Don’t make these recycling mistakes! CharDreizen breaks down what you should do with pizza boxes, paper coffee cups, and other items if you live in DC.
This allows the machines to easily separate plastics from paper. “Ensuring that all items are being put loose into the recycling bin or in a paper bag where they’ll fall out during the process of being transported, sorted, and recycled is really important,” says Dreizen.The reason? According to Dreizen, machines in sorting facilities are designed to equate 2-D items with paper products and 3-D items with other materials.
“The very first piece of equipment at recycling facilities basically takes all 2-D items and it puts them aside onto a separate track where all paper items go, which is why all paper—whether it’s just loose leaf paper or junk mail or pizza boxes or an Amazon shipping box—all of those really need to be flat to ensure that they can successfully be pulled off by that first piece of equipment,” says Dreizen.
“For example, shredded paper on its own can’t be recycled but if you put shredded paper into a paper bag and staple it shut, we can recycle that in DC ,” says Dreizen. “For small metal items like keys or nails, those would be good fits for scrap metal drop-offs [such as the6. Keep lids attached to containers.
This prevents the sorting machines from mistaking flat lids, such as those on containers of cream cheese, for paper. It also ensures that small plastic caps, like those on plastic milk jugs, don’t fall through the cracks of the machinery and get lost. That said, if the lid is made of a different material and larger than the 2×2 rule, you’ll want to separate them.
“We should really have publicly supported acceptable drop-offs for textile recycling, but that’s not something that we’ve tackled yet in DC,” says Dreizen.Paper mills can’t process products like ice cream containers, which are coated in layers of glossy plastic on both the outside and inside. “There’s no recycling pathway whatsoever for these today,” says Dreizen. “The best pivot would be for a company to change the packaging format.
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