It’s hard to believe, but currently not everything is recyclable. Good intentions aside, some items simply just can’t be salvaged, and even worse, some items can actually cause more harm than good by going through the recycling process. While it is true that technology is becoming more and more sophisticated every day, sometimes it can’t be helped, and you will need to dispose of some items into landfills. The following article is a list of common household items that you should never recycle, complete with full breakdowns explaining why they should avoid the recycle bin, and more importantly, whether or not it’s worth trying to compost them or to simply toss them into the trash.
Can You Recycle Bottle Caps?
This may come off as a shock, but those caps that come with your bottles of soda or juice aren’t recyclable, and the reason may surprise you. While most caps do appear recyclable on their own, you may find that no matter the material, all caps have a thin plastic coating on the inside. Melting this down would contaminate the whole batch. Before you can melt anything down, you should remember that all the materials have to be separated. Failing to do so would mean the material you would have gained can no longer be used. It’d be far too brittle, weak, or malleable. This idea will continue to present itself throughout the article, so keep it in mind as you continue reading.
Can I Recycle Cosmetics?
While it is true that there are numerous companies making the change over to non-toxic materials in their beauty products, the fact remains that the vast majority of the market still uses very toxic material in cosmetics. Some hazardous, and thusly non-recyclable products, include lipstick, foundations, hair products, and even perfumes, to name a few. They contain carcinogenic and hormone disrupting ingredients that can cause sickness to spread within a community, as well as being unsafe for the environment.
While being as specific as possible, contact your local disposal service about getting rid of old and unwanted beauty products. More information allows them to properly dispose of the product. It’s okay to give too much info than to leave them with vague details. An example would be that perfume bottles often don’t list their ingredients, so they may require a whole separate process for disposal.
This isn’t to say that you can’t still recycle some items. For example, some products (while containing toxic material) still come in glass or plastic containers, which can be recycled still. It’s important not to pour these products down the drain, so if this is the course of action that you wish to take, be sure to dump the contents of the product in the trash (as much as you can), and from there clean the container. Once again, the goal is to avoid pouring the contents down the drain at all, so try to clean them without the use of your sink. Rather than the sink, you can often use a paper towel or rag to get the bottles clean
Taking Care of Take-Out Containers
What makes up a pizza box? Cardboard. Guess what chinese pack boxes are made out of. Also cardboard. Can you guess what’s the common link here? Contaminants. Think back to the bottle caps section, when we discussed the problem with mixing different materials. Food waste is also a part of that topic. Even if you were able to scrape off all of the cheeses, meat scraps and renegade noodles, you’re still left with a box of greases and fatty acids that have soaked into the cardboard. If you try to recycle that you’ll only be adding to the landfill because you’ll be contaminating all of that material. As a rule of thumb, if you use any paperboard products with food, chances are there’s no way to effectively recycle it. It should be noted though that paperboard that has been in contact with food product can be composted, meaning you can put them in a compost bin or a trash bin without fretting over the environmental impact.
How Do You Recycle Styrofoam?
One particular hot topic is over Expanded Polystyrene (EPS), which is more commonly known as styrofoam. Because it’s a synthetic material that easily breaks down, many people believe it’s just as recyclable as plastic or paper. Many also believe that it’s alright to simply burn EPS.
The fact is that styrofoam is recyclable, under certain conditions. Throwing Styrofoam into the recycling bin will result in your load simply being thrown out, as the recycling companies can’t melt it down with other materials and they simply don’t have the time, fund and resources to pick through everyone’s bins to separate them correctly. To make matters more complicated, only certain types of styrofoam can be recycled, the rest have to be thrown away. The only type of styrofoam that can be recycled is PS 6, which will be marked on the back of all the pieces of styrofoam. It isn’t able to be recycled if that PS 6 symbol is not present on the back of it.
You may be putting yourself at risk if you burn styrofoam at home. Burning polystyrene will result in the release of deadly black carbon and carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. Not only is this bad for the environment, but it’s also an immediate risk to you and anyone nearby the burning styrofoam, as carbon monoxide poisoning is likely to occur. Nearly 30,000 people a year are hospitalized from carbon monoxide poisoning, and nearly 500 people a year die from it. Needless to say, it’s just better to let the professionals handle it.
However, there are other alternatives to recycling Styrofoam. For example, companies such as Publix, located in the southern part of the USA, allow for donations of styrofoam so that they can reuse it for their own products that they’re packing. You should get online and look for one of the many other companies throughout the nation that offer similar programs. If there are no businesses in your area with a similar program, you can always contact your local recycling plant for a hassle-free drop off, where they will then take care of it’s disposal.
