Mountains of Plastic, Nowhere to Go: The Recycling Crisis

Seven major US plastic recycling plants closed in just one year, cutting capacity by 25% as cheap imports and zero buyer demand break the system

28 May 2026

Seven of the United States' 30 major PET recycling facilities have shuttered in a single year, cutting domestic reclamation capacity by more than 25 percent at the worst possible moment. Extended producer responsibility laws are expanding collection volumes across seven states, yet without buyers for that material, recycling centers nationwide are sitting on unsold bales with nowhere to send them.

Evergreen Recycling, once North America's third-largest PET reclaimer, closed its Ohio and New York facilities in February 2026, eliminating capacity to process around four billion bottles annually and displacing 247 workers. Earlier exits by Alpek, rPlanet Earth, and Phoenix Technologies all traced back to the same economic pressure: cheap virgin resin and a roughly 300 percent surge in imported recycled PET have made domestic processing financially unviable.

At the 2026 Plastics Recycling Conference in San Diego, industry leaders called for urgent structural remedies. Recycled content mandates with domestic origin traceability, federal tax credits for recyclers and post-consumer resin buyers, and stricter controls on cheap imports emerged as the primary solutions. Kate Eagles of the Association of Plastic Recyclers drew a hard line: "We can't fail here."

Without demand-side mandates, the warning from the conference is stark. EPR legislation drives collection, not consumption. Bales accumulate. More facilities face closure. Without corrective policy, industry observers say landfilling becomes a plausible operational outcome, reversing years of progress and billions in infrastructure investment.

Longer-term signals remain constructive. North America is projected to become the fastest-growing region in the global recycled plastics market, which stands at $70.3 billion in 2026 and is forecast to reach $131 billion by 2033. Realizing that trajectory, however, demands that reclamation infrastructure survives the current contraction. Mandatory recycled content requirements, paired with procurement incentives that reward domestic sourcing, offer the clearest path to stabilizing a market that still has enormous room to grow.