The current situation with recycling is that China used to take almost everything, and then over the last few years it's gone from that to first "only very clea

The current situation with recycling is that China used to take almost everything, and then over the last few years it's gone from that to first "only very clean stuff" to "we don't want certain materials at all". Unfortunately, since they were such a reliable vendor for so long, many of the local recycling plants shut down, here and elsewhere in the world, and a lot of stuff we used to recycle ends up in the landfill, but there's also a lot of stuff that's right on the edge, so some recycling centers store it for a period hoping the economics make sense in the near future as markets fluctuate. Now, global shipping is cheap, but I'm sure for large portions of the country there's also a portion of the cost which is even getting the goods to a large port, which may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. Localized recycling helps not only with the the global shipping, but also a portion of the local shipping, as well as likely bringing back capacity to recycle goods that we just can't feasibly do economically right now. Some of that is shipping cost, some of it is just rectifying the mistakes of depending almost wholly on an outside vendor that then cut off service.