World Recycling Day - Here's How To Recycle

Today is World Recycling Day! Sadly, many of us (yours truly included) are recycling the wrong way and much of what we return with good intentions is actually sent to the landfill. One of the biggest, and easiest to remove, contaminants is plastic bags in which we put recyclables - they clog up the sorting pipes as seen in the image in the story and workers have to climb in the machine to cut them out by hand (like picking the hair out of your vacuum bristles so they'll keep rotating). Cans and bottles should be tossed in the bin as is, not bagged up!

Other problems: don't crush cans and cartons because it makes it hard to sort them, rinse jars and bottles to remove food waste so pests aren't attracted to the recycling facility, and compost greasy, cheesy pizza boxes - they can't get the food contaminant out of the cardboard in order to recycle it. Read through the article for more recommendations, like what to do with the lids. Thank you for helping make our world cleaner and reducing demand for finite materials our earth provides!

?Rethink
✖️Refuse
⬇️Reduce
✓ Reuse
♻️Recycle

How To Recycle
Well-intentioned “aspirational recycling” is actually making to harder to recover materials.
By Ula Chrobak
March 15, 2019

We’re having a bit of a recycling crisis.

Last week, officials in India announced that the country would no longer accept post-consumer plastic imports, in an effort to fight the pollution emitted in processing the often highly-contaminated loads the U.S. and other countries have been sending over.

“When we collect the material, it has as much as 25 percent contamination, but by the time we sell it it needs to have less than one percent,” says Susan Robinson, senior director of sustainability and policy for Waste Management, which operates 100 recycling sorting facilities in North America.

Here’s the reality of recycling, and how you can do better.