Addressing the issue of Horry County landfill recycling is essential for the health of residents as it relates to forever chemicals in the Waccamaw River.

Horry County sent 304,000 tons of municipal solid waste to the Highway 90 Landfill in 2024, according to MyHorryNews. Roughly 72% of everything the county generates ends up buried. Only 28% gets recycled — and that number has barely moved in nearly a decade. The problem is especially severe for plastic. Nationally, just 8.7% of plastic waste gets recycled, according to the EPA. The rest — tens of thousands of tons in a county this size — goes straight into the ground. For a landfill already burning through its remaining capacity faster than projected, the math does not work in Horry County’s favor.

The Importance of Horry County Landfill Recycling

## The Scale of What Gets Buried

The Highway 90 Landfill receives an average of 700 tons of household waste every day, according to the Horry County Solid Waste Authority. That daily intake has climbed steadily. Total municipal solid waste rose 27% over the past decade, from 239,000 tons in 2015 to 304,000 tons in 2024, as reported by MyHorryNews. Construction and demolition debris doubled in the same period, hitting 286,000 tons last year.

Population growth drives part of the increase. Horry County’s resident population reached 413,391 in 2024 — up 34% from 309,350 in 2015, according to MyHorryNews. More people means more trash. But population growth alone does not explain why waste volumes outpace the headcount.

**Of the roughly 396,000 tons of waste and recyclables the county handled in 2024, approximately 286,000 tons were landfilled and 110,000 tons recycled**, according to MyHorryNews. That 72-to-28 split mirrors the statewide picture almost exactly. South Carolina as a whole landfills 70.5% of its municipal solid waste — roughly 3 million tons annually — while recycling just 29.5%, according to the South Carolina Department of Environmental Services.

The county’s recycling participation rate tells the story in starker terms. In 2024, it stood at 30.5%, according to MyHorryNews. In 2016, it was 30%. Eight years of growth, infrastructure investment, and public messaging produced a half-point improvement.

## The Plastic Recycling Gap

Plastic occupies a uniquely wasteful position in the American trash stream. Of the 35.7 million tons of plastic generated nationally each year, only 8.7% gets recycled, according to the EPA’s most recent comprehensive data from 2018. More recent estimates from multiple researchers suggest the real figure has dropped closer to 5%. The remaining 27 million tons of plastic end up in landfills, making plastic 18.5% of all landfilled waste nationally — even though it accounts for just 12.2% of the total waste stream, according to the EPA.

The gap exists because most plastic cannot be economically recycled. Horry County’s own recycling program accepts only two types: PET bottles marked #1 and HDPE containers marked #2, according to the Horry County SWA. No plastic bags. No Styrofoam. No clamshell containers, no food trays, no flexible packaging.

Even those two categories have modest recycling rates: 29.1% for PET bottles and 29.3% for HDPE nationally, according to the EPA. Every other category of plastic — the yogurt cups, the takeout containers, the shrink wrap — goes directly to the landfill regardless of what number is stamped on the bottom.

**For Horry County residents, this means the vast majority of plastic they throw away has zero chance of being recycled under current infrastructure.** The county’s 40,000-square-foot Materials Recycling Facility can process 30,000 tons of recyclables per year, according to the Horry County SWA. In the most recent fiscal year, it actually handled roughly 18,000 tons, as reported by MyHorryNews. Even the facility that exists runs at 60% of its capacity. Meanwhile, roughly 10% of loads that arrive at the MRF get rejected due to contamination, according to MyHorryNews — residents putting non-recyclable materials in recycling bins.

The contamination problem feeds on confusion. When plastic containers carry a recycling symbol but the local facility will not accept them, residents either toss everything in the bin and hope or give up on sorting entirely.

## Tourism Dumps Its Trash and Leaves

Horry County does not generate waste like a normal county of 413,000 people. The Grand Strand’s tourism economy adds the equivalent of 301,801 full-time residents to the waste stream, according to the Horry County SWA’s 2022 Management Plan. Those visitors eat at restaurants, stay in hotels, and shop at retail outlets — all of which produce commercial waste at rates far above residential households.

**Seventy-five percent of waste disposed at the Highway 90 Landfill comes from multi-family residential and commercial sectors driven by the tourism economy**, according to MyHorryNews. That figure reframes the entire recycling discussion. Horry County’s waste problem is not primarily a problem of residents failing to sort their bottles. It is a structural consequence of hosting millions of visitors who consume disposable products and leave the cleanup bill to local taxpayers.

When the equivalent tourist population is factored in, per capita disposal drops to 2.3 pounds per person per day, according to the Horry County SWA’s 2022 Management Plan. That number looks reasonable on paper. But the waste still lands in the same landfill, consuming the same finite airspace, regardless of who generated it.

