Maines recycling reports are better, but they’re still bleak [Video]

MAINE, USA — Three years ago, I spent several days reading through 145 municipal recycling reports. Towns and cities across Maine are required to report to the Department of Environmental Protection every two years on their solid waste management and recycling practices.

The records are intended to help determine whether communities are making “reasonable progress” toward Maine’s goal of recycling or composting 50 percent of our solid waste (we’ve yet to come close).

My hope had been to create a database with recycling rates by town, but I quickly abandoned the idea. The documents, which covered the years 2019 and 2020, were PDF files. Most had been filled out by hand, meaning any kind of large-scale data analysis would have required deciphering handwriting and manually inputting the information into a spreadsheet. 

Of those that had been filled out, many …