Dear Readers,
Welcome back to the Green Place.
Spring has sprung, and I’m sure most of you are relieved, even if this winter's ferocity felt out of place. It was in fact the second warmest U.S winter on record. The brutal cold snaps, dangerously low wind chills, and crunchy snowpacks weren’t contradictions; they were symptoms. When climate systems go out of balance, erratic is the new normal.
That imbalance is the story of this month's issue — and it runs deeper than the weather. Global warming has been accelerating since 2015, now outpacing decades of prior trends. Oceans are absorbing heat at more than double the rate they were a generation ago. And a new El Niño may be forming on the horizon.
But this month we’ll look at a different kind of system failure. For decades we were told our recycling was working. But it largely wasn't. When China shut its doors to foreign recyclables in 2018, the illusion cracked overnight. The circular economy we believed in had never fully materialized.
Two systems. Both under stress. Both worth understanding.
Global warming has been picking up speed up since 2015 to 0.35°C per decade, up from .2°C per decade on average from 1970 to 2015. This surge isn’t an anomaly. The acceleration still appeared even after accounting for the outsized effect of El Niño on temperatures in 2023 and 2024. In other words, remove the noise, and the underlying signal is unequivocal. At current pace, Earth is set to exceed the 1.5°C limit set by the Paris Agreement before 2030 — a threshold scientists have treated as a long-horizon target, not a near-term deadline.
The shift is visible. March temperatures, once consistently below baseline, are now persistently above it. March 2026 was the second warmest March on record — another data point in what is increasingly a structural trend, not a series of outliers.
The oceans, which have traditionally held up to 90% excess heat trapped in our atmosphere, are also warming at an accelerating rate, and the rate of increase for ocean temperatures has more than doubled over the last two decades relative to the longer-term trend.
And as we head into spring, the next climate disruption may already be forming. The Climate Prediction Center (CPC) issued an El Niño watch on March 12, 2026, signaling an 62% chance of the warm-phase pattern developing by late summer or early fall.
An El Niño developing by late summer would layer additional warmth on top of an already accelerating baseline — potentially making 2026-27 among the hottest years on record. After the record-shattering 2023-24 El Niño cycle, there is little reason to expect the next one to be mild.
The circular economy has become a magnet for venture capital. Advanced recycling market was predicted to increase from USD 2.39 billion in 2026 to approximately USD 7.26 billion by 2035, at a CAGR of 13.16% from 2026 to 2035. Chemical recycling startups — companies that break plastics down to their molecular components rather than mechanically grinding them — drawing particular attention. On paper, the capital story looks promising.
But the reality on the ground is harder. Chemical recycling remains largely pre-commercial. Most facilities operate at a fraction of nominal capacity, and the economics depend heavily on oil prices and virgin plastic costs that work against recycled feedstocks when energy is cheap. Meanwhile, the mechanical recycling infrastructure that actually processes the overwhelming majority of today's materials — your curbside bin, your local materials recovery facility — has seen years of disinvestment since China's National Sword removed the revenue floor that kept those systems viable.
The result is a capital stack tilted toward moonshots and away from the unglamorous middle: the sorting equipment upgrades, the domestic reprocessing capacity, the logistics networks that would make a circular economy function in practice. According to EPA estimates, 36.5 to $43.4 billion in investment is needed to modernize the U.S. recycling system by 2030.
EPR legislation, if it takes hold at scale, could help advance circularity across the economy. When producers are on the hook for end-of-life costs, they have a financial incentive to fund the infrastructure that reduces those costs — and to design packaging that's actually recyclable. That's the market signal the sector has been missing. Several large CPG companies, anticipating tighter regulation, have quietly begun investing in domestic reprocessing capacity ahead of mandates. Watch that trend.
Policy Watch: The Bill Comes Due: Extended Producer Responsibility Gains Ground
For decades, the cost of recycling fell on municipalities — and ultimately, taxpayers. Companies that designed packaging had little incentive to make it recyclable, because they bore none of the cost when it wasn't. China's National Sword exposed that arrangement for what it was: a system held together by a single foreign buyer willing to sort through our waste.
Now, the policy landscape is shifting. Extended Producer Responsibility — EPR — is the framework that changes the equation. Under EPR laws, the companies that manufacture and sell packaged goods are required to fund and manage end-of-life collection and recycling for their products. The logic is simple: if you make it, you're responsible for what happens to it.
The EU has gone further — its revised Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, finalized in 2024, sets mandatory recycled content targets and recyclability standards that apply to any company selling into the European market.
At the same time, pushback on EPR and circularity legislation has already begun. For example on March 17, 2026, a set of plaintiffs filed a lawsuit to challenge California’s ‘truth in recycling’ law (SB 343), which, effective October 4, 2026, would prohibit “chasing arrows” symbols on products in California unless certain thresholds are reached.
For companies operating at scale, EPR compliance is no longer a distant concern. It requires knowing — precisely — what materials flow through your supply chain, what's recoverable, and what isn't. Organizations that lack visibility into their material flows are flying blind into a more regulated environment.
Work with us. The material flow analysis in this issue draws on the same methodology behind @Loop Lens — our platform for organizational circularity profiling. If your company wants to understand what's flowing through your supply chain, where recyclable value is being lost, and how to prepare for an EPR-era regulatory environment, reach out. We're offering a complimentary MFA snapshot to a limited number of organizations. Reply to this email to start the conversation.
This month’s analysis looks at how global recycling flows responded to China’s National Sword policy.
China's National Sword policy (January 2018) banned imports of most recyclables overnight. The question I raised this month is, did U.S. domestic recycling rates and material flows measurably change in response?
Using Python, I queried UN Comtrade data to track material flows for plastic and paper waste. I found that metal, plastic and paper waste diminished across the board but no shock to waste flows was as dramatic as plastics’ - plastic exports to China disappeared overnight.
.Looking at a broader geographic sampling of material flows, I found that paper exports were temporarily diverted to Southeast Asia countries like Thailand and Vietnam. This is because recycled paper waste exports are more usable than plastics, as paper fibers can be recycled up to 5 to 7 times to make new paper. Plastics - even after decontamination - can only be reused once or twice before it degrades.
The two stories in this issue share a common thread: systems that were designed without accounting for their own failure modes. A climate modeled on stable baselines. A recycling infrastructure dependent on a single export market. When those assumptions broke, the whole structure buckled.
The acceleration in global warming is not slowing. The recycling infrastructure gap is not closing on its own. And the policy window — EPR mandates, recycled content standards, truth-in-labeling laws — is narrowing as litigation and political headwinds build.
What comes next won't be decided by individual choices at the bin or the thermostat. It will be decided by the systems we build — and whether the capital, policy, and organizational will exist to build them in time.
Until next month, Ted
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