Hello and welcome to the ProRata podcast, a podcast that takes 10 minutes to get you smarter, faster on the collision of tech, business, and politics.

Billing in for Dan Primak today, I'm Axios Special Projects producer Naomi Shaven. On today's show, coronavirus hits

Apple and tech alarm bells sound in Nevada. But first, why U.S. cities can't recycle. Recycling in the

U.S. had long been on the rise, dating back to the 1960s. In 2017, the U.S. generated 267.8 million tons of waste, 67 million tons of which was recycled.

But in 2018, China implemented a ban on importing recyclable goods from the rest of the world.

China had been processing almost half of the world's recycling prior to the ban.

One result is that now a lot more

plastic is ending up in landfills. Cities in the U.S. are struggling to find new markets for their

recyclable goods and canceling the recycling programs entirely in some cases. Alexandria, Virginia,

and Katie, Texas recently stopped collecting glass. Hawaii County stopped collecting paper and plastic.

Baltimore County recently revealed that the city had not recycled any of the glass

it collected in seven years, despite encouraging residents to recycle glass and collecting

it from recycling bins.

In many cases, cities are simply throwing away the recyclables that residents sort because

it's too expensive to recycle them, and no one will buy the recyclables.

Planet Money explored the problem last year at a recycling center in Arizona and found that

it costs $200 to get a ton of plastic recycled, but only $30 to bury it all in a landfill.

One option in all of this, cities could start to charge residents for recycling services

to offset the costs.

There's a decent chance that residents would buy in because recycling has become a norm, and

people who are environmentally conscious generally believe in the environmental value of recycling.

Automation could also bring down costs. Currently, recycling

...