About one in four items Americans put in recycling bins does not belong there. This good-intentioned mistake leads to equipment damage, higher processing costs, contaminated bales that buyers reject, and injuries to workers who have to remove these items from conveyor belts.

Recyclers call this hopeful but mistaken behavior wishcycling. This means putting a questionable item in the blue bin and hoping the facility will sort it out. Most facilities cannot do this, and the cost of trying has gone up sharply. An August 2024 EPA assessment estimates that the country needs $36.5 to $43.4 billion in investment by 2030 to modernize a recycling system strained by contamination. Understanding what wishcycling actually costs, and who pays for it, is the first step to stopping it.

What is Wishcycling?

Wishcycling is the practice of putting items into a recycling bin when you’re not sure they’re accepted, hoping the system will sort it out.

The term appeared around 2015 and is attributed to Bill Keegan, president of Dem-Con Companies, a Shakopee, Minnesota waste and recycling operator. Star Tribune columnist Eric Roper revisited the term in a 2017 follow-up documenting industry efforts to coordinate recycling education across haulers and municipalities. The behavior is older than the word. Bowling balls, garden hoses, propane tanks, and Christmas lights have been arriving at material recovery facilities (MRFs) for decades.

The main change has been the cost. In the early 2000s, U.S. MRFs accepted fewer types of materials and sent most contaminated materials overseas in bales.

After China’s National Sword policy took effect in 2018, the global market for dirty recycling collapsed. Research from the University at Buffalo found that the amount of plastic landfilled in the U.S. increased by 23.2% in the year China’s import bans began to take effect. Processors now have to clean material to a much higher standard if they want to export it, or pay to landfill it themselves.

The Contamination Numbers Have Stayed Stubbornly High

National contamination figures vary by methodology and region, but the picture is consistent: a meaningful fraction of every recycling load is material that shouldn’t be there. Industry estimates put the share of items placed in residential bins that are not actually recyclable at around 25%, with municipalities reporting rates from below 10% to above 40% depending on local rules and education. Waste Management, the country’s largest hauler, reported its average inbound contamination at just over 17% in recent years, down from a longer-running 25% average, which represents progress, but is still well above the under-5% threshold most end markets demand.

Capture rates tell the other half of the story. The Recycling Partnership’s 2024 State of Recycling report found that only 21% of U.S. residential recyclable material is actually recycled. Roughly 76% is thrown out by households as ordinary trash, and another 3% is lost at the MRF, where contamination, broken glass, and unsortable mixed material wash out of the system before it can be baled and sold.

In other words, most recyclables never make it to a recycler. The ones that do often come with extra items like pizza grease, plastic bags, garden hoses, food residue, batteries, or propane canisters, which compromise the load.

What Contamination Costs the System

Wishcycling affects the finances of every part of the recycling process.

At the MRF, processing a ton of single-stream mixed recyclables cost $129 per ton in Oregon in 2022, according to a Crowe LLP audit cited in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2025 review of U.S. recycling. The same review says that after the National Sword contamination restrictions, Waste Management’s processing costs went up by about 15%, or roughly $13 per ton, across its 43 single-stream facilities. These costs include extra labor, optical sorters, screens, and slower processing when machines jam.

At the end of the process, contaminated bales sell for less, get downgraded, or are rejected completely. When a load is rejected, the MRF has to pay the landfill tipping fee instead of making a sale. The Environmental Research and Education Foundation’s 2024 tipping fee analysis puts the national average at $62.28 per ton, a 10% increase from 2023, which is the biggest year-over-year jump since 2022. In the Northeast, the average is even higher, around $80 per ton.

At the public level, municipalities and producers end up paying the bill. Oregon’s new producer responsibility program, which started in mid-2025, includes a contamination management fee that producers pay to MRFs. The fee is $341 per ton of eligible material for 2025 and 2026, rising to $432 in 2027. This shows that regulators recognize contamination has a cost, and that someone besides the MRF operator should pay for it.

The EPA’s August 2024 Recycling Infrastructure Assessment estimates that bringing U.S. recycling infrastructure up to a level that gives every household access to recycling on par with trash collection would require $36.5 to $43.4 billion in investment by 2030. That figure covers MRFs, packaging-specific recycling facilities, drop-off infrastructure, and composting and anaerobic digestion capacity. Reducing contamination is built into the agency’s assumptions; cleaner inputs are a precondition for the recovery gains the investment is meant to unlock.

