions matter," said Cody Marshall, chief recycling officer of The Recycling Partnership. "As the leading organization that has been on the ground gathering deep, scientific, system-level data on household recycling behaviour, we are uniquely positioned to use this pivotal funding to accelerate the time it takes to achieve next-level recycling rates."
