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

[dphilli1.livejournal.com]

pnut butter is easy -- add a little warm water, put the lid on and shake hard. You can also make pseudo pnut butter milkshakes that way, use milk instead of water.

[skreeky]

I've been known to toss really dirty plastic/foil/glass recyclables in the dishwasher. That said, food residue can't go in recycling, so dirty stuff must go in the trash. Never put oily paper like take-out containers into recycling - ESPECIALLY no pizza boxes. If you feel bad about putting them in the trash they have to go to compost.

[clevernonsense.livejournal.com]

Adding a bit of peanut butter to ramen or even chicken noodle soup is actually crazy delicious. I roughly follow the method you described when needing to polish off a near-empty jar.

Any food-soiled paper goods should always go in the trash or compost (if appropriate) anyhow. In general, the trash is probably the better bet when in doubt. But obviously things like soda cans get recycled all the time unrinsed, so anything with near invisible residue should be fine.

[jadelennox]

Yeah, err on the side of trash, because food residue can contaminate other recyclables.

[ron_newman]

For a plastic or glass jar or bottle, I'd just soak it in warm water overnight. That is usually sufficient to get rid of sticky food residue.

For paper, just throw it in the trash if it's not clean.

[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).

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

@ all these people with time on their hands to wash the trash:

Whaaaaaat? I just put it in single-stream recycling.

[sparr0.livejournal.com]

You're explicitly not allowed to put food residue into single stream recycling. That's why I posted this.

[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.

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

My god, I bet I am the only one.

[nathanjw]

Oddly, next door Cambridge's single-stream recycling explicitly permits pizza boxes - "oil stains OK". I don't know if they're having them processed differently or just think it's better to get people on board with recycling or what.

[dial-zero.livejournal.com]

When I have water in the sink leftover from washing dishes, I just throw the dirty containers in there and let them soak.

But if you aren't into doing that, I vote for trash instead of recycling.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

So does Somerville. From the city's page on trash procedures (http://www.somervillema.gov/departments/dpw/trash-procedures):
These items can be recycled.

...

Cardboard and paperboard - Including pizza boxes ( make sure to remove all food waste from the boxes).

[sparr0.livejournal.com]

I'm posting this because I've found that soaking isn't helping with peanut butter or sour cream or cream cheese, at all.

[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.

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

My feeling has generally been that if it would require significant amounts of water to clean an item, then it isn't worth recycling it. I feel like it's kind of a zero-sum game at that point because it's impossible for me to gauge whether the ecological benefit of recycling a pb jar outweighs the ecological damage done by wasting an extra (insert amount here) of water. So I just toss it in the trash.

I of course do not make any claims to logical consistency or even coherence.

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

Fill peanut butter jar with warm water. Add a few drops of dish soap. Cap. Let soak overnight. Shake vigorously. Dump out soapy water and peanut butter curds.

[masswich.livejournal.com]

Single stream, in general, is designed to be more tolerant of things like food residue. They go through a more thorough "sort" at the facility, throw away what doesn't meet their standards, and separate the rest. The efficiency of the recycling goes down (ie. more of it ends up in the trash anyway) but the net volume is theoretically supposed to be higher.

No idea how that is applied in Somerville, though.

[pakoo.livejournal.com]

fill a dirty jar with white vinegar and water. microwave thirty seconds and pour out--works every time

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Thank you! That at least partially answers my questions.

[sparr0.livejournal.com]

I'm getting a lot of replies here with processes for cleaning out the jar. I don't have enough information to make a value judgement in this regard. How much energy/money/entropy am I saving by recycling a single plastic jar, vs how much a jar of vinegar and 30 seconds of microwave time costs?

[ratatosk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the replies, though made entirely in good faith by people genuinely trying to be helpful, have been kind of tangential. Nobody has said how clean they think is fair or reasonable, which is what you were asking.

