Successful recycling requires some care. Alejandra Villa Loarca/Newsday RM via Getty Images ...

Every week, millions of Americans toss their recyclables into a single bin, trusting that their plastic bottles, aluminum ...

While single-stream recycling is convenient, it has downsides. Contamination, such as food residue, plastic bags and items that can’t be recycled, can degrade the quality of the remaining material, ...

So, what makes plastic recycling so difficult? As an engineer whose work focuses on reprocessing plastics, I have been exploring potential solutions. In cities that use single-stream recycling ...

Single-stream recycling makes participating in recycling easy, but behind the scenes, complex sorting systems and contamination mean a large percentage of that material never gets a second life.