An end-of-year report from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality shows the state’s recycling rate in 2017 was 42.8 percent, slightly better than the previous year.

Doubling of the bottle deposit to 10 cents was a booster for Oregon’s recycling race. But recycling had setbacks too, including the closure of local paper mills that bought recycled paper and China deciding to cut off recycling imports from the United States.

Glass and paper recycling ticked up, while plastic, electronic and organic waste recycling declined between 2016 and 2017.

Metro is going back to the drawing board in its grand plan to convert the Portland area's food scraps into renewable energy, after failing to come to terms with Waste Management to build a processing facility in conjunction with the Portland sewage treatment plant in North Portland.

Metro offers a look into the recycling pipeline, from cart to commodity, complete with behind the scenes videos of are MRF processing lines. Great article to share and show what it takes to get those recyclables to market and beyond.

Read more here.

The Oregon Legislature is reportedly mulling to enforce a statewide ban on plastic straws and a tax on plastic bags.

DEQ is pleased to announce the long-awaited release of a critical meta-analysis of packaging materials asking the basic question: ‘Do popular packaging attributes including recycled and biobased content, recyclability and compostability correlate with lower environmental impacts?’

Oregon’s iconic Bottle Bill is being celebrated with a new sculpture in Salem. In 1971, Oregon became the first state in the nation to require a deposit on beverage containers for soda and beer. That landmark legislation is the inspiration for a new nine-foot-tall steel and aluminum sculpture in downtown Salem.

Last year, Oregon's 5-cent bottle deposit went up to 10 cents, and the number of bottles being redeemed has skyrocketed.

From July through September of this year, the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative says 500 million cans and bottles were turned in around the state.

But many of those came from across state lines, mainly Washington.

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Oregon and Colorado have very different recycling landscapes but are seeing a similar trend: stagnating recycling numbers.

The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has proposed issuing a solid waste material recovery facility permit to Georgia-Pacific Toledo LLC, part of Atlanta-based Georgia-Pacific. 

The proposed recycling plant, called the GP Toledo Material Recovery Facility, appears equipped to further GP’s research into its Juno technology, which is being designed in part to recover and consume mixed paper.  

On the Oregon Department of Energy's latest episode of Grounded, they’re talkin’ trash in Southern Oregon at