Recycling Carts Cost Corpus Christi 9 Percent More This Year While Laredo Pays to Keep Its Sorting Plant Running
The blue cart that Corpus Christi rolls out to a new recycling customer costs the city $48.72 this year.
The blue cart that Corpus Christi rolls out to a new recycling customer costs the city $48.72 this year.
Longview picked up recycling from half its households before a 2024 fire destroyed the plant that took the material.
A federal judge in Portland has upheld Oregon’s law requiring the companies that make packaging to pay for recycling it, the first time any court has tested such a law against the U.S. Constitution — and on Aug. 28 he entered judgment against the trade group that brought the case.
For about ten years, households in eight American cities bought a special orange trash bag, filled it with the plastics their curbside program would not take — chip bags, plastic film, foam cups — and set it out with the recycling.
In July, the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor and the Speaker told every state agency to build its next budget request around a 3 percent cut to general revenue.
The bottles Americans put in a curbside bin were worth noticeably less in August than they were in July, according to pricing figures published Aug. 17 by the trade publication Resource Recycling — the second month of decline after a spring price surge that traders now describe as an overreaction.
Connecticut got back 92% of the bottles and cans its residents paid deposits on in 2025 — up from 65% in 2024 and just 44% in 2023 — the sharpest gain recorded in any of the ten states that run container-deposit programs, according to new state-by-state data from the Container Recycling Institute, a nonprofit that tracks and advocates for deposit systems, reported by Waste Dive on Aug. 5.
Irish consumers returned 1.4 billion bottles and cans for deposit refunds in 2025 — a 76.4 percent return rate in only the system's second year — while leaving €60.1 million in deposits unclaimed, according to the 2025 annual report published July 31 by Re-turn, the not-for-profit company that runs Ireland's Deposit Return Scheme, as reported by RTÉ.
The federal trial that could reshape how states pay for recycling is heading into its final written round, and the judge has signaled the case may turn on a narrower question than either side expected.
A federal judge in Oregon is about to decide a case that will shape how — and whether — states can require companies to pay for recycling the packaging they sell, and Texas has a stake in the outcome even though it has no such law.