At Real Cycle, we’re often asked: Why hasn’t recycling advanced further? For decades, we’ve been bombarded with messages about recycling—yet globally, less than 10% of plastic actually gets recycled. So what’s holding us back?

The answer isn’t simple. It’s not just about technology—it’s about economics, incentives, and competing interests. And maybe even something deeper.

1. It’s Expensive—and Often Doesn’t Pay

Let’s start with the obvious: recycling is expensive. Mechanical recycling, the most common method, struggles with contamination, sorting, and high labor costs. Advanced chemical recycling methods can process more types of waste, but they require large capital investment and still face skepticism—even when they’re producing valuable outputs like fuels or feedstocks.

Recycling doesn’t always make economic sense in today’s market. If it’s cheaper to make virgin plastic from oil than to recycle it, guess which one manufacturers will choose?

2. The Incentives Are Misaligned

Our systems often reward disposal, not recovery. Landfills are cheap, especially in countries with lots of land. Incineration is efficient for certain materials and provides energy, but it’s unfairly demonized by some groups—even when it can reduce landfill volume and recover energy from otherwise unusable waste.

Meanwhile, industries that profit from the status quo may see real innovation in recycling as a threat. Oil companies sell more product when plastic is made from virgin feedstocks. Landfill operators earn tipping fees every time trash comes in. Major players don’t necessarily want disruption—even when it’s possible.

3. Funding Favors Narratives, Not Outcomes

Recycling innovation is underfunded. The money that is available often goes to what looks good on paper, not what works in practice. Some powerful foundations raise more money from keeping problems alive than from solving them. It’s uncomfortable, but real: solutions can dry up donations.

There’s also a kind of gatekeeping. Some thought leaders and institutions only support one type of “approved” circular economy—usually highly idealistic, overly academic, and rarely scalable. If you’re not following their blueprint, you’re seen as “wrong,” even if your project works. The result? Innovators with practical solutions are often excluded.

4. Perfection Becomes the Enemy of Progress

There’s a dangerous expectation that every solution must be perfectly circular, perfectly clean, and produce zeroemissions. In reality, progress is messy. Energy recovery makes sense. Sometimes turning plastic into fuel is more effective than endlessly trying to make it into new plastic again.

But if a solution isn’t “pure” enough, it’s dismissed. That’s not how progress happens. The world needs scalable, transitional solutions now—not only utopian endgames that don’t exist outside of whitepapers. More importantly, the scale of the problem is so large that we need every possible solution available.

5. The Public Doesn’t Know What Works

People still think they’re “recycling” when they toss something in the blue bin—even if it’s going to a landfill. Misinformation is rampant, and wishful recycling is more common than effective recycling.

Meanwhile, successful projects often don’t get public attention unless they’re framed in trendy terms. As a result, public support doesn’t always go to what works—it goes to what’s branded best.

So What Can We Do?

We can ask better questions.

• What if we judged recycling systems by results, not ideology?
• What if we funded solutions based on performance, not narrative alignment?
• What if we made room for multiple paths forward?

We don’t need to agree on every detail to move forward. But we do need to challenge the rigid thinking that keeps practical ideas out of the conversation.

At Real Cycle, we’re committed to real-world solutions. We believe in asking hard questions, building profitable systems, and doing good by doing better. Progress may not be perfect, but it’s possible—and we’ll get there faster if we stop insisting that there’s only one right way to recycle.

Let’s keep the conversation open.