Ideal Bite

unfortunately i have a friend who thinks he saw the recycling truck dump all the recycleables into the dump, and now he wont. even worse, he has convinced another friend not to. i called the county and they said its not so. what can i do?

I didn't notice mention of waxed cartons such as some milk, soymilk and orange juice containers. It seems a lot of people do not realize these ARE generally recyclable with paper. I know we go through quite a few, with little alternative packaging available, so I'm pleased to know they can be recycled. Same goes for cereal and cracker boxes!

Hey guys, it's actually not enough to take your recycling program's word for it. "... food containers. . Plastics #3-#7 – more difficult to recycle, they are found in Styrofoam, pipes, shrink wrap, padded envelopes, trash liners and more. Check with your local facility to see if it recycles these plastics. . Yogurt Cups - recyclable in most areas, especially the #2 plastic kind..." NONE of these plastics are being made into new products in any meaningful way. Most likely the contractors pick them up in order to keep them from the municipal landfill. It makes residents happy because then they feel good about not throwing something away, and it makes city officials happy about making residents happy and they can go on to claim extraordinary diversion rates from the garbage. It's a bloody shell game, actually. And it makes the plastic industry feel SUPER good because it means consumers are continuing to buy products in this kind of packaging, or that necessitates this kind of packaging. I'm not just BS'ing on this one. I work in non-profit recycling, in one of the last dual-stream programs in my area. We only pick up materials that we've been able to trace from the curbside setout to a finished product; everything is being landfilled as far as we can tell, either here in the States or over in Asia where plastic brokers are buying a lot of our plastic scrap and making it disappear for us. That chasing arrow symbol doesn't mean a plastic is recyclable. Use of it goes back to the American Plastics Council's decision to adopt a 'recognizable' icon when they decided to start denoting what kind of resin a plastic is manufactured from. The number in there sort of denotes the resin. Bottles and yogurt tubs and food takeout containers, for example, cannot be mixed when they reprocess these plastics, post-consumer, whether or not the number matches. It's a contamination issue because of additives, plasticizers, etc. Kinda like why you can't reprocess plate glass windows and coke bottles together, eh. I don't like to preach, but plastic recycling is anything but, the way we do it. It is merely a process of keeping some plastic out of the landfill briefly. It'll end up there eventually. Can I post a link for more plastic info? There's more than you can shake a stick at, here: http://www.ecologycenter.org/iptf/recycling/index.html And don't be put off by the age of some of the links at the URL above. They're still valid. Didn't mean to post so much verbiage, but I kinda wish you guys had done more research on this one.

There are some plastic caps, such as on some paper milk containers, that have recyclable numbered caps. Check your plastic caps before tossing them.

Watch out for the grocery bag recycling bins at the grocery stores. I recently found out from an employee that my local Stop & Shop doesn't recycle them after collection. They just get added to the huge amounts of waste the grocery store generates daily. Like Sara, I'm saying do the right thing, but do it smart...take the time to do your homework.

Melissa, your skeptical friends' hearts are in the right place...we should all question. But the problem is they stopped at the easy answer (don't recycle) which is no better than those who recycle without questioning. Tell them to follow through on this hunch that recyclables are getting dumped and if it's true, to get involved in making a change. Otherwise, their skepticism is wasted.

First rethink whether the thing you are recycling can be replaced with a non-recyclable container. Do you really NEED to drink pop at all? Do you NEED to buy yoghurt in a single serving cup? How about drinking iced tea, made with tea from the bulk store, and making your own yoghurt from milk bought in a returnable jug? It's easy to make yoghurt - a week's supply will take about 10 minutes of effort. How about cancelling the daily newspaper, and reading the news online? And here's a totally radical idea - if you know you won't eat a whole restaurant portion, bring your own container to the restaurant and package up your leftovers yourself! It may look strange to the other patrons, but what the hey! And those tinfoil swans always leak on the seat of the car or bus on the way home anyway. Remember, recycling trucks still burn gasoline picking up all that stuff, even if you can be sure that the stuff is being recycled.

"...There are some plastic caps, such as on some paper milk containers, that have recyclable numbered caps. Check your plastic caps before tossing them..." No, it actually doesn't work this way. I'm really sorry to have to post that. I didn't explain fully above.. Lefty non-profit recycling advocates like the folks I work for lobbied noisily against the American Plastics Council adopting the chasing arrows symbol when they announced they were going to start marking on plastics what type of resin they're manufactured from (e.g., polyethylene terephthalate, polypropylene, et al), because it would lead people to believe these plastics are in fact recyclable. Go figure! You can see who prevailed. It is pretty slick if you think about it. Propagate the recycling myth in order to justify manufacturing in the first place, because us consumers will think we're doing the right thing hucking all of these materials into bins thinking they'll actually be recycled. I think the plastic bag thing is one of the most egregious, really. I learned the same way Eric did, that these aren't being reprocessed at all. In fact, if you go to any of the plastic film manufacturers' websites, they're really wild and crazy about talking about the huge strides they've made in reclaiming this material. (Never mind that plastic films vary in resin type, have additives used in their manufacture depending on end-use, e.g. food storage, garment bags, high density, low density, etc, shrink film, cling film, yada yada). They're all different. But these manufacturers talk a really good game. "We reclaim these materials!" is not the same as saying, more honestly, "We've set up collection programs so that you needn't feel like a heel for purchasing products packed with this garbage which we're determined to manufacture until there's no more petroleum." Anyway, the recycling symbol on plastics? Totally disregard it. It's horse puckey. Actually it's worse than that, it's us the consumers being played by an industry which is entirely profit-driven and will do anything it can to remain in a positive light as long as people keep buying stuff in plastic, or plastic items.

Sorry, I left the 'a' off your name, Erica! My humble apologies...

I appreciated reading Sara's bit on plastic recycling (May 03, 2007). The need for more extensive and true recycling of plastic is huge. Much more so than glass. Recently Missoula had an Earth Day festival and a glass crushing machine was the star. Recycling glass certainly has easy recognizable support, but in relation to plastic it is not where the limited recycling money should be focused. Certainly glass should be recycled, but the efforts and funding of this program should not reduce the efforts and funding of recycling plastics, electronic equipment, etc.