How does recycling deal with food and junk on bottles and cans?
In: 8
I believe that with metal they don’t bother, it’ll burn off in the melting process.
Plastics are made of complex organic chemicals, and their properties change with repeated melting, so they often don’t get recycled at all.
Food contamination is a large issue with recycling operations, and will significantly taint the end product if not removed. Plastic and aluminum both needs to be cleaned thoroughly for them to be recycled. Food contamination is why China stopped accepting most plastics for recycling, leading to a major shakeup in the recycling industry. Please rinse your containers before placing them into the recycling stream!
If bottles are well sorted (as they are in germany/nordic countries and a few other places) the recycling plant has a pretty clean recovery where the bottles consist of PET/aluminium/glass plus labels/glue and mostly food junk.
This means that they can be put through a combination of sorting, washing, mechanical shredding, filtering, caustic soda before being remelted into new stuff, but the core of the process is “these are relatively uniform flakes of either PET plastic, aluminium or crushed glass. And that means it behaves mechanically and chemically different from junk like glue, labels and food waste so it can be sorted and filtered until you get a pure end product that can then be reused”
Often times they don’t. Particularly with oily foods, if it soaks into the container, like say a pizza getting oil from the cheese into a cardboard box, that cardboard becomes almost impossible to recycle.
They don’t, they throw it out. Yeah sure the melting process would burn it off, but they can’t use all the stuff they have. Fyi, much of the collected recycling just gets dumped into landfill anyway.
Latest Answers