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plants, studies have found that they release more harmful chemicals like mercury and lead into the air per unit of energy than do coal plants. And as cities are now learning, the other cost is financial. The United States still has a fair amount of landfill space left,but it's getting expensive to ship waste hundreds of miles away to those landfills. Some dumps are raising costs to deal with all this extra waste—according to one estimate, along the West Coast, landfill fees increased by $8 a ton from 2017 to 2018. Some of these costs are already being passed on to consumers,but most haven't—yet. Americans are going to have to come to terms with a new reality: All those toothpaste tubes and shopping bags and water bottles that didn't exist 50 years ago need to go somewhere, and creating this much waste has a price we haven't had to pay so far. "We've had an ostrich-in-the- sand approach to the entire system," said Jeremy O'Brien, director of applied research at the Solid Waste Association of North America, a trade association. "We're producing a lot of waste ourselves, and we should take care of it ourselves." As the trash piles up, American cities are scrambling to figure out what to do with everything they had previously sent to China. But few businesses want it domestically for one very big reason: Despite all those advertising campaigns, Americans are terrible at recycling. About 25 percent of what ends up in the blue bins is contaminated, according to The National Waste &Recycling Association. For decades, we've been throwing just about whatever we wanted—wire hangers and pizza boxes and ketchup bottles and yogurt containers—in the bin and sending it to China,where low-paid workers sorted through it and cleaned it up. That's no longer an option. And in the U.S., at least, it rarely makes sense to employ people to sort through our recycling so that it can be made into new material,because virgin plastics and paper are still cheaper in comparison. Even in San Francisco, often lauded for its environmentalism, waste management companies struggle to keep recycling uncontaminated. I visited a state-of-the-art facility operated by San Francisco's recycling provider, Recology,where million-dollar machines separate aluminum from paper from plastic from garbage. But as Recology spokesman Robert Reed walked me through the plant, he kept pointing out non-recyclables gumming up the works. Workers wearing masks and helmets grabbed laundry baskets off a fast-moving conveyor belt of cardboard as some non-cardboard items escaped their gloved hands. Recology has to stop another machine twice a day so a technician can pry plastic bags from where they've clogged up the gear. Cleaning up recycling means employing people to slowly go through materials, which is expensive. Jacob Greenberg, a commissioner in Blaine County, Idaho, told me that the county's mixed paper recycling was about 90 percent clean. But its paper broker said it needed to be 99 percent clean for anyone to buy it, and elected officials didn't want to hike fees in order to get there. "At what point do you feel like you're spending more money than what it takes for people to feel good about recycling?"he said. Then there's the challenge of educating people about what can and can't be recycled, even as the number of items they touch on a daily basis grows. Americans tend to be "aspirational" about