More Recycling Tips

Free Items to Recycle

Glass is perhaps our best win where recycling and reuse is concerned. It comes to the island, and stays here, on Orcas. We welcome glass bottles, jars, glasses, and even window glass (no safety glass, though). What can really foul up Big Blue, our glass crusher, is when a 2-liter plastic soda bottle, or something similar, gets mixed into the glass. It can foul up our machinery and requires a messy, time-consuming effort to correct it. This also creates contamination.

Corrugated cardboard is bundled and shipped off island to a dealer for reuse as a new paper product. Well-intentioned recyclers often fail to confirm whether or not the cardboard is corrugated and put lots of other types of cardboard in the bins—cereal boxes, office loose papers, and packing used in shipping. All that should go into mixed recycling. If too much of the wrong kind of cardboard winds up in the bin, it may cause the dealer to refuse the bale because of contamination – it then becomes trash.

Cans need to go into the correct bin.  Aluminum drink cans (beer and soda, specifically) have the greatest value of any commodity we ship to the mainland. If you put anything else in those dedicated bins, it is considered contaminated – and when a bale is too contaminated, we receive less per bale.

Steel/tin cans have their own dedicated bin but these items need to be washed out and clean before recycling. If there is too much food residue, the dealer may declare the load as contaminated, and it becomes trash.

NOTE: Cat Food Cans go in Mixed Recycling, please.

Mixed Recycling

If you don’t have items that fall into any of the 4 categories above, but your items do match with the signs posted, then it should go into Mixed Recycling. The biggest culprit of contamination in the Mixed Recycling bins is non-recyclable items such as food waste, packing materials (such as styrofoam); plastic wrap or sacks, and shredded paper.  Those are some of the most common culprits, but there are more. Small amounts of contamination can cause an entire bin to be labeled as trash.

The best rule to follow when you’re unsure if something is recyclable? “When in doubt…throw it out!” (into the Garbage). Check out Recycling Tips for more information.

And finally, we encourage you to take a look at some Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs) and how they work in the YouTube videos below. These facilities have an innovative way to sort and oversee mixed recycling so that the good stuff is saved and the less-than-good stuff goes into the landfills. They process mixed recycling, as the really good stuff has been separated by our conscientious recyclers. Notice how often “contamination” comes up, and see that even with all the automation, there is still a need for lots of hands.