The Human Cost: Recycling Workers Are Getting Hurt

Contamination is not just an economic problem. Items that do not belong in the recycling stream, such as propane tanks, lithium-ion batteries, medical sharps, broken glass, and plastic bags that tangle in screens, make sorting recyclables physically dangerous.

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data released in January 2026 show that the injury rate for solid waste collection workers rose to 5.0 cases per 100 full-time-equivalent workers in 2024, up from 4.3 in 2023 and 4.7 in 2022. Workers at material recovery facilities were injured at a rate of 5.8 per 100 FTE — the highest the agency has reported for that category since at least 2020. For comparison, the rate across all private industry in 2024 was 2.3 per 100 FTE, the lowest since 2003. Sorting recycling is more than twice as dangerous as the average American job.

Fatalities show an even more serious side. The BLS counted eight MRF deaths in 2024, down from nine the year before, and 32 fatal injuries among solid waste collection workers, with 23 linked to transportation incidents. In 2024, refuse and recyclable material collection was the fifth-deadliest job in the country, behind only logging, fishing and hunting, roofing, and structural ironworking.

Lithium-ion batteries deserve a separate line. They are routinely placed in curbside recycling bins by residents who don’t know where else to put them, and they routinely catch fire when crushed by compactor trucks or sorting equipment. A 2024 report from the National Waste & Recycling Association and Resource Recycling Systems estimates more than 5,000 fires occur annually at U.S. recycling facilities, with the rate of catastrophic losses up 41% over the previous five years. The cost of insuring an MRF has climbed accordingly, driving recycling costs for citizens higher.

Why Wishcycling Persists

Three structural problems keep contamination rates high.

First, recycling rules are set locally, but packaging is made for the whole country. For example, a yogurt cup accepted in Seattle might be sent to landfill in Atlanta. The chasing arrows symbol and resin identification codes 1 through 7 show the type of plastic, not whether it can be recycled locally. According to a 2020 McKinsey survey cited in the National Academies’ 2025 report, two-thirds of U.S. consumers are confused by this difference.

Second, single-stream collection is convenient for residents and trucks, but it results in dirtier loads compared to dual- or multi-stream systems. Most U.S. municipal recycling programs now use single-stream collection, and the convenience that made it popular also allows more contamination.

Third, people often feel a strong moral urge to recycle, which can lead them to ignore instructions. A National Academies survey found that 78% of consumers check product labels to sort products correctly, and 82% trust the information on those labels. When labels are wrong or misleading, good intentions turn into contamination.

What You Can Do

Reducing wishcycling begins with individual choices at the bin, but it is most effective when combined with changes at the system level.

At the household level:

• Look up your local recycling guidelines and post them where you sort. Use the Earth911 recycling search by ZIP code and material to find what’s accepted near you.
• When in doubt, throw it out. One contaminated item can devalue an entire bale. A landfilled item costs the system less than a wishcycled one that has to be pulled out twice and sent to landfill anyway.
• Follow four common-sense rules: keep recyclables empty, clean, dry, and loose. Do not bag recyclables. Do not leave food residue. Avoid putting in items that tangle, such as hoses, cords, string lights, or plastic bags.
• Never put batteries, propane cylinders, electronics, or hazardous waste in curbside bins. Use a dedicated drop-off location. Most counties have hazardous waste collection days, and many retailers accept batteries.
• Treat plastic bags and film separately. Most municipal MRFs can’t process them; grocery stores and big-box retailers often have collection bins for them at the entrance.

At the community and policy level:

• Support extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws that shift the cost of packaging recyclability onto the companies that produce it. Several states have packaging EPR laws on the books; Oregon’s took effect in mid-2025.
• Ask local officials whether your municipality publishes contamination data and whether it audits MRF inbound loads. Cities that measure tend to manage.
• Push back on misleading recyclability labels. The Federal Trade Commission has been reviewing its Green Guides since 2022 but has not yet issued an update; public attention has been one of the main forces keeping the review going.

Wishcycling happens when good intentions meet a system that cannot handle them. The solution is not to try less, but to focus your efforts: learn what your program accepts, follow the rules even if it feels wasteful, and speak up about the policies that decide what gets made and labeled.in place.

The workers who sort our recyclables, the cities that pay for processing, and the bales that decide if material becomes a new product all depend on one thing: what you put in the bin.

Editor’s Note: Originally published on January 11, 2017, this article was substantially updated in June 2026.

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