The recycling industry creates $184 billion in economic activity each year and supports 603,000 jobs. Unlike most American manufacturing, these jobs cannot be moved to lower-wage countries. Recycling is local work because the materials are heavy and must be collected nearby.

This local focus is a key but often overlooked reason to support recycling as part of U.S. industrial policy. While the country spends billions to bring back manufacturing jobs in areas like semiconductors and steel, recycling already provides skilled, local jobs that cannot be outsourced. The real question is not whether to invest in recycling, but why we have spent 50 years seeing it as just a trash issue instead of a manufacturing opportunity.

The Numbers the Policy Debate Skips

Looking at recycling versus disposal per ton makes the benefits clear. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Recycling Means Business report shows that sorting and processing recyclables create about 10 times as many jobs per ton as landfilling or burning waste. Remanufacturing with recovered materials creates about 30 times more jobs. A fully circular system that includes prevention, reuse, repair, recycling, and composting can create up to 200 times more jobs than disposal, according to a major study by the Global Anti-Incineration Alliance.

Put simply, every ton of aluminum sent to a landfill means missing out on about 36 times more economic activity than recycling would create. When textiles are burned for energy, all the value from sorting, grading, fiber recovery, and remanufacturing is lost in one step. These are not just side effects; they are direct comparisons of how much work each method creates for every ton processed.

According to the Recycled Materials Association’s 2024 study, 175,000 Americans work directly in recycling, with average pay and benefits over $100,000. The total economic impact, including supply chain effects, is $184 billion. These are not future projections; they are real jobs in real facilities, handling materials with market value.

Materials that the market does not want make up the leftover portion.

The Place-Based Argument

Industrial policy is most effective when it supports jobs that have to stay in the country for practical reasons. Semiconductor factories are local because of the need for investment and security. Broadband work is local because the cables are buried underground. Recycling is local because you cannot send curbside waste collection overseas.

This point is often missing from recycling discussions, likely because it requires a circular view of the economy, seeing waste collection as the start of a manufacturing process rather than just the end of consumer use. But this view is accurate. A materials recovery facility is really a feedstock producer. Composting creates agricultural inputs. Textile sorting is the first step in turning old fibers into new ones. Jobs at every stage—collection, sorting, processing, and remanufacturing—stay in the communities where the materials come from.

When container glass goes to a landfill as alternative daily cover, the bottle-washing, cullet-processing, and glass-blowing jobs that could exist don’t. They are simply lost to other countries, leaving them to make the next wine bottle sold at the grocery store. The same is true for carpet-fiber reclamation facilities, diaper-component recovery operations, aluminum decoating lines, and every other downstream industrial operation that depends on a consistent feedstock of recovered material.

Recycling Beats Supply Chain Risk

The clearest illustration of this dynamic right now is the case of critical minerals. The United States imports more than 50% of its supply of 31 critical minerals, including cobalt, lithium, nickel, and rare earth elements, which are essential to electric vehicles, grid storage, and defense electronics. The Department of Energy announced $500 million in March 2026 for domestic critical-minerals processing, battery manufacturing, and recycling, an acknowledgment that recovering these materials from end-of-life products is a supply-chain security strategy, not just an environmental program.

Battery recyclers are expanding in the U.S. because the alternative is to send old batteries overseas for processing, then buy back the recovered lithium and cobalt at market prices and with the added risks of a multicontinent supply chain demonstrated by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz because of the Iran war. The e-waste stream, the fastest-growing waste type in the world, can also be seen as a domestic source of readily usable critical minerals.

This new way of looking at recycling is shifting the policy discussion. When recycling is seen as a way to strengthen supply chains instead of just meeting environmental rules, it brings in new supporters and new types of investment. The Department of Energy’s funding for critical minerals and the EPA’s $58 million in SWIFR grants are two separate funding sources, but both support the same regional recycling facilities.

Oregon Is the Working Template

Oregon’s packaging extended producer responsibility (EPR) program, which started on July 1, 2025, is a clear example for household materials. It has about $200 million in annual funding from producers and plans to open 144 new recycling centers across the state. The first annual report shows new collection sites and jobs in operations and logistics—positions that did not exist in these communities before.

This is how EPR works as industrial policy: producers fund a system that guarantees a steady supply of recovered materials, removing the price risks that have hurt private recycling investment in the past. This stability helps build regional recycling facilities and creates local jobs.

California’s packaging EPR program is set to start in 2027. Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, and Washington are also working on similar programs. Each one signals to regional recyclers that a steady supply of materials is on the way, making investment in local capacity a safer bet based on policy, not just on changing market prices.

The Repair Trades We Dismantled

There is also a story in the jobs we have lost. The Bureau of Labor Statistics uses upholstery as an example for the larger furniture repair industry. In 1990, about 35,000 upholsterers worked in the U.S. By the mid-2020s, fewer than 7,000 remained—an 80% drop over 35 years, mostly because cheap imported furniture is made to be thrown away, not fixed.

The upholstery trade did not vanish because the skills were no longer needed. It disappeared because fast furniture made with particleboard, non-repairable joints, and stapled upholstery made repairs seem too expensive compared to buying new. Each year, 12 million tons of furniture end up in landfills. Every ton means a chair was not fixed, a frame was not refinished, and a cushion was not recovered. These are real job losses in communities that once had these trades.

The same pattern is seen in shoe repair, appliance service, textile mending, and electronics repair. A true circular economy policy would focus on bringing back these trades by investing in workforce training, apprenticeships, and right-to-repair laws that make products easier to fix. This approach is a real jobs program.

What We’re Paying Either Way

You do not need future estimates to see the economic case for recycling. The costs are already clear in the bills cities pay. In 2024, the average landfill fee in the U.S. was $62.63 per ton, up 10% from the previous year and the biggest jump since 2022. In the Northeast, it is over $80 per ton. Cities pay these fees, and residents cover them through utility bills and property taxes.

When a city sends recoverable materials to a landfill, it is not saving money. It is picking the more expensive option and passing the cost to taxpayers, while also missing out on the economic benefits that recycling would bring. The real choice is not whether to spend, but whether to spend on disposal or invest in manufacturing.

There are also hidden costs to not recycling. The EPA recently estimated the social cost of carbon at $190 per metric ton of CO₂-equivalent, before the number was reviewed by the current administration. There are also health costs from incinerator pollution in nearby communities and $1.2 billion a year in fire damage from improperly discarded lithium-ion batteries. These costs do not appear on landfill bills, but show up in higher insurance, more asthma, and climate damage. Households are already paying these costs.

What You Can Do

• At home, recycle properly. If recycling loads are contaminated, cities pay extra processing fees and do not get the value back that makes curbside recycling work. Check Earth911’s recycling search to see what your local program accepts before putting items in the bin.
• In your community, ask your local solid waste department if they are applying for EPA SWIFR infrastructure grants or if your state has started packaging or product EPR laws. When local advocates ask clear questions, it helps move these efforts forward.
• As a voter and citizen, support right-to-repair laws at both state and federal levels. Back packaging EPR bills in states that do not have them. When talking about economic development, point out that recycling, composting, and repair jobs are part of manufacturing and should be included in policy discussions.
• As a consumer, the best investment is in products that are built to last, can be repaired, and can be recycled at the end of their use. When enough people make these choices, it sends a clear message to producers.

Related Earth911 Articles

• The Public Investment That Pays for Itself
• Extended Producer Responsibility: Which States Have It and What It Means for You
• Right to Repair: What It Is and Why It Matters
• What Is a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) and How Does It Work?

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