The recycling rate in McLean County is not as high as an environmental nonprofit had hoped and worked for leading up to 2026.
The Ecology Action Center [EAC] has announced the 2025 waste generation and recycling rate of the county was 41%, and the rate of the year before was actually 43%.
Last year, EAC reported the county’s recycling rate topped 50% for the first time, a long-term effort that was finally reached. Executive Director Michael Brown said that figure was corrected from the previously reported 51%.
“We’re doing a lot of validation, verification, checks for redundancy where multiple entities may be submitting similar data or related data, and so the reality is there was a significant figure that was reported in 2024 that ended up being incorrect,” he said.
“We did, even at the time, attempt to verify, double check, and yet it was confirmed at that time to be correct. In our process for 2025, in double checking again with this entity, yes, we did discover in fact that we had been given incorrect information in 2024.”
Brown declined to name the specific entity which mislabeled and therefore reported the incorrect data. He said he is confident the reports prior to last year are all correct.
At the time, topping 50% for the recycling rate was a big goal met. Reflecting on that missed goal, Brown said it is a significant loss.
“We have been very excited about that goal met, and so that does mean we’re now behind schedule again in meeting the goals in the community's solid waste plan. As of 2022 we were actually supposed to have hit the 50% rate,” he said.
The county’s goal for 2027 was to hit 60% of waste generated being recycled.
Changing definitions and strategies
Brown said there are more strategies in EAC’s 20-year solid waste plan that have not been fully explored to increase the recycling rate. Those may be needed now more than before because of one reason that helps explain why the rate is trending downward.
“Here in the past, our recycling rates really benefitted from what was then the Henson and Kirk Construction Demolition Recycling Facility that at the time was taking the bulk waste from Bloomington-Normal,” Brown said. “Since then, that facility has not only changed hands but there has been a bit of a change in perspective on the state regulations.”
When the facility was operating, the county was able to recycle old furniture, remodeling materials and things of a similar nature which all counted toward the recycling rate as bulk waste.
Now, Brown said the state is applying a stricter definition of what is considered “construction demolition materials,” or what those materials used to be considered. Instead of allowing any material which resembled what is collected from the construction or demolition of a building, materials must come from one of those projects to be recycled.
Brown said making the recycling process more accessible to commercial businesses and large organizations would improve recycling rates.
“The solid waste plan does talk about coming up with routes that are more cost effective to run, kind of putting it out to bid in geographic areas, trying to pass along cost savings of these more geographically dense routes to business operators so it’s not such a burden for them to be able to recycle,” said Brown.
“Another one is organics recycling, so essentially food waste, and that’s something that we’re actually looking at right now. …We’ll be looking at the feasibility of taking organic food waste and through anaerobic digestion, harvesting methane, turning that into a compressed natural gas for fleet usage.”
At least one company in Bloomington already is doing that, Symbio Bioculinary, though the lab works with partners outside Bloomington-Normal.
Additionally, Brown said plastic has become cheaper, which has not necessarily led to fewer residents recycling but has led to some recycling haulers being more restrictive on what they accept because it is not always profitable for the haulers to accept more.
“The same thing for glass. There’s some haulers that are not taking glass for recycling, whereas [Circular Services], who is the main recycler in the area…they still do take a broader range of plastics for recycling and glass for recycling,” he said. “And they’re the ones that do take all the materials from single family homes in Bloomington-Normal that are essentially collected by the municipal programs.”
Brown said he regularly monitors the capacity of landfills left in the state since the sites are what he hopes to avoid being overly reliant on by recycling. According to him, Illinois has about 20 years left in its landfill capacity based on the current estimated rate of usage.
Helping people get back on track
Brown said EAC will continue to push itself and pursue recycling goals despite the setback. Furthermore, the organization wants to reverse the downward trend the corrected data now reflects.
A lingering need for helping residents continue recycling is education, Brown said.
“I would say we’re already doing a lot, we do as much as we can, but we need to find more effective ways to reach the specific targets,” he said. “The people who are either contaminating or who have lost their faith in recycling and kind of need more confidence or education to make them into more effective recyclers.”
Brown said it happens — people throw everything into the recycling bin or maybe they err on the side of caution and throw away things that can be recycled. He said that costs additional time for sorting out nonrecyclable items.
He said EAC had applied for a federal grant to do curbside auditing of a home’s recycling habits but did not receive it, adding it would “… kind of do an assessment of how much contamination was in there. Perhaps if there was a lot of materials seemingly absent, that we might be able to help them out on and then give them household specific education and feedback and even do this on a repeated basis for each of those households.”
Brown said it is popular to attach stickers or flyers to the side of recycling receptacles for education, but it is a costly measure.
Still, he always wants people to be reaching out with questions because that is what the EAC is all about.
“We’ve been doing that work specifically for over 50 years in this community. We want people to be better recyclers — not just recycling more, but better,” he said. “We have had growth of what are called ERP programs, extended producer responsibility, where the manufacturers and retailers of specific materials get involved with the full life cycle and taking care of those materials.”
Brown said EAC also can help with the recycling of more hard-to-place materials such as car batteries and latex or oil-based paints.
