When my children were little I volunteered for a lot of local environmental projects including setting up our first (and VERY successful) recycling depot. We’ve seen a number of changes over the past 18 years but some things will never change…

1. If the recycling depot has sorting rules, follow them. They are not trying to punish you or make your life miserable. It’s usually a staffing issue. They are well aware that there is a fine line between asking you to sort your stuff, and having you give up on recycling because it is a pain (even I gave up once in a private New York campground; the sorting rules were wild!).
2. Some of your recycled material may still end up in the landfill. It might be contaminated with food waste, it might be too dirty, or the recycling company might not have a market for it anymore. Or… the price may be so low that they don’t want to ship it, but they might want to in the future, and they don’t want you to get out of the habit of recycling it… so they still take it, and then they dump it.
3. Sometimes garbage is garbage. Wishing you could recycle something, and dragging it down to the depot, leaving it beside a bin, hoping they will find a use for it, is pointless. They will throw it out. And they will be annoyed.
4. Your recycled junk might be sent by truck, then ship, then truck again to a centre in a third-world country where it is reclaimed. The material will then be sent by truck to a manufacturer, then trucked to a port, then shipped again, and trucked again, to your local store. Did you really need that smiley-face plastic cup in the first place?
5. Items have to be dry. They don’t have to be spotless, but soggy, crappy, filthy items are garbage, not reclaimable material.
6. Check to see what your recycler will accept. You might find that the depot accepts a lot more things than you thought were recyclable. On the other hand, you might find out that something you have gone to considerable time and effort to clean, flatten, or whatever, is not on their list. Every depot is different.
7. Most recycling outfits don’t have time to dig through your papers to find that one receipt that you sat-up-all-night-worrying-about-because-it-might-be-used-to-steal-your-identity. If you think it might be an issue get a shredder, most places take shredded paper.
8. The 3R’s are Reduce, Re-use and Recycle. Recycle is last for a reason; it’s always better to not buy something in the first place.
9. The jury is still out on recycling plastics – way out. Everyone wants to recycle it, and there are tons and tons of it out there (and lots of it is ending up in the ocean) but the plastic recycling process is full of environmental, economic, and worker health issues. It just doesn’t seem right to not recycle it though, so for now, at least, sort it into various types.
10. Recycling is not perfect and it will not solve all the world’s environmental problems BUT THAT’S OKAY… it is still, definitely, worth doing.

Tags:

environmental issues, ocean plastics, plastic recycling, recycling, recycling depots