Story by Connor Foote
DURHAM, NC — Bryce Brooks has spent most of her professional life asking other people for their trash. She’s managed waste for Durham Central Park for more than a decade, and in that time founded two different organizations that aim to ease some of the stressors in the recycling process.
One of those, The ReCollective, was inaugurated in 2022 by Brooks and business partner Kevin Younge. At the time, Brooks had been focusing on managing waste for commercial businesses, but after connecting with Younge through North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), the pair began to lay the groundwork for a service which would supplement the other side of waste management — traditional curbside recycling.
“With residences, you have to worry about residential compliance and having a system that is easy for everyone to do,” Brooks said. “Having a system that makes sense to a lot of people is difficult to kind of conceive of because what we’ve been raised on, in curbside recycling, in traditional recycling services, is single-stream.”
Single-stream recycling means that all the different recyclable materials on a truck’s route get mixed together before being divvied up at what they call a sortation center. But many recyclable materials cannot be properly handled through single-stream service. Each municipality has different rules about what can and can’t be recycled, and often what they won’t accept is still recyclable.
To ease what is often a confusing municipal service, The ReCollective’s vans set out each month to pick up much of this hard-to-recycle material from more than 400 households on routes spanning from Garner to Greensboro.
They return with canvas bags full of plastic film, styrofoam and crinkly packaging — practically everything that your municipal curbside service won’t accept. Inside its Durham warehouse, mountains of plastic bags cover the cinderblock walls, yards of textiles are packed into large cardboard bins and various school supplies await delivery to classrooms. Some materials get baled together and shipped off to processing facilities. Others are donated or sold directly for reuse.
“We want everyone to try and consume less, to do less Amazon shopping, to do more circular economy and to be more thoughtful,” Brooks said. “We offer a way to do that while still living your life and meeting your waste where you are.”
The ReCollective has met more and more waste during its four years of life, adding full-time and part-time employees to manage a rapidly expanding customer base as well as a growing list of accepted materials. The business operates on a subscription model, and customers pay from $19 to $51 for Brooks’ team to bring them closer to the circular economy. Services like The ReCollective are popping up across the country to supplement the circular economy and combat misconceptions about waste management.
The vast majority of recycling in the U.S. is carried out through county or municipal contracts, which face a variety of structural barriers to better results. Much of the material coming in will gum up grinders and incinerators or just isn’t dense enough to justify energy and transportation costs.
The hard truth is that recycling is often an inefficient and flawed method of waste management — in short, it’s a business. Yes, there are significant environmental aspects that are indivisible from the process, but recyclers also need to make money. If the price isn’t right on transporting, storing and reforming waste, a material will exit the economy for good.
In contrast to a linear economic model, in which materials leave a factory and eventually find a permanent home in landfills, by the roadside or in the ocean, the aim of a circular economic model is to generate as much reuse as possible — to get the stuff you throw in the green bin back circulating in the economy.
“They want volume, so a lot of times with plastic recyclers, they are not willing to handle individual residential volumes because it’s more work on the front end,” Brooks said. “Because we are taking so many different materials, we can aggregate and make sure that we are producing the volumes that the plastic recyclers want.”
Recycling entrepreneur Mimi Wu noted that there are many considerations when choosing a material for a product. Wu worked in the southeast Asian country of Myanmar to develop the post-use supply chain for dirty plastic bags, where she found monetary barriers to effective recycling.
“It’s really not a ‘valuable’ product at the end of the day,” Wu noted. “People don’t really want to use it. It’s so much cheaper to just make virgin plastic that it’s almost not even worth collecting it.”
The process of recycling really begins when R&D and marketing departments decide how to present and package their product. Typically, companies aren’t willing to sacrifice their color schemes in favor of using recycled material, especially in cases where recycled material costs more than virgin material. A November 2024 study from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that those cases are common — recycled plastic cost $0.72 per pound in North America, whereas virgin plastic cost $0.58.
Another issue is transportation. Many hard-to-recycle materials are low-density, which translates to inefficient space usage in transportation and storage. Without expensive in-residence machinery to compact these materials, the unit cost is too high for municipal recyclers. Part of The ReCollective’s expansion has been enabled by its ability to consolidate and ship off these low-density materials at a rate that makes logistical sense.
At this point, some might be inclined to agree with a recent thought trend: recycling just isn’t worth the effort. It seems to fit nicely into the narrative that all pollution is just the fault of large corporations, and that consumers don’t really bear the burden of proof.
Yet this isn’t actually the case. Brooks, Wu and Matt James of North Carolina’s Recycling Business Assistance Center (RBAC) all agree that most consumers are a long way from recycling efficiently.
“Roughly 21% of all material that is sent to a material recovery facility, a sortation plant, is contamination, and that is a cost right off the top,” James said.
Despite structural issues like material type, infrastructure and profitability, James said the biggest issue facing recycling is household sorting. When done improperly, consumers either contaminate or throw away what is otherwise perfectly good material.
“Our goal at DEQ is to make sure that folks have just as easy accessibility to recycling as they do to throwing something away in a landfill,” James said. “And a problem is that we are throwing a lot of recoverable material away in our landfills, taking up valuable landfill space.”
A not-insignificant portion of what ends up in landfills is actually quite recyclable. Even in Orange County, one of the most effective recycling districts in the state, a fifth of landfill material would have been accepted by curbside recycling.
When Orange County resident and UNC public health student Connor Bost moved closer to campus ahead of the fall semester, he noticed his roommates weren’t as particular about recycling as he was. To help them recycle better, he pointed them toward Orange County Solid Waste’s A-Z waste guide.
“It does take a lot of deliberate effort,” Bost said. “You have to take the time to maybe educate yourself, at least on a baseline level, about what can and can’t be recycled, what kind of procedures need to be taken in order to recycle something. Like if I have a bottle that I want to recycle, but it’s got food waste on the inside, that’s not eligible for recycling. I need to rinse that out first, and so it’s kind of knowing those guidelines and steps that need to be taken.”
There are significant structural limitations to growing the circular economy. In an ideal world, we would produce as little virgin material as possible, and live by the three Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle) otherwise. But Brooks said the most impactful solution is also the easiest: educating ourselves about what can and cannot be recycled.
“I don’t think we should feel bad about the trash that we’re creating,” Brooks said. “I don’t think we should have be ashamed, but we can’t look away from it, and I think that that’s the biggest point that I would make: that when we look away from it, we don’t actually understand that what we’re doing with curbside recycling in the city is making it worse overall for landfills and city recycling.”
Waste management doesn’t start nor end with consumers. Other people decide which materials to use and manage most of the operations that actually get them back into circulation. But while consumers wait for corporations to become more environmentally conscious and for municipalities to upgrade waste management infrastructure, experts say consumers still have the most power in deciding if waste belongs to the linear or the circular economy.
Key in this, Brooks noted, is recycling with integrity — knowing your limits in order to confidently make your impact. And if after consuming responsibly and consulting your resources you’re still struggling to find a home for yards of bubble wrap or a drawer full of used vapes, maybe give The ReCollective a call.
