For some, sorting recycling from trash is automatic, quick and easy. For others recycling can be confusing- there are so many different kinds of materials, what’s included and what’s not?

The new 2015-2016 Recycling and Trash Guide is the best place to start if you want a quick refresher. As a rule of thumb, recycle containers you use in the kitchen and bathroom, and rinse them free of food particles. These are the containers that the curbside program is designed to recycle. Included are glass jars and bottles, plastic bottles (including shampoo and conditioner bottles), cups and jugs, aluminum and tin cans, all clean cardboard (no greasy pizza box bottoms) and all newsprint, mail and junk mail. Pretty much everything else should NOT go in the curbside bin. Incorrect materials in curbside recycle bins will not be recycled, even if you wish they could be.

The Details

How about lids and tops? Here’s a trick: if the lid is the same material as the container, reattach it. That way, small plastic lids will travel through the sorting process with their host containers. Without being attached, lids can fall out of the sorting system and become trash. However, if the lid is a different material from its container, such as glass jars with metal lids, then remove the lid and recycle both, unattached from each other. This way, those metal pieces will be magnetized out of the unsorted material without taking the glass jar with them. Beer and soda bottle caps can be collected inside a tin can (then squish the top of the can closed to hold them all in). Corks go in the trash, or you can recycle them at Whole Foods in their specialty recycling area.

To be sure this plastic cap makes it way through the recycling process,
squeeze out a little air from the jug
then re-attach the top. This way the little top
won't fall through the gaps in the mechanized sorting process

Be an Exceptional Preparer

What more can we do to help prepare recycling to optimize that the most amount of material actually gets recycled? It’s true that poorly prepared recycling is too much like to trash to carry value. Too much food waste in or on our recycling, for example, degrades the value. Only when our recycling is well-prepared can we be sure that the Materials Recovery Facility (or MRF, pronounced “murf”, that’s where all our recycling goes) will be able to sort it accurately, thereby getting the most amount of that material into the re-manufacturing processes.

A recent study by major packaging trade associations looked into which methods of preparing curbside recycling worked best when it arrives at the MRF. During the rolling, dropping, blowing, magnetizing and other mechanical sorting processes, our recycling goes from single-stream curbside recycling through its journey to be sorted in numerous distinct materials, each individually marketed for resale.

What did that study conclude? We should not completely flatten our recycling. Items which are two-dimensional are not as well sorted in the MRF operations. For example, flattened milk and juice cartons may look just like regular cardboard to the MRF machinery if they are flat. However, as three-dimensional cartons they are sorted into their own category of very valuable long-fiber paper products, a higher-grade material than corrugated cardboard.

Cardboard is exception and should be flattened as often as possible. If you have a number of larger boxes, however, you are not required to flatten cardboard. You can even nest small boxes inside larger ones, just be sure to remove plastic bubbles and foam peanuts first and bring these for recycling at the monthly Recycling Center- they are not allowed in curbside recycling. We want the recycling of cardboard to be as easy as possible- the more we recycle our paper and cardboard, the fewer trees we chop down.

Pushing a little air out of your plastic bottles, jugs and paper cartons will certainly allow for more items to fit in the bin, but if you are finding yourself flattening all you items in order to be able to squeeze a whole week’s worth of recycling into one small bin, maybe it’s time to consider upgrading your recycling container. Any reusable container will do, as long as it’s clearly marked. You can repurpose a trash can using the green RECYCLING stickers we have here at DPW. Alternatively, you can purchase a barrel of your choice. If you are making an investment in new equipment, please consider making the color blue, and aim for a container that is large enough (64 gallon max) to hold all the recycling you might accumulate after you throw a birthday party, for example. Whenever life circumstances leave us with overflowing recycling containers at the curb, the wind has a nasty way of spreading that recycling down the street.

The 2015-2106 Recycling and Trash Guide has been sent to all Arlington households. If you have not received yours, please download it here or pick up a copy from Town Hall or DPW.