When the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services tweaked the math behind its statewide recycling rate estimate last fall, the result suggested that the state was doing worse than previously thought at diverting waste from landfills.
That wasn’t all the sobering news contained within the most recent Biennial Solid Waste Report, which also showed New Hampshire’s recycling rate trending downward overall. Since 2020, the proportion of municipal waste sent for recycling has dropped by about four percentage points, according to the department.
The data isn’t a perfect mirror of recycling trends across sectors, state Department of Environmental Services section supervisor Michael Nork said in an interview. But it does highlight the effects of rising pressure on regional recycling industries from factors including shifting recyclable markets, a lack of local infrastructure, and mixed attitudes toward recycling among the public.
Accounting adjustment
About 16.7% of the material that municipal transfer stations reported handling in 2024 was ultimately diverted for recycling, according to the recalculated percentages in the most recent biennial report.
Applying the recalculation to previous years shows a rate decrease of about a quarter relative to previous estimates. In 2022, for example, the new formula estimates about 21% of waste was recycled, while the previous formula had yielded an estimate of 27%. Now, officials say that method involved unintentional “double-counting” of some recycled material.
Keeping tabs on the flood of materials entering the waste stream requires detailed accounting of data from many sources, said Nork, who leads the Materials Management, Education, and Planning Section at the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services.
Once it’s discarded, an object might make several stops along its journey toward finally getting repurposed. From a municipal transfer station, for example, a bundle of cardboard could be sent to a regional sorting facility, from where it will journey out to the plant where it will be processed for reuse.
Many of these facilities must submit annual reports to the Department of Environmental Services tallying their intakes and outputs. The department generated its previous estimated recycling rates with averages pulled from those reports. But this method did not account for the fact that some recycling was getting counted more than once as it was weighed and reported at multiple locations around the system, Nork said.
To complicate things further, some of those reports were also coming from facilities dedicated to recycling. Because those stations accept exclusively recyclable material, their recycling rate is consistently 100%, skewing the average, Nork said.
“The recycling reports we published were probably a little bit inflated,” he said at a meeting of the Solid Waste Working Group on Jan. 23.
The new formula takes a different approach. It considers a narrower dataset including only municipal waste facilities, Nork said. The rate is calculated by comparing the amount, by weight, of waste diverted to recycling with the amount sent to a landfill or incinerator.
Looking at data from one sector — in this case municipal facilities — means the rate is an imperfect estimate for the true recycling rate in New Hampshire as a whole. But the department chose to look at municipalities in particular because they provide a better approximate “cross-section”of the statewide market than other data sources, according to Nork.
“The reason we chose municipal facilities is because they generally are fairly representative of the total waste stream,” he said.
Weighing benefits against up-front costs
What that cross-section shows, in recent years, is a decline in the proportion of waste ultimately getting recycled across the state. Just under 17% of waste was recycled in New Hampshire in 2024, according to NHDES estimates, compared to about 21% in 2022.
But while the statewide data illuminated this recent trend, the factors underlying it are more complicated than those numbers can show, Nork said.
“The report gives us data,” he said. “It doesn’t tell us why.”
About 20% of the materials that make up municipal solid waste are commonly accepted by most recycling programs, while another 13% are recyclable through narrower “special collection” programs, according to a 2024 study characterizing waste in New Hampshire. An additional 30% or so of municipal waste could theoretically be composted or anaerobically digested, according to the report.
So why might some materials be falling through the cracks? Numerous combined factors may be at play, said Reagan Bissonnette, executive director of NH Recycles.
New Hampshire’s policy landscape and infrastructure limitations affect how easy it is for towns to participate in recycling, she said.
“It’s in part because the state of New Hampshire doesn’t require recycling, and also doesn’t provide a lot of support to make it easier for communities to recycle,” Bissonnette said. She cited a lack of state programs, like grants, that she said could help small communities participate in recycling markets.
Once recyclable materials are discarded, they are sold to the private companies that will ultimately repurpose them. But it can be hard for a small town to amass enough of any one type of material to participate in the market, she said. NH Recycles brings communities together to aggregate their material and provide logistical support, Bissonnette said, and about 90% of communities in the state are members.
But grants could help even more, assisting communities in aggregating their recyclables and boosting local infrastructure, said Bissonnette. She highlighted a program in Massachusetts that makes grant funding available to communities for projects like regional recycling hubs.
“We don’t really have a lot of robust recycling infrastructure in the state, so a grant program could help to bolster that development of additional infrastructure at the municipal level, or even an entrepreneur or private industry organization that wants to get into that space,” Nork said.
