I’ve always wondered how legit recycling is and if it’s worth the effort to personally do it. (I live in a high-rise and I can toss my garbage down a chute on my floor, but have to bring my recycling down to the ground floor.) In college I literally saw them dump the recycling bin and trash bin into the same truck, but I know I see dedicated recycling trunks around.
I was told “soiled” recycling can’t be used i.e. greasy used pizza boxes, is that true? Recycling dumpsters are gross, isn’t everything soiled?
When companies sell a product that’s “made from recycled products” how truthful is that? Is it their own recycled products or do they source it?
Whats the deal with the recycling triangles and numbers on a product? If I recycle a number that I shouldn’t, does it ruin everything else in that dumpster?
How does any one/machine feasibly sort recycling? It seems like a herculean task.
Recycling, fact or fiction?
In: Other
Cans are the most important to recycle. Aluminium can be recycled over and over again. PET plastic is another important one because using recycled plastic uses a good big less energy than producing new plastic.
Paper products are somewhat less important environmentally. They are generally being produced from farmed trees and are just part of the carbon cycle, not actually a major contributor to envrionmental issues.
It varies – recycling is handled pretty locally. Sometimes, yeah, they just dump it all in the same landfill. A lot of recycling programs relied on shipping the material overseas to be picked over in the poorest countries, this is becoming uneconomical.
The number is the recycling symbol is shorthand for what kind of plastic it is. The recycling symbol does *not* mean the plastic is recyclable, the plastic industry just likes to imply it is.
Cardboard with moderate amounts of oil or other soiling is increasingly accepted.
For information on what plastics can be recycled, and if you can send out soiled cardboard, your city or county should have a webpage about how they handle recycling.
So from one end, the “made from recycled products”, that’s usually legit. I don’t know if that’s a regulated term but I do know companies often charge a premium for products they advertise as using recycled materials and when the people who pay that premium on purpose find out they’re lying, they quit. That kind of trust is hard to earn back.
Still, without government regulations and inspections, there’s a lot of wiggle room.
The problem is recycling is super complicated, leading to things like this:
> Whats the deal with the recycling triangles and numbers on a product? If I recycle a number that I shouldn’t, does it ruin everything else in that dumpster?
Plastics create this problem. There’s lots of different *kinds* of plastic, and how well they can be recycled differs for each. The numbers tell the plant what kind of plastic they are and how they can be recycled. For a rough, ELI5 difference, three examples can be like:
* One kind might be able to be melted down and made into new, similar products.
* Another kind might chemically change after being melted, but still usable as different products.
* Yet another kind might be so useless after melting, all we can do to recycle it is chop it up into smaller pieces and use that for something.
One example I think I remember is that the plastic in bottles can’t really be used to make more bottles after it melts down, but it CAN be used for the kinds of bags used by grocery stores. Those bags can’t be melted down to make other products but CAN be used to make things like larger, longer-lasting tote bags. There are also projects where they’re used as filler material in landscaping and other projects. Also a lot of people apparently like to decorate trees with them so much my locality fought really hard to end regulations that banned them.
Now a lot of these other points run together:
> I was told “soiled” recycling can’t be used i.e. greasy used pizza boxes, is that true? Recycling dumpsters are gross, isn’t everything soiled?
Yes, this is true. A lot of times the way cardboard and paper are recycled is to soak them in water, grind them up, and make new paper out of them. Unfortunately, if there’s food residue on them, that becomes impossible to clean out of the system. The resulting paper products might include oils that can go rancid and stink or present dangers of infection. So if you put greasy stuff with food residue in recycling, the stuff with food residue can’t be recycled. And if the residue spreads to other things in the bin, THAT stuff can’t be recycled.
> How does any one/machine feasibly sort recycling? It seems like a herculean task.
It is! A lot of places can’t afford enough machinery to do all the sorting. That’s why some places ask people to sort glass, plastic, and paper separately. That at least cuts down on a lot of the job.
Some places rely on human labor. Sometimes that involves prison labor, they don’t have to be paid to do it so that can be profitable. If clever ways to get free labor aren’t employed, then someone has to pick through all the stuff and make decisions, knowing that sending the wrong stuff to the wrong machines can ruin an entire batch.
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So a big problem is it’s hard to make money recycling. It takes a ton of highly specialized machinery and a lot of labor. The point isn’t really to make a profit, it’s to try and do some good for the planet. Unfortunately, a ton of operations are set up to make a profit.
So like, the company that does my office recycling? They pay for humans to hand-inspect the bags. And they charge my company a *fine* for every non-recyclable item they find. Other companies just won’t accept recycling if they find non-recyclables. The company that did the recycling in my last apartments would throw recycling bags in the dumpster if they saw visible incorrect items in the bag. Still other companies figured out they can ship all of their material overseas and just trust that the recycling facilities over there handle it.
It’s not 100% “a scam”. But there are thousands of companies involved in it and not all of them are honest. So it’s also not 100% being done with nothing but the benefit of the planet in mind.
To a certain extent, especially with plastics it is.
Hard plastics ie bottle tops, drinks bottles are recycled. However even these are not indefinitely recyclable after a few cycles the polymer chains hare too damaged and the resultant product would be weak and prone to breaking. This is why you see containers with lines like “made of up to 60% recycled material” they need to add new plastic to help reinforce the old plastic.
Same with cardboard, it can only be recycled between 5 to 7 times.
Often once they are past the point where they can be recycled they along with soft plastics like cellophane get sent to a waste to energy incinerator.
Metals and glass however are infinitely recyclable and it’s financially worth wile to do so. Aluminium for example takes about 95% less energy to recycle than to produce new.
