Recycling in Pennsylvania

What's New: Recycling information specific to your county.

Recycling is the process of recovering waste materials and converting them into materials that can be used to make new products. It is one of the easiest and most effective things individuals can do to benefit the environment, and it has many economic and social benefits as well. Recycling is one of the "Three R's" - Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle - that describe ways to decrease the amount of waste we produce.

According to the EPA, the U.S. leads the industrialized world in municipal solid waste (MSW) generation, with each person in the U.S. generating an average of 4.6 pounds of waste per day. The U.S. is also a leader in recycling, with 24 percent of waste being recycled in 1995, the most recent year for which comparative international data is available. A much larger percentage of our waste could be recycled but ends up being thrown in the trash instead.

Recycling has been the law in Pennsylvania since 1988, when the state passed Act 101, the Municipal Waste Planning, Recycling, and Waste Reduction Act. There are currently more than 9 million Pennsylvanians in 870 communities with access to curbside recycling and many others with access to drop-off recycling facilities.

Explore this website to learn how to get started recycling and what to recycle. The site will be updated soon with more information.