More than a quarter of a century ago, the news staff at The Enterprise mapped out a series of stories on recycling to educate the public, and to urge our local municipalities, to embrace the new state regulations to stop burying or burning waste that can be reused.

Over the years, we’ve run dozens of editorials on topics like the benefits of composting, the need to charge for plastic bags, the best ways to recycle electronic waste, the wastefulness of bottling water — the list goes on.

Our towns have, by and large, done a good job. Some of them even made money, selling recyclables that would have formerly gone to landfills. Some states, like Vermont and California, have passed laws that have greatly enhanced recycling efforts, as Sean Mulkerrin reports this week.

But there is still a long way to go. The federal Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 75 percent of the United States’ waste stream can be recycled or composted, but only 34.7 percent is. The worldwide upheaval in the recycling market — China stopped taking the world’s trash this year — has caused us to take a deep dive in a series of stories this week.

As H. Rose Schneider reports, towns we cover are now faced with huge increases in fees for recyclables. We urge them to stay the course. Maxing out our landfills faster is not good for society or the Earth in the long run. The Albany landfill on Rapp Road, which many of our municipalities use, recently got a few years’ reprieve but piling up more waste is not the answer.

Some of the lessons we learned are easy. We need to be more careful with what we put in our blue recycling bins. One of the reasons China backed off is because of the contamination of recyclables.

A state Department of Environmental Conservation expert told us that about 30 percent of what New Yorkers put in their bins is not recyclable. “We call that ‘wish recycling,’” Terry Laibach told us. “People tend to think: This item has value to me. I can’t use it anymore and they’ll figure out something to do with it.” Some of this sloppiness can be dangerous — dishware mixed with glass to be recycled, for example, can cause explosions.

We urge our readers to review our lengthy explication of the DEC list and make amends. As Laibach urged, we should think of our recyclables as raw material for new products. “That’s why it has to be the right stuff,” she said. “That’s why it has to be clean.”

All our usual caveats apply: Compost your food scraps, donate your used clothes, drink your water from a refillable container, bring home your groceries in a reusable cloth bag, wash and reuse plates and cups and cutlery rather than buying and throwing out single-use tableware, donate unused foods to the needy, take your batteries and your electronics to manufacturers’ recycling programs.

We love what the Cornell Cooperative Extension environmental youth educator Sean Taylor told us this week. He said he likes to show kids how they can find solutions to a problem. One of his lessons, on recycling, makes direct use of plastic soda bottles to create hanging planters for scarlet runner beans.

“It’s a different way to use plastic,” Taylor said. “And, they get food from it.”

But what if the problem is bigger than any individual can solve? That’s why we need government.

The problems with recycling are, indeed, bigger than individual choice and cannot be solved by individual responsibility alone.

In the past 15 years, for example, the world has created more plastic than in all of human history. Plastic doesn’t go away. It will plague our planet and its many inhabitants — animals as well as humans — for centuries to come. It takes oil to produce plastic, and the carbon-dioxide released in the manufacturing process adds to the greenhouse effect that has caused climate change. When oil prices drop, as has happened recently, there is less incentive for recycling.

Why must we produce so much plastic? Do we need to have dog bones, sold in the grocery store, packaged in plastic? To what purpose? Laibach, who has worked with the DEC for 29 years has seen an uptick in plastic packaging for our on-the-go society. Even individually wrapped fruits are sold at the grocery store.

How can this be controlled?

The New York Product Stewardship Council is working to implement what it calls principles of stewardship. We applaud the council’s efforts to shift waste-management costs off taxpayers and into the cost of a product.

And we support more extended producer responsibility, known as EPR, in the United States. This requires manufacturers to finance the costs of recycling or of safely disposing of products that consumers no longer want. One example of this is New York’s Electronic Equipment Recycling and Reuse Act, which went into effect in 2011.

The United States has no national regulations on electronic waste but about half of the states have adopted laws requiring e-waste recycling. Our country generates millions of tons of e-waste yearly — more than any nation on Earth — yet has no no national laws on how to dispose of it and no plants to recycle it.

Recycling e-waste is essential for two reasons — it contains toxic substances like mercury, lead, cadmium, and beryllium. It also contains precious and special metals like gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.

“For their part, federal lawmakers have not embraced EPR policies except to remove some barriers to state-level initiatives. In the two-decade period from 1991 to 2011, U.S. states enacted more than 70 EPR laws,” according to an article in “The Journal of Industrial Ecology. “In addition, manufacturers have implemented voluntary programs to collect and recycle products, but those efforts have proven largely ineffective in capturing significant quantities of waste products.”

China no longer wants our refuse; that should be a wake-up call. The alarm has sounded. Putting recyclables in the landfill for governments to save money is not the solution.

Other developed countries have succeeded in at least partly solving the problem of an industrialized society that creates too much waste to be sustainable. Germany leads the way with a total recycling rate of 80 percent. Its policies — a five-tier hierarchy puts prevention first — have not just required recycling but have actually reduced the materials that need to be recycled.

A 1991 ruling required manufacturers to take responsibility for the recycling of product packaging after consumers finished using it, including transportation packaging, secondary packaging like the box holding a six-pack of beer, and primary packaging like the beer cans.

Five years later, Germany passed the Closed Substance Cycle and Waste Management Act, applying to any entity that produces, markets, or consumes goods — making them responsible for the reuse, recycling, or environmentally sound disposal of the materials. This led many businesses to produce less waste in the first place.

Manufacturers in Germany pay a fee to put a green dot on packaging, showing it must be accepted by recyclers. The green-dot system encourages manufacturers to cut down on packaging since they pay higher fees for more packaging.

Germany has created a culture where its citizens value recycling and do the sorting themselves in ubiquitous bins marked for six different categories. As Elizabeth Floyd Mair notes in her story on the countries leading the world in recycling, they have these initiatives in common: comprehensive schemes that make it possible for people to recycle; clear recycling targets; good funding for recycling, including government funding and manufacturer responsibility; and incentives for citizens, including pay-as-you-throw and deposit-refund schemes and restricting the amount of waste that cannot be recycled, reused, or composted that is allowed.

In the United States, as in Germany and the other countries leading the way, polluters should pay for recycling, not taxpayers. That’s the only way we’ll reduce waste and needless packaging. Our country’s survival, let alone its greatness, depends on an ability to value our future, passing plans and policies that will sustain our Earth for generations to come.