Treehugger -The irony is that, in order to recycle more, we have to recycle less – meaning, we have to stop clogging the recycling stream with non-recyclable items, no matter how great we feel about sending them to a 'good' place. Materials recovery facilities (MRFs) have a hard enough job collecting, sorting, baling, and selling recycled goods in a faltering market, and they don't need the added headache of dealing with non-usable waste. From an article I wrote last summer about California's problem with wishcycling:
The less sorting people do at home, the lower the recycling rate becomes, due to cross-contamination. Mixing paper with beverage cans results in wet paper, which is non-recyclable. Unwashed plastic food containers, like mayonnaise and peanut butter jars, cannot be recycled either. And many of the items we buy every day were never designed to be recycled at all, like plastic grocery bags, toothpaste tubes, hard moulded plastic packaging, plastic wrap, compostable or biodegradable plastic containers, and construction paper.
Broader standardization is needed, with Mother Jones suggesting we follow the European Union's example in establishing "a national policy that defines what is recyclable rather than leaving that up to municipalities."
But while we wait around for the system to improve, the least we can do is be careful about what gets tossed in the blue bin, and that means resisting the urge to recycle anything and everything. The easier and cleaner we make the MRFs' job, the more of our waste can be repurposed.
1 comment:
I live in a place that uses a single bin for all recyclables. I struggle with how we are told to put paper recycling in the same bin with plastic bottles and metal cans.
I rinse my cans and bottles, but to keep the paper in a recyclable state, I would need to wash and dry bottles and cans as well as I do my dinner plates. A good rinse is what they get, which removes all the substance, but may leave some damp residue. Sometimes that residue gets on the paper, which I worry is making the paper unusable. Just removing paper from the mixed bin and gathering it separately would stop a great deal of this problem.
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