Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, I was catching up with some colleagues at TerraCycle HQ in Trenton. The conversation turned to then President-elect Donald J. Trump. The topic was centered on the question of how the new administration would affect environmental policy and global action plans for sustainability. More specifically, how would a Trump presidency affect TerraCycle?
Given the environmental platform that the current president campaigned on last year, it was clear that, if elected, a President Trump would significantly alter the direction taken by the previous Administration. One pre-election promise was the聽cancellation or renegotiation of the United States鈥� participation in the聽Paris Agreement, a global climate change deal hinging on increased regulations for the reduction of carbon emissions. Another was the eradication of the聽Clean Power Plan, which regulates emissions from power plants.
In less than a month since President Trump took office, there have been聽reports of EPA employees being banned from giving social media updates, speaking with press and interacting with Congress and public amid the grants and contracts freeze. Actions taken with regards to advancing the Dakota Access and Keystone Pipelines by聽executive order聽signal the possibility of expanded support for U.S. dependence on fossil fuels for domestic energy production.
That TerraCycle is an environmentally-minded company on a mission to move away from the linear 鈥榯ake-make-dispose鈥� way of doing things in favor of more circular and/or sustainable production systems, might question how TerraCycle would operate under the new direction favored by this Administration.
So will a Trump presidency negatively affect TerraCycle? The deep irony is that the answer is 鈥楴o.鈥�
The services TerraCycle offers are built to circumvent and address the economic and structural limitations of currently inefficient public waste management systems. As it stands in the U.S. and most countries around the world, public works sees most 鈥渨aste鈥� outputs falling outside the scope of recyclability (aka resource recovery), tracking them for landfilling or incineration. This is because the value of most items cannot be sold on back-end channels for more than the cost of collection, logistics and processing in these publicly funded systems, providing no economic incentive to recycle them because of the lack of profit.
However, a report from the World Economic Forum and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation finds that since most plastic packaging is used only once, 95 percent of the value of plastic packaging material, , is lost to the economy. The current value system may not view recycling as a profitable business, but the fact is, not recycling is wasting money.
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