What is our responsibility for the end-of-life of food and beverage packages in the U.S.? For decades, many operated on the belief that the private sector (brands, packaging producers, etc.) was primarily responsible for manufacturing environmentally friendly packages and that the public sector (local governments, regional authorities, etc.) was responsible for recovering those packages.
With ever-diminishing budgets, many local governments don’t have the funding they need to bring state-of-the-art recycling programs to residents by themselves. Material recovery facilities (MRFs) work to stay on top of the newest technology that makes recycling more efficient, but with the challenges of peaks and valleys in both volume and commodity pricing, it’s not always financially feasible.