America’s Cardboard and Paper Waste Problem, the Link Between Electric Vehicles and Solar, and the Future of the US Electricity Sector

• A new analysis by NREL that reveals that the $4 billion economic value represented by cardboard and paper is lost due to landfilling. The study, focused on 2019 data, emphasizes the potential for substantial energy, environmental, and economic benefits through improved waste management strategies for paper and cardboard waste, which constitutes a quarter of municipal solid waste in the United States.
• Owners of electric vehicles (EVs) are more likely to install solar panels on their homes, according to a behavioral study analyzed by researchers NREL. The study, based on a survey of 869 households in the San Francisco Bay Area, reveals a complementary relationship between EVs and solar photovoltaics (PVs), suggesting potential benefits for energy system resiliency and cross-sectoral adoption of sustainable technologies.
• NREL has released its 2023 Standard Scenarios, offering insights into potential changes in the U.S. electricity sector until 2050. The scenarios, generated using NREL's Regional Energy Deployment System model, project significant growth in wind and solar power by 2050, with a five-fold increase in wind capacity to 750 GW and a tenfold increase in solar capacity to 1,100 GW.

This episode was hosted by Kerrin Jeromin and Taylor Mankle, written and produced by Allison Montroy and Kaitlyn Stottler, and edited by James Wilcox, Joe DelNero, and Brittany Falch. Graphics are by Brittnee Gayet. Our title music is written and performed by Ted Vaca and episode music by Chuck Kurnik, Jim Riley, and Mark Sanseverino of Drift BC. Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast is created by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. We express our gratitude and acknowledge that the land we are on is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples. Email us at podcast@nrel.gov. Follow NREL on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Threads, and Facebook.

Transcript

[intro music, fades]  

Kerrin: Welcome to Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast, brought to you by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory! We’re highlighting the latest in clean energy research and innovations happening at the lab. It’s Wednesday, January 24. I’m Kerrin Jeromin.  

Taylor: And I’m Taylor Mankle.  

Kerrin: Hi Taylor!  

Taylor: Hello!  

Kerrin: Hi! How are you?  

Taylor: I’m doing well! 

Kerrin: Good! 

Taylor: I’m doing well; it’s a new year!  

Kerrin: It is! I know – there’s so much going on, I feel like this year is just off to a cruising start.  

Taylor: Mm-hmm 

Kerrin: Um, how are those new years resolutions going for you? 

Taylor: You know, they’re chugging along. Some have dropped… Uh, the gym ones, primarily. But, the others –  

Kerrin: - Let’s just check that off.  

Taylor: Yeah, exactly. Almost every year, but, overall some bigger ones, some big life plans, things are moving forward, quickly, too. How about yourself?  

Kerrin: That’s good! That’s good! Mine are going pretty well, I have a big one this year: to work on minimizing.  

Taylor: Hmm, I like it.  

Kerrin: Less stuff … less consuming … And I think overall it’s going really well – I feel positive about it for both me, and the planet.  

Taylor: I love that. Interestingly enough, we’re talking a lot about consumers in today’s three stories! Starting from the choices people are making every day that have an impact on our planet, and then venturing into how these impacts and the policies built around them provide a glimpse into our possible futures.  

Kerrin: We’ve got a great lineup of stories for you today, listeners, so … let’s dive right in.  

 [music]  

Taylor: This first story might feel particularly relevant to anyone whose trash and recycling bins were filled to the brim by the end of the holiday season. Gift wrapping, product packaging, and online purchases create a lot of paper and cardboard waste across the United States. I know my recycling bin was full. And listeners, you may be thinking, yeah but it is recyclable—so no problem, right?  

Kerrin: Unfortunately, no. There is a problem. Most of that waste isn’t actually ending up in recycling. A recent NREL study shows that in 2019, about 110 million metric tons of paper and cardboard was just tossed out across the US. Of that, only around 38% of it actually got recycled, some was burned, and a whopping 56% was dumped in landfills. That’s almost 62 million metric tons of cardboard and paper piling up in landfills in just one year. I did just a little quick math on the internet there, and, to kind of quantify that. It’s about 1.9 million, loaded, cement trucks. 

Taylor: Oh my goodness, wow. And those piles of holiday packages, newspapers, magazines, books, pizza boxes, napkins, and milk cartons represent 4 billion dollars in lost economic value.   

Kerrin: Man, that’s a lot. These findings come from a group of NREL researchers seeking answers on what is clogging the country’s landfills. Their hope is that this analysis can help guide policymakers toward sustainable waste management. They’ve previously examined what could be done with food waste and studied the mountains of plastic waste we toss in the garbage, and now they’ve turned their focus to cardboard and paper.  

Taylor: Using those 2019 numbers we mentioned earlier, the study mapped where in the US cardboard and paper waste is ending up in landfills and breaks down the waste composition by material type in each region. In the southeastern US, about a quarter of total waste was paper and cardboard. In Florida and Tennessee specifically, 30% of trash in landfills was cardboard and paper.  

Kerrin: A lot of energy is used in making paper and cardboard that gets used maybe once and then tossed into landfills. But the issue doesn’t just lie in all the energy used up manufacturing these products, and the lost economic value when they’re tossed in landfills.  

Taylor: Paper and cardboard in the landfill also contribute to methane emissions, waste-disposal fees, deforestation, and local environmental issues.  