Here's my personal answer, speaking as someone who is meticulous about recycling, but who is also bothered by wasting water on it:

Disclaimer: I grew up with an unreliable well (to the point where we sometimes had to use paper plates in order to conserve water), so I have never fully acquired the mindset of someone who has always had access to cheap, plentiful, perfectly clean water.

Personally, I will only wash recyclables if one squirt or so with the sink sprayer gets it to a point I consider reasonable (e.g. a yogurt container). I could never do the soaking in vinegar or microwaving that people are suggesting. I think if you need to apply a chemical or use electricity, you should consider just putting it in the trash.

Also personally, my threshold for how much food I think it's reasonable to leave in there is somewhere around the same point where I'd feel guilty for wasting food, either for failing to scrape out a reasonable final serving of peanut butter from a jar, or for having let that much of something go bad. Because Somerville has a rat problem, my threshold for reasonable is higher for sealed containers (e.g. peanut butter jars with the lids on vs cans).

In another place I lived, with a private trash and recycling company, we asked them about their request to wash the recycling, and they said the sole purpose of that was to avoid attracting wasps, because they were worried about their workers getting stung. So I suspect recycling processes (as well as attitudes towards what is "reasonable") vary enormously, and the optimal recycling method for Somerville might be pretty specific.

Obligatory tangential comment:
You also mentioned trying to guess at energy saved by recycling. I'm not convinced recycling reliably saves energy. I'm pretty sure it reduces landfill usage, though. And it seems like a no-brainer to me from a conservation perspective to recycle things like fluorescent light bulbs, or anything else that contains a completely non-renewable resource. But overall it seems insanely hard to know how much of a difference you are making.

[masswich.livejournal.com]

Yes you're right, our answers are all a little off-topic. I think the point I was trying to make was: wash them as much or as little as you want (within limits.) Whatever it gets for you to recycle the item rather than throw it away. If they can use it, they will. If not, they will clean it or throw it away. People don't need to think too hard about it, just recycle things rather than deciding to throw them away because they are too dirty and you don't feel like washing them out.

The centralized cleaning they do at the recycling facility is presumably more efficient anyway.

Where I live, we pay for our trash bags, so there is all the incentive in the world to recycle. With free trash collection like Somerville, that isn't an issue.

[xuth.livejournal.com]

The energy saved by recycling aluminum vs manufacturing from raw materials is relatively huge. Aluminum production is one of the largest uses of electricity in the world and recycling aluminum requires about 5% of the energy of producing new. Back when aluminum cans were heavier and thicker walled you could say that not recycling a 12 oz beer/soda can was equivalent to filling it half full of gasoline and burning it. Now, manufacturing enough aluminum for the current lighter beverage cans from recycling vs new materials saves the equivalent of about 2.5 oz of petroleum (this assumes 34 cans per pound and 32 barrels of oil saved per ton of recycled aluminum but the numbers seem to be relatively consistent from varied sources) so in almost any case this is worth the time and water.

Steel, paper and plastics provide less but still significant energy savings (look at http://www.epa.gov/osw/education/pdfs/toolkit/tools-m.pdf for an idea of how much) and in general this is worth it as well.

Note that all of this is on top of the environmental savings of not having the waste go to landfills.

For what it's worth, recycling in Somerville is still only optional, but in many communities (and possibly Somerville in the future) recycling is mandatory and actually punishable for failure to do so.

[ratatosk.livejournal.com]

That's a nice link -- thank you!

[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.

[smammy]

Of course I have no citation for this, but once I read an interview with someone who worked at a recycling plant. He said that the main reason why food residue on glass/metal/plasitc is a problem is because it's fucking gross for the people who have to handle the stuff. He suggested that making sure that the residue would dry out rather than festering was a good alternative to washing the trash. So don't put the cover back on that peanut butter jar, and toss it in the recycling!

(And gosh, it must be really annoying reading all these replied about how to wash your trash when you said outright that you weren't willing to do it. Oof.)