![]() One of them happens to be my hometown of Franklin, Tennessee, and another is New York City. We could also count on one hand how many communities ask you to put your recyclables in plastic bags before setting out for recycling. Not fun! Please look for the Store Drop Off label, take your bags and wraps with that label to the store. When you place these items in the curbside bin, they get wrapped on the equipment at the recycling facility, and workers have to stop the machines to climb on them to cut out the bags. Meaning, recycle those items at your local grocery store along with plastic shopping bags. But the vast, vast majority of people need to recycle these items through Store Drop Off. Plastic bags and some plastic wraps are recyclable - just not in your curbside bin! There are a small handful of communities in the US that can recycle bags and plastic wraps through curbside recycling. Here are the top things that recyclers do NOT want to see come into their facility: 1. Think of yourself, as a responsible recycler, as being the white blood cells of recycling… you attack the invaders and keep them out. All the materials that end up as waste from our households that aren’t recyclable are either not valuable enough to create a recycling stream for, or not recyclable at a big enough scale yet.īut, you can do your part to help keep the recycling system strong, by keeping it clean and free of contaminants. The recycling system was built especially to sort and process these select materials, but not everything else. You should think of recycling more as a system designed to process a select suite of valuable materials to turn into something new again - not so much a Santa’s workshop where elves can magically transform everything that passes through its doors into objects of glory. Sometimes those items can put recycling facility workers at risk or danger sometimes those items cause the recycler to lose money if they tried to sort or process them (for a variety of reasons), so the recycler has to then pay to landfill the material anyway and sometimes those items really slow down the recycling facility operations so that fewer overall materials can be processed by the facility each day, which hurts the health of the recycling business. Whenever you try to recycle items that you shouldn’t, it harms recycling. It may be tempting when you aren’t sure whether something is recyclable, to just put it in the recycling bin anyways, in a hope (or even an assumption) that “they’ll find a way to recycle it.” This is called “wishcycling.” In order to keep our recycling system healthy, it’s just as important to leave stuff out of the recycling as it is important to but the good recyclable stuff in the recycling. ![]() Originally posted on the How2Recycle blog.
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