Tourism-driven commercial waste is also harder to recycle. Restaurants produce contaminated packaging. Hotels generate mixed-material waste. Beach shops sell products in single-use plastic that falls outside the #1 and #2 categories the county can process. The visitors who create it bear none of the long-term cost.

## What the County Is Doing

The Horry County SWA operates 24 Recycling and Convenience Centers across the county, according to the authority’s public materials. The MRF processes recyclable materials that do find their way into the system, and the revenue from those sales reached $4.1 million in 2024 — a 64% increase since 2022, according to MyHorryNews. Rising commodity prices for recycled materials have made the program more financially viable, even as participation rates stagnate.

The authority has also pursued energy recovery from landfill gas. A partnership with Santee Cooper converts methane captured at the Highway 90 site into electricity that powers approximately 2,100 homes, according to MyHorryNews. The SWA spent $450,000 on gas expansion infrastructure and earns roughly $100,000 annually from Santee Cooper for the energy produced, according to MyHorryNews.

**These programs generate revenue and reduce environmental impact, but they do not address the core volume problem.** Landfill gas capture makes a full landfill marginally less harmful. It does not make the landfill fill more slowly. Recycling revenue rewards the 28% of waste that gets diverted. It does nothing about the 72% that does not.

Ed Marr, the SWA’s Assistant Executive Director, described the daily reality at the Highway 90 site to MyHorryNews: “Every day in a landfill is a construction project.” The operation requires constant engineering, compaction, and management — all of which cost money that scales with volume.

## The Clock Is Ticking on Airspace

At current recycling rates, the Highway 90 Landfill has capacity to operate until approximately 2040, according to the Horry County SWA. That estimate has already been revised downward from an original end-of-life projection of 2050. The SWA has identified the potential to add three new landfill cells that could extend operations to 2060, according to MyHorryNews, but that expansion is not guaranteed.

Danny Knight, the SWA’s Executive Director, put the constraint bluntly to MyHorryNews: **”Air space — you live and die by air space.”** Every ton that enters the landfill consumes a finite resource. Every ton diverted to recycling extends the facility’s life. The arithmetic is that simple, and the county is currently losing the equation.

The SWA has set a goal to reduce per-person waste landfilled by 40%, according to MyHorryNews. South Carolina’s statewide recycling target stands at 40%, according to the Horry County SWA. Horry County’s current 30.5% participation rate falls well short of both benchmarks. Closing that gap would require a fundamental shift in commercial waste handling — not just better residential sorting.

Horry County is not an outlier. South Carolina recycles 29.5% statewide, according to the Department of Environmental Services — a state that has set recycling targets it shows no trajectory of meeting.

Paper remains the largest single category in the national waste stream at 38%, according to the Horry County SWA. But plastic’s low recycling rate makes it disproportionately destructive to landfill capacity. A material that constitutes 12.2% of generation but 18.5% of what gets landfilled occupies space it should not need to if recycling infrastructure existed for it.

## What Comes Next

Population projections for Horry County point in one direction. Tourism shows no signs of contracting. The question is whether the county can bend the waste curve enough to buy time — or whether it will spend the next 15 years watching its remaining airspace disappear at a rate that outpaces every mitigation effort.

Residents who want to make a difference can start with the basics: recycle only what the county actually accepts — PET #1 and HDPE #2 plastic bottles — and keep contaminants out of recycling bins. But individual action will not solve a problem driven by commercial and tourism waste volumes that dwarf what households produce. Structural solutions — expanded MRF capacity, commercial recycling mandates, and tourism-sector waste accountability — will determine whether the landfill’s end-of-life date reads 2040 or something further out.

The airspace is finite. The clock does not pause for planning sessions.

## Further Reading

– [Horry County Solid Waste Authority — FAQ and Recycling Program](https://www.solidwasteauthority.org/faq.html)

– [BOOM at the Beach: Push for Recycling Could Extend Life of Horry County’s Landfill — MyHorryNews, 2025] (https://www.myhorrynews.com/news/boom-at-the-beach-push-for-recycling-could-extend-life-of-horry-county-s-landfill/article_2534491f-d497-4068-8e32-987f076f9685.html)

– [EPA — Plastics: Material-Specific Data] (https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/plastics-material-specific-data)

– [South Carolina Department of Environmental Services — Solid Waste and Recycling Reports](https://des.sc.gov/community/recycling-waste-reduction/solid-waste-and-recycling-reports)

– [Horry County Solid Waste Management Plan, 2022 (PDF)](https://www.solidwasteauthority.org/docs/horryswmp2022draft.pdf)

– [Horry County SWA — What Can I Recycle](https://www.solidwasteauthority.org/whatcanirecycle.html)

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