Like other Cabinet members in the Trump administration, new Environmental Protection Agency chief Lee Zeldin has hit the ground running, canceling ideology-driven contracts for diversity, equity and “environmental justice.”

But it’s not just these progressive favorites through which the agency has strayed far from its mandate to clean the environment.

One of its less controversial core goals — and one popular with municipalities and corporations across the country — is the vehicle for spreading environmental damage across the world. To reverse that trend, Zeldin should roll back an EPA edict aimed at every city and town in the country: the national recycling goal.

Instead of putting plastic in those blue bins, we should establish systems to recover valuable “e-waste,” the rare earth elements and metals found in cellphones and other electronics — in other words, the very same things the Trump administration is working to get from Ukraine.

Per the EPA, the goal is to increase trash recycling to 50 percent of solid waste by 2030, with the aim of “managing materials more sustainably.” Think here of the plastic, glass and paper piled in the ubiquitous blue bins found on curbsides. It sounds like an admirable goal — but what seems like an unobjectionable practice turns out to be both uneconomical and........

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