Kerrin: But, good news! For paper and cardboard, there are solutions – reuse, recycle, compost, and energy recovery. All strategies that can ease the drawbacks of landfilling. You know the drill: reduce, reuse, recycle, we learned this when we were kids, right? Breaking down boxes is no one’s favorite chore but making sure your cardboard and paper are properly in the recycling bin is an easy way to help our planet! Or, even better, repurpose them and extend their use.  

[music]  

Kerrin: Alright, with that, how else can we help our planet out? Let’s chat about some consumer choices that do just that.    

Taylor: Like driving electric vehicles! Or, installing solar panels on your home!  

Kerrin: Yeah! Or maybe even both!  

Taylor: Hmm! 

Kerrin: It turns out, owners of electric vehicles, or EVs, might be more inclined to invest in photovoltaics, or PVs—solar panels.  

Taylor: That makes sense: The addition of solar panels on the roof could offset the energy bill cost of charging EVs at your home.  

Kerrin: That’s correct: A team of researchers at NREL, the University of California Santa Barbara, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory took a look and found that a quarter of EV owners also own a PV system. Meanwhile, only 8% of people who do not own electric vehicles actually have solar panels installed.  

Taylor: So, essentially people who own electric vehicles are more likely to take a step further and add solar panels to their home. Does it work the other way, too, though?  

Kerrin: Not necessarily. There’s not as strong a correlation to show that people who own solar panels would be more likely to buy an electric vehicle. It might influence their decision, but there might be other things at play here, such as social influences. You know, like, when you hear about it from your neighbor or government incentives, too.  

Taylor: But while governments offer incentives to adopt EVs and PVs, the researchers suggested that it might be beneficial to create policies that accelerate the adoption of these two technologies together— 

Kerrin: Ohhh.

Taylor: —because electric vehicle owners are more inclined to install solar panels anyway. And a double incentive just helps accelerate implementation.    

Kerrin: By the way, this research used a survey of 869 households in the San Francisco Bay area. It provided valuable insight, but the team recognizes that a more holistic survey might be needed to continue to unpack the evolving transportation and residential energy use nexus. Because the more we understand that intersection, the faster we can identify pathways to achieve decarbonization goals!  

[music]  

Taylor: Are you ready to look into the future, Kerrin?  

Kerrin: Always! I don’t see a crystal ball in your hand, but I assume you must be talking about NREL’s 2023 Standard Scenarios.  

Taylor: Right, it’s not quite a fortune-telling tool, but the Standard Scenarios is an annually updated product that’s designed to support decision makers in the US electricity sector. It’s modeled from the latest cost and performance data in NREL’s annual technology baseline.  

Kerrin: NREL grid researcher Pieter Gagnon is the lead author of the Standard Scenarios. He said that the scenarios are meant to give analysts and readers an idea of where the U.S. electricity sector may be headed, and how the picture could change across ranges of key unknowns.   

Taylor: This installment has 53 possible futures anyone can explore in NREL’s scenario viewer available at scenarioviewer.nrel.gov.  

Kerrin: This is the ninth year NREL has created a Standard Scenarios, and in each year there’s a baseline or middle-ground scenario called the “mid-case” that basically shows what could happen using mid-range estimates for important assumptions like the future cost of wind, solar, and natural gas.  

Taylor: This year’s Mid-case shows that by 2050 wind and solar could grow significantly—wind increasing five times and solar 10 times from current levels. The Mid-case also shows expansion of natural gas capacity by 200 Gigawatts.  

Kerrin: So, based on central estimates of the future costs of different technologies, and with current policies, we’re looking at a huge growth in renewables—in large part due to the incentives for clean electricity generation in the Inflation Reduction Act. And, more good news, across all 53 scenarios, the US electricity sector emissions decrease significantly into the 2030s.  

Taylor: In the Mid-case, carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector decrease by 81% by 2035.  

Kerrin: There are 17 scenarios that include current policies and no additional decarbonization policies, and across all of them emissions are projected to decrease between 71% and 86%. Meaning that because of the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, US electricity is expected to significantly decarbonize just because clean generation is so cheap!  

Taylor: The 2023 Standard Scenarios is basically the closest we will get to a crystal ball, like you said Kerrin.  

Kerrin: Totally! And there’s a nice dashboard that you can adjust so you can pick and choose to see what happens when you add more of one technology or price changes, and so on. It’s cool and part of NREL’s larger effort in energy analyses to incorporate transparent, realistic, and timely assumptions and consider diverse potential futures.  

Taylor: You can check out the 2023 Standard Scenarios for yourself! That website, again is standardscenarios.nrel.gov. 

[music]  

Kerrin: Alright everyone, thank you again for joining us on today’s clean energy research adventures! We’ll be back in just two weeks with more news from NREL, but if you just can’t wait that long, we know, you love us, be sure to check out our last episode that launched our Lab Notes series. There, you can get to know NREL’s laboratory director, Dr. Martin Keller.  

Taylor: And if you like what you hear, give us a positive review on your streaming platform of choice.  

[music]  

Kerrin: This episode was adapted from NREL news articles from December 2023 and January 2024 written by Wayne Hicks and Madeline Geocaris. Our theme music is written and performed by Ted Vaca and episode music by Chuck Kurnik, Jim Riley, and Mark Sanseverino, of Drift B-C. This podcast is produced by NREL’s Communications Office and recorded at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. We express our gratitude and acknowledge that the land we are on is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples. We recognize and pay respect to the Indigenous peoples from our past, present, and future, and are grateful to those who have been and continue to be stewards of this land.