Once material is amassed, transporting it to its next destination presents another challenge.
“A lot of the cost involved with recycling is the transportation, the physically moving the material from point A to point B,” said Bissonnette.
Trucking costs pose even more of a barrier to small towns because New Hampshire has limited local infrastructure for recycling. There are some facilities in-state that process materials: American Paper Recycling, in Claremont, and Colt Recycling, an electronics recycling facility based in Merrimack, for example. However, there is not enough capacity in-state for recycling to occur entirely locally, and as a result, recyclables are often sold to plants in other New England states, in the Southeast and Midwest, or abroad.
The cost of transportation is rising, and at least one New Hampshire municipality, Lancaster, has stopped recycling paper in recent years because of high trucking costs, according to Nork.
Another limitation is the instability of markets for recyclable goods.
The production of plastics with fossil fuels continues to flood the market with cheap, new plastics, diminishing the market for recycled plastic, Nork said. Facing uncertain outlooks, some plastic recycling plants in the U.S. and abroad have recently shuttered, like Alpek Polyester USA, a large bottle-to-bottle recycling plant, whose imminent closure was announced last week.
Global changes also affect recycling markets in New Hampshire. Before 2018, China was processing about half of the world’s recyclable waste, but in that year, the country announced a ban on the importation of most recyclable goods. The effects of that policy change are continuing to play out across recycling markets, Nork said at the Solid Waste Working Group meeting.
Sorting bays for recyclable plastics at a transfer station in Henniker. Sorting recyclable plastics prevents contamination, making it easier for towns to sell their waste to vendors for repurposing, said experts. (Photo by Dana Wormald/New Hampshire Bulletin)
Is recycling profitable?
Large and small, all these economic factors can increase pressure on municipalities and other small recycling processors.
“Because we don’t have mandatory recycling, what that means is recycling is often an economic decision,” Nork said. “… The economics behind recycling in the last five to eight years have been harder on towns that are really struggling with financial decisions. It’s been harder for them to justify, in some cases, because costs are rising on a number of fronts.”
These barriers can cause towns and the state to miss out on the benefits of recycling, according to Bissonnette, from diverting waste from landfills to providing readily available materials for reuse and cashing in on recyclable materials where possible.
In 2024, according to NHDES, New Hampshire missed out on about $23.6 million in revenue from recyclable commodities that were sent for disposal rather than funneled into the recycling market.
However, while recyclables do carry value, Bissonnette said she thinks of recycling more as a “cost avoidance strategy” than a profit-maker for towns.
“The assumption that a healthy recycling program should make money isn’t typically true,” said Brian Desfosses, director of public works for the town of Bedford. Instead of profits, Desfosses said he measured success in terms of the amount of material diverted from landfills and recovered from the waste stream.
“Our recycling program costs us money overall but is offset somewhat by both the money generated from item fees from residents and sales of a few items to third parties,” he said in an email.
Bedford’s current municipal recycling rate is close to the state municipal average at 16.1%.
Disposing of waste in a landfill or incinerator carries a cost, too, said Bissonnette. “So long as the cost to recycle is less than the cost to dispose of the same material in a landfill or incinerator, the town still benefits by avoiding a higher cost of disposal,” she said.
Public mindset and misinformation
Advocates for recycling in New Hampshire said they were not only fighting a turbulent market but also a tide of misinformation about recycling.
The idea that items sent for recycling are not actually repurposed is often false but continues to erode public trust in recycling, Nork said.
Recycling programs that require residents to sort recyclables themselves are the most successful at seeing materials through to being repurposed, he said. Single-stream recycling can face more issues, such as a higher rate of non-recyclable materials finding their way to sorting facilities and gumming up the works or creating more labor. (It also tends to be more expensive for towns, said Desfosses, but he believes it boosts public participation in recycling by making the process easier on the consumer.)
“Recycling is actually happening. It’s happening in New Hampshire,” said Bissonnette. “We still hear misinformation where people think that it’s just a scam … but recycling, really, is a thriving business in New Hampshire.”
Bissonnette noted that New Hampshire has implemented its first surcharge on solid waste. Funds from this program can be used to provide the grant funding and support for recycling and waste-stream programs that New Hampshire is currently lacking, she said.
“There’s definitely room for improvement, but we shouldn’t give up on (recycling),” Nork said. “… A lot of things are happening in New Hampshire very fast with waste management that are very promising.