Unfortunately huge multinational plastics producers have spent a lot of money telling the public to recycle rather than reducing the plastics they make or moving to more ecologically sustainable packaging.
Recycling is gonna be different with different materials.
Metal and glass can be melted down and reused pretty much infinitely. Easy!
Paper involves mulching it back into pulp again, but this breaks down the fibers that it’s made of, so recycled paper isn’t as high quality and it can’t be done over and over forever. Still, completely usable for tons of things. *Grease* specifically makes it hard to recycle, although I honestly don’t know why. I’m sure you can google it
“Plastic” is a word we use for dozens of different hydrocarbons that have very different properties. Some can be melted down and reused pretty easily, others are much harder to.
Unfortunately this does make recycling plastics more awkward, because different locales have different levels of recycling capability. But that’s the point of the numbers – look up which ones can be recycled in your city. This also applies to those bags you saw put in a garbage truck with the trash. Every city handles it differently. Some are serious about it: in LA you can put all recycling in one bin and people will sort them by hand. It costs more, but it gets people to recycle much more. Other cities might truly bullshit it because there’s a mandate from the state to have a recycling program but the city doesn’t actually care.
“made from recycled products” is nice, I guess, but it really doesn’t mean much if there’s no regulation on what % that means. They might be recycling waste from their own assembly lines, or buying waste from others, it doesn’t really make a difference. Either way, they’re doing it when it’s cheaper than buying “new” raw materials. I’m fairly sure that your city recycling plant sells what they recycle to producers on the market in the same way.
I am a solid waste facility inspector and spent 10 years working in garbage/recycling, so hopefully I can help explain!
> In college I literally saw them dump the recycling bin and trash bin into the same truck
Some trucks have multiple compartments inside, so trash and recycling go in the same truck but stay separate inside. Other places might use separate trucks. Which is better just depends on how the collection routes are set up and other logistical details.
> I was told “soiled” recycling can’t be used i.e. greasy used pizza boxes, is that true? Recycling dumpsters are gross, isn’t everything soiled?
This is actually a big problem. Paper/cardboard can’t be recycled if it’s too contaminated by things like grease. In “single stream” recycling (where all types of materials go in the same bin), contamination rates can be very high. There is usually still a fair amount of useable cardboard, though. This isn’t an issue for plastic, glass, or metal since they can be washed off during the recycling process.
Single stream recycling is often used in spite of high contamination levels because it’s easier than keeping all the materials separate. A lot more people will participate in recycling if they don’t have to separate all the materials themselves.
> When companies sell a product that’s “made from recycled products” how truthful is that? Is it their own recycled products or do they source it?
It depends! “Recycled” material can come from many sources – for example industrial waste, scrapyards, or municipal recycling programs. “Post consumer material” specifically means it uses things that were recycled by consumers (aka ordinary people).
> Whats the deal with the recycling triangles and numbers on a product?
The triangles themselves are unregulated. Anyone can slap a triangle logo on anything… whether or not it’s actually recyclable.
The numbers in the triangle are an industry standard to show what type of plastic it is. Different number plastics have different properties and get processed differently.
However, a number doesn’t necessarily mean your local program can recycle that product… for example, my local facility can take number 2 bottles, but not number 2 bags because our equipment can’t handle thin floppy bags. Check with your local pickup service for a list of what they can/can’t take.
> If I recycle a number that I shouldn’t, does it ruin everything else in that dumpster?
Nope, they will just remove it during sorting. But try to avoid it if possible since it adds extra work/expense to processing the recycling.
> How does any one/machine feasibly sort recycling? It seems like a herculean task.
It doesn’t. We sort that shit *by hand.*
There is some mechanical sorting, like magnets to pull out steel and blowers to separate heavier/lighter materials. But most of the sorting is a conveyer belt with a bunch of dudes picking through it, sorting stuff manually.
And no… this is not a very nice job lol. It’s gross and smelly and you have to watch out for dangers like needles. So be considerate to the workers when you throw stuff in the bin!
I’m from a rural area in the US. We have to sort our own recycling and take it to a “convenience center” (a dump). Our township annually discloses the money it makes on our recycling.
From what I understand, if your municipality is making money, then the resources are being recycled. If you’re paying someone to take it, it may or may not be. See if you can find out about where you live.
Just to point out a popular misconception, garbage trucks have multiple compartments. What you almost certainly saw was bins being emptied one after another. The trash is compressed and kept separate within the truck. This is common in most developed nations around the world.
Metal and glass recycling are efficient and important for reducing the environmental footprint.
Plastic is a mixed bag and depends on where you live. PET is extremely efficient (plastic bottles using standardized plastic and standardized additives to make an easily recyclable product that can be reused several times, saving energy and fossil fuels with every cycle). Other plastic product are so so, but if you have a competent recycling plant it will at least burn in a high-temperature incinerator where it can contribute energy, be burnt under controlled conditions with flue gas desulferization (and other filtering techniques) that reduces environmental impact…not to mention reduce microplastic waste. The worst case scenario is a landfill (which happens to a lot of “recycled waste” in the US because US environmental agencies are neutered compared to European ones).
Paper is generally good. Modern recycling facilities can handle a fair amount of grease, but even if it can’t be recycled then burning it prevents methane release.
For you as a consumer. If you live in an apartment building, HOA or some other association that’s large enough to negotiate waste disposal prices the direct benefit is that sorted waste should cost you less. If you’re relatively close to a recycling plant the discount can be up to half price per ton for plastic to free for well-sorted metallic waste.
Depends on your locality. The town i grew up in had a big scandal a few years back when it came out that all the recycling had just been going to the landfill for years. Apparently similar things occur elsewhere.
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