Giving Compass' Take:

• Lloyd Alter at TreeHugger discusses what the U.S. is doing with recycling now that it's not being shipped to China and what other countries across the globe are doing too.

• One problem in North America is the mixed recycling bins, which were easier for the homeowners but required so much labor in China to separate out everything. How can state officials access donor capital to help fund needs for a sustainable recycling program? 

• Here's how small U.S. cities are fighting to save recycling. 

It's déjà vu all over again as the industry pushes "chemical recycling".

We have had recycling since the seventies. It's part of our lives. Saabira Chaudhuri writes in the Wall Street Journal:

For decades, America and much of the developed world threw their used plastic bottles, soda cans and junk mail in one bin. The trash industry then shipped much of that thousands of miles to China, the world’s biggest consumer of scrap material, to be sorted and turned into new products.

Then everything changed when China closed its doors. Other Asian countries have followed suit. Shipments of plastic to China are down 89 percent, mixed paper is down 96 percent. So what is happening now?

The U.K. is burning more of its trash, including dirty or low-value recycling. Attitudes toward incineration vary greatly by country. In the U.S., where space is plentiful, it has long been cheaper to send materials to landfills, and incineration has remained unpopular. Across much of Europe, by contrast, trash burned for energy has been popular for years.

Read the full article about "recycled" waste by Lloyd Alter at TreeHugger.