A Recycling Know-it-all Gets Schooled (That’s Me!)

After the misuse of the apostrophe, my biggest pet peeve is mistakes made with recycling. Oh, yes, I judge your blue boxes! So, imagine my surprise when I discovered I was making not one, but several mistakes as well.

Most of us know to look for the little triangle and number on plastics, and that fibres go in one bin, metal and plastics in another. But there are finer points that many people don’t bother learning, or we’ve never been told why.

Frozen food boxes aren’t recyclable, for example. In some municipalities you can recycle an ice cream container, in others you can’t. Why do we need to be so picky about what goes into the box, and how? And rinsing – or as Jim Gaffigan calls it, “washing the garbage.”

Some people throw stuff in the bins based on optimism. “It doesn’t say it’s recyclable, but it probably is!” As you will read, that just leads to waste.

I went right to the source: a person who works at a recycling plant who agreed to answer some questions anonymously. Many people suspect that a lot of recycling goes to landfills. Some of it does but that’s largely because of mistakes we are making.

Q and A With a Recycling Depot Deep Throat

Q: What happens when you put a non-recyclable in with the recycling?

A: It will most likely get hand-sorted out. If there is too much volume of non-recyclables mixed in, it just becomes classified as garbage and goes to landfill.

Q: Why do we have to clean recyclables before putting them in the bin? Do we need to make sure they’re properly washed?

A: Yes. Not like you would wash dishes but completely rinsed out so there is no food debris left in them. Otherwise, it will attract rats en mass and when that happens, a whole area of a facility can get infested quickly. All that contaminated recycled material will go directly to landfill. I’ve seen this once. I saw a loader expose an area the size of an average bedroom with hundreds of rats in it, deep inside a pile of recycled material. The whole warehouse got loaded in dump trucks and sent to the dump.

Q: Should we put caps back on bottles?

A: No. No caps. Caps and bottles are made of dissimilar plastics and there’s no way to get the caps off during sorthing other than by hand. No labels if they will come off. Try not to put containers inside of other containers whether metal or plasic. There’s no way for machines to to sort these so they have to be hand sorted or thrown out if they get beyond the sorting stage. And don’t put can lids in the can.

Q: Is there anything else that people should do or stop doing?

A: The best thing is for people to actually read the card they get from their municipality so they understand what can go in and what can’t. Also, what can be mixed with what and which box to put things in. It will make a huge difference.

I have read my municipality’s dos and don’ts but I don’t recall seeing my violations in it. We’ve never been told some of these things. I have been putting can lids in cans. Someone, somewhere said it prevented the workers from getting cut by the sharp edges of the lid. OK, so I’ll stop that!

The other thing I’ve done routinely is to put smaller cans in bigger cans and press them closed – with the lids at the bottom, of course. No more. Live and learn, and recycle better.