According to the article, there's a huge disparity just in transportation costs, before wages even begin to factor in:

> Today, Recology, San Francisco’s employee-owned recycling company, pays £230-to-£390 to ship a container of recycled plastic across the Pacific–a fraction of the £2,700-to-£3,100 price tag for transporting that same container across the United States to plastic processing plants that are mostly located in the South, according to Robert Reed, a company spokesman.