From the roof over your head and the car you drive, to your children’s school building and your doctor’s life-saving equipment, recycled materials can be found in the items and essential infrastructure you interact with every day.

Recycled materials are a renewable, sustainable source of high-quality materials for the manufacturing of everyday items and essential infrastructure.

By providing a reliable source of materials for manufacturing, the recycled materials industry helps keep the global supply chain moving and makes the U.S. less dependent on any one market or source. The industry helps make infrastructure more self-sufficient by providing a resilient source of raw material.

A sustainable planet cannot exist without recycling.

When manufacturers obtain raw materials for a product, the recycled materials industry provides a sustainable alternative to cutting down trees for paper, mining for ore, extracting fossil fuels for plastic, and otherwise depleting natural resources. The high-quality recycled materials that the industry manages annually save enough energy to power 48 million homes for one year.

The recycled materials industry helps manufacturers reach their sustainability goals and create a greener planet for future generations.

The recycled materials industry is partnering with consumer brands, big companies, and the public to research and develop ways to recycle new products. Innovative technologies like artificial intelligence are helping us separate, sort, and handle materials more efficiently.

Recycling goes beyond the use of recycled content and the implementation of new technologies. It is equally important that manufacturers design products with recyclability in mind. The industry actively works with manufacturers to ensure such through ISRI’s Design for Recycling® (DFR) principles and award.

Education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—or STEM—fosters students’ ingenuity and creativity and provides a deeper understanding of recycling. Students with these educational backgrounds will develop into tomorrow’s workers. The next generation of workers will be responsible for continuing the innovation of the industry, designing products for recycling, and developing handles to recycle new materials.

To expand youth education, ISRI has partnered with the nonprofit JASON Learning to develop a school curriculum that helps teachers and students understand the importance of recycling and the industry. This partnership presents a unique opportunity to not only spread the recycling message to youth, but also inspire students to think about careers in the recycled materials industry and give them the scientific and technical background that recycling responsibilities require.