A county government in Alabama will stop collecting plastic for recycling, citing processing costs that have outpaced what the program can absorb. The Anniston Star reported the decision, which removes plastics from the county's recycling stream while other materials — typically paper, cardboard and metal cans — continue to move through the system.

The termination zeroes out one material category from the county's tonnage. For residents, that means plastic containers head to landfill rather than to a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). The county framed the move as a cost decision: the price of collecting, sorting and marketing plastic now exceeds the revenue or value the material returns.

That economics is not unique to this jurisdiction. Since China's National Sword policy took effect in 2018, mixed plastic has become the least profitable commodity in most single-stream MRF bales. Low-value resin grades — anything beyond PET and HDPE, and often contaminated fractions of even those — frequently trade at negative net values once sorting, baling and freight are counted. Municipalities across the Southeast have responded by narrowing accepted-materials lists rather than raising fees.

The decision puts the county on the list of U.S. jurisdictions that have formally excluded plastics from curbside or drop-off recycling since 2018. Each exclusion shrinks the captured tonnage of post-consumer plastic, a metric that producers and policymakers track as extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws come online in states such as California, Oregon, Colorado and Maine. Under those statutes, packaging makers pay into programs based partly on how much of their material is collected and recycled — an incentive structure that programs like this county's decision directly test.

The county's move also illustrates the split between announced recycling capacity and built capacity. New plastic recycling plants — chemical recyclers, PET depolymerization units, film recovery lines — have been announced at a rapid pace across North America, with billions of dollars in committed investment. But those facilities need clean, aggregated feedstock. When a county exits plastic collection, the upstream supply that would feed that capacity shrinks.

For the regional MRF market, the loss matters at the margin. One county's plastic tonnage is small on its own. Repeated across dozens of jurisdictions, it changes the bale composition and volume that sorters can offer to reclaimers, tightening supply for the very resin types new capacity is designed to process.

What happens next depends on two things: whether the county reverses course if processing fees fall or a regional buyer emerges, and whether state-level policy — an Alabama EPR bill, a disposal surcharge, or a grant program funding MRF upgrades — changes the arithmetic that made plastic unaffordable to collect. Until one of those moves, the county's plastic stream ends at the landfill, and the tonnage that used to count as diverted now counts as disposed.