Recycling plays a crucial role in protecting our environment. The goal of recycling is to ensure that the products and packaging we use every day—whether made from plastic, paper, glass, metal, or another material—don’t end up as trash in our landfills or our oceans, and instead end up as material circulated back into the system to be used again.

Recycling, in conjunction with reducing and reusing our materials, is a critical solution to shifting away from our current “take, make, waste” approach to a more sustainable, circular one. But in practice, we’re falling short. Not all Americans have access to recycling. Right now, so many recyclable products and packaging end up in landfills because it’s often cheaper to trash them than it is to recover and recycle them. And according to WWF public opinion polling, 86% of Americans believe that the recycling system for plastic in the US needs improvement.