Recycling and Composting Accountability Act
Have a question about what this bill does? Ask in plain English; the answer is drawn from the bill's actual text and official record, and it'll tell you when something isn't in the text rather than guess.
Recycling and Composting Accountability Act
This bill establishes data collection and reporting requirements concerning composting and recycling programs.
Specifically, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must issue several reports related to composting and recycling, including a report on the capability of the United States to implement a national composting strategy in order to reduce contamination rates for recycling.
The EPA must also
- inventory certain facilities that recycle residential materials and describe the materials that the facilities can process;
- collect data related to curbside and drop-off recycling and composting programs in order to establish a comprehensive baseline of data for the U.S. recycling system; and
- develop and disseminate best practices that states, local governments, and Indian tribes may use to enhance recycling and composting.
The EPA must also develop a metric for determining the proportion of recyclable materials in commercial and municipal waste streams that is being diverted from circular markets, which are markets that utilize industrial processes and economic activities to enable post-industrial and post-consumer materials used in those processes and activities to maintain their highest values for as long as possible. After developing the metric, the EPA must then study the proportion of recyclable materials in such waste streams that were diverted from those markets in the prior ten years.
Finally, the Government Accountability Office must report on the recycling practices of federal agencies.
Referred to the Subcommittee on Environment, Manufacturing, and Critical Materials.
- Introduced in House Formatted Text PDF Formatted XML
Cite this page
U.S. Congress. (2026). H.R. 4040: Recycling and Composting Accountability Act. 118th Congress. Open America. https://openamerica.io/bill/118-HR-4040/
"H.R. 4040: Recycling and Composting Accountability Act." 118th Congress, 2026, Open America, https://openamerica.io/bill/118-HR-4040/.
H.R. 4040, 118th Cong. (2026), https://openamerica.io/bill/118-HR-4040/.
[H.R. 4040: Recycling and Composting Accountability Act](https://openamerica.io/bill/118-HR-4040/)