Summing up 2025

What word would you choose to sum up 2025?

Various dictionaries have published their words of the year, with Merriam-Webster selecting “slop,” low-quality digital content often created with artificial intelligence (AI), and the Oxford University Press choosing “rage bait,” referring to content meant to create anger to drive social media engagement. Cambridge Dictionary’s selection of “parasocial” points to the growing connection people feel with online personalities and AI characters, while Dictionary.com selected “agentic” to reflect its application in describing AI’s ability to act independently.

Many of these words are related to AI, a technology that holds a great deal of promise for recyclers, particularly in sorting applications but also in other areas. Recycling Today will continue to report on the evolution of AI and its use in the recycling industry in the year ahead.

In my conversations with recyclers over the last year, several other words were repeated frequently, including “uncertainty,” and that sentiment seems likely to continue as we head into 2026. The Trump administration’s tariff policy contributed to the indecision many recyclers experienced, and one economist predicts that tariff-related uncertainty will linger until mid-2026.

“I think you’ll see some of the tariff rates begin to come down because it simply is not sustainable in the way it was set up,” Ray Perryman, president and CEO of The Perryman Group, a Texas-based firm that provides economic insights and analysis, told NBC affiliate KXAN in Austin, Texas.

“Volatility” was another word recyclers repeated in the last year as commodity values, particularly for copper and aluminum, escalated rapidly, reaching new highs. The gold price also rocketed throughout 2025, reaching 50 all-time highs by the end of November of last year. For more on the factors influencing the gold price over the last year and what 2026 could hold in store, see the feature "Excessive enthusiasm."

What words do you think will shape 2026? Will they be positive, or will they represent struggle for the industry and the wider economy? Share your thoughts with me via email at dtoto@gie.net or by connecting with me on LinkedIn.