BIRDSBORO, Pennsylvania If youve ever dropped a potato chip bag into a recycling bin full of bottles and cans and hoped it might get recycled, theres something you should know: Its almost certainly sitting in a landfill right now. A recycling center employee or an automated sorting system most likely found the bag and removed it from the other household recyclables.

Each year, people trash 12 billion tons of flexible plastic packaging, according to the consultancy Resource Recycling Systems. Cheap and ubiquitous, items like grocery, dog food and snack bags are recyclable in theory but are often made from layers of different materials that are too costly and difficult for recyclers to process. They can tangle sorting equipment, causing damage or delays at sorting plants; they might be too dirty from food scraps or grease to be of any value; and they often get mistaken for paper and baled with the wrong materials, compromising a whole shipments worth of recyclables. Its easier and cheaper for recyclers to send most flexible plastics to a landfill.

But change is afoot as awareness swells around the environmental risks of plastic pollution and people demand meaningful solutions to the waste crisis . A coalition of plastic producers, recyclers and consumer goods companies has a plan to make it OK for people to throw chip bags and grocery sacks into their home recycling bins along with their households milk cartons and detergent bottles.