Trying to be a good recycling citizen...

[sparr0.livejournal.com]

If I've determined that removing a certain food residue (peanut butter from the walls of a jar, dried cheese from a paper to-go container, etc) is not something I am invested enough in being a good person to do... should I put it in the trash or recycling?

Comments

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Is that because of single-stream recycling? My understanding is that it contamination hardly matters to glass and aluminum recycling because the process they go through is great at eliminating impurities -- but I can see how food residue from dirty containers could completely contaminate, say, the paper in the bin.

There's a lot I don't understand about single-stream recycling, like why pizza boxes (which are basically always contaminated with grease) are suddenly okay to recycle when they didn't used to be. I wish the flyers from the city were a little more informative. When I lived back Philadelphia we had, like, a textbook on exactly what you had to do before putting something in recycling (no can labels! no milk caps! but neck rings okay!) and what could and could not be mixed... and the really odd thing I read somewhere is that people are more likely to recycle when the rules are kind of arcane (which seems counterintuitive, and alas I don't have the link on hand).

[kelkyag]

I always thought the 'no pizza boxes' (or other food-contaminated paper) rule was because greasy cardboard would attract rats.

[clevernonsense.livejournal.com]

It's food oil that is the main issue--I guess even a small amount can ruin an entire 1-ton batch of recycled paper pulp.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought too. So why is it okay to put pizza boxes in Somerville's single-stream recycling? Because apparently it is.

[ron_newman]

I thought you were supposed to rip off the (non-food-contaminated) cover and recycle only that.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Sure, that would make sense, but where did that piece of information come from? The city's trash page says you can recycle "Cardboard and paperboard - Including pizza boxes (make sure to remove all food waste from the boxes)" -- so does that mean, like, removing congealed pieces of cheese, or does it also mean tearing off the grease-stained bottom part of the box? (And why does Cambridge's single-stream recycling guideline explicitly say "oil stains OK"?)

What's more, that's the only time food waste is mentioned with regard to recyclables on that page at all. As I said above, I really wish the city's flyers and official sources of information about this were a little more detailed on this subject, especially if it's actually true that a single grease stain on a pizza box or unrinsed peanut butter jar can literally contaminate an entire ton of recycling, as suggested above.

Or is this a situation where so much more raw material is put into recycling than could ever successfully be recovered for other purposes that they don't even care whether or not most people do it correctly? That wouldn't totally surprise me. There's a reason recycling isn't considered the most efficient way of reducing waste.

[skreeky]

I stand corrected then. I recently moved here and mistakenly thought the rules would be the same as they were in Boston City (which I also haven't looked up and re-read in a couple of years). At the time I checked them, they explicitly said "no pizza boxes" whether clean or not. I always assumed this was because pizza boxes are often terribly greasy even when they're sort of clean-ish looking. So either the paper process is different and better, or perhaps they have added a compost stream to the separation step.

They also used to explicitly say no paper plates and no tissue, I assumed because people would throw in dirty ones. But rinsed milk cartons (cardboard kind) and ice cream cartons were OK if you cleaned them. I suppose I'd better look that up again.

[clevernonsense.livejournal.com]

With single stream I believe there are actual human beings providing some of the sorting, so pizza boxes end up mostly getting pulled out/trashed unless the recycler follows the instructions and only includes the unsoiled parts.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

That would explain it.