1. Do we really need to clean stuff to recycle it?
Yes, we really do! Dried on food waste, or other sorts of dirt is, by definition trash, which is not recyclable. There are no little elves at the processing plant sitting around and cleaning stuff to be recycled, and no way, during the actual recycling process, to separate out the dirt. When a bag or bin of recycling contains dirty items, generally the entire bag or bin is discarded into the trash. That means both that there is less recycling, and that our taxes pay for the triple hitter – pickup, sorting, and then landfilling.
Things do not need to be sterile, or clean enough to eat from them again, but there should be no visible evidence of their prior use – no mayonnaise glops, tomato paste, peanut butter, etc. left on the item. If it can’t be cleaned, it can’t be recycled, and it must go into your trash.
2. “Wish-cycling”?
This is the practice of throwing something into recycling, instead of trash, when we are not sure whether it can be recycled or not. We must stop this practice! As with dirty items, a bin with non-recyclables in it is likely to be discarded into the landfill by the processing facility, with the same problems as discussed above.
Unfortunately, in order to improve the contamination rates in our recyclables, we need to change our default designator to Trash, Not Recycle. Ironically, this will have the effect, in the short term, of increasing our tonnage of trash collected, but that trend will reverse itself as more people learn best recycling practices, learn how to decide what can and cannot be recycled, and use fewer items that become either trash or recycled items after their use.
In the end, the answer to reducing both our trash and our recycling collecting is to generate less waste of any kind. That’s the medium and long term goal of our town Recycling and Sustainability Committee.
3. Paper Milk Cartons
Paper milk cartons (as well as ice cream boxes, aseptic juice boxes, etc.) are an enigma of sorts. In theory, they can be recycled in the same as envelopes are done when they have a glassine window in them. When the paper is reduced to pulp, the window remains, and is simply filtered out of the soup, along with any staples, paper clips, or other detritus.
Some paper processors can do the same thing with these other types of cartons that have a layer of plastic on the paper to render them watertight. That is not entirely the case with Casella’s process, but those items with which they can’t deal constitute an extremely small percentage, by weight, of our recycling stream, so they are allowed to be included in the blue bins even now.
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