Recycling Shredded Paper
Another hot button you can press is the topic of recycling shredded paper, and it’s not without cause. It isn’t so much a problem regarding the environment as it is the actual logistics of using shredded paper. Every american uses an average of about seven trees a year for paper, and only 66% of recycled paper is even able to be reused. Shredded paper is much more difficult to recycle than regular paper, so of the few companies that are willing to take it, most require for it to be put into clear bags separate from the rest of the recycling.
The best thing you can do is to not shred paper. This isn’t a reasonable thing though, as often shredded paper has sensitive information on it that shouldn’t be easily accessible to the public. As a compromise, you should only shred documents with important information on them, such as checking account information, credit card numbers, anything involving your social security, etc. By minimizing the amount of shredded paper produced, recycling plans can concentrate on maximizing their output from their recycling process.
Should I Recycle Juice and Milk Cartons?
It’s often thought that juice boxes and milk cartons are able to be recycled. Based on the texture one might think they’re a type of cardboard of paper-based material. They are, as it turns out. These items are around 85% paperboard. The big problem is that both juice boxes and milk cartons contain a thin lining of plastic on the inside, which is also known as Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE #4). It keeps the walls of the container safe from dissolving due to exposure to the contents. You may destroy all your hard recycling work if you carelessly toss your juice boxes into your recycling, as it may then be all tossed away.
The way companies have attempted to address this issue is by switching their containers to being purely plastic. A simple solution is to simply by only plastic bottles of milk and juice. The greatest thing you can do while recycling is to cut out the middleman as much as possible, so if you can cut your usage of these boxes and cartons altogether, then the less impact you will have overall, despite using more plastic bottles potentially. Once again, the idea is to reuse as much as possible, and mixing materials will just end up in a landfill anyway.
Can You Recycle a Diaper?
People want to keep landfills from being overwhelmed too quickly, so they often wonder if there is a way to recycle diapers, which can take up to 500 years to decompose when inside a landfill. Again, you have to think about the logistics of it. Your average diaper contains not just paper, but plastic as well. Not to mention that it takes time to sort through contaminants in order to ensure no cross-contamination occurs with the other materials in the recycling plant. Realistically, it’s just not possible to safely recycle diapers.
There are other ways to dispose of diapers, however! One way is to buy more eco-friendly diapers, and luckily for us, there is a massive market of these in circulation. They’re made to decompose at a faster rate, so their time in the landfill is minimized greatly.
Can I Recycle My Ceramics?
Ceramics are usually made from clay and heated in order to take form. Known as sinter, the process involves partially melting the materials used, then allowing them to cool and solidify together in order to maintain their shape. In a sense, it is very similar to glass. However, similar and the same are two very different things. You cannot recycle ceramic. The material is not easy to salvage, so if you break a mug or a plate you’ll have to throw them in the trash. It should be said that you might be able to compost your ceramic pieces, depending on how much clay there is in them.
If you don’t want to send the pieces to the landfill, and you can’t recycle them, you could try reusing them yourself. You might be able to make a small plant pot from a mug that’s lost it’s handle by sanding down where the handle broke off from. Art pieces, like mosaics, can also be created by using broken ceramic. There are even ways to file down and reuse ceramics for gravel.
What Should I Do With My Plastic Bags?
Plastic bags are a big problem. Aside from plastic bottles, plastic bags make up a large percentage of waste in our landfills, our oceans and our national parks. Unfortunately, you can’t recycle these either. Due to the danger these bags pose to machinery and people alike, most recycling plants will be unwilling to take in these bags. For this, there’s a simple solution: Don’t use plastic bags. The only feasible means of keep them out of the environment, due to the lack of means to recycle them, is to stop using them all together. Since both paper and reusable bags have risen in popularity, only luxury is a reason to continue using plastic bags. To reduce your carbon footprint, help the environment, and cut down on overall production costs for businesses, one of the easiest solutions is for you to buy several reusable bags, store them in your car, and have them at the ready whenever you next go shopping.
Can You Recycle Bottle Caps?
This may come off as a shock, but those caps that come with your bottles of soda or juice aren’t recyclable, and the reason may surprise you. While most caps do appear recyclable on their own, you may find that no matter the material, all caps have a thin plastic coating on the inside. Melting this down would contaminate the whole batch. Before you can melt anything down, you should remember that all the materials have to be separated. Failing to do so would mean the material you would have gained can no longer be used. It’d be far too brittle, weak, or malleable. This idea will continue to present itself throughout the article, so keep it in mind as you continue reading.
Can I Recycle Cosmetics?
While it is true that there are numerous companies making the change over to non-toxic materials in their beauty products, the fact remains that the vast majority of the market still uses very toxic material in cosmetics. Some hazardous, and thusly non-recyclable products, include lipstick, foundations, hair products, and even perfumes, to name a few. They contain carcinogenic and hormone disrupting ingredients that can cause sickness to spread within a community, as well as being unsafe for the environment.
While being as specific as possible, contact your local disposal service about getting rid of old and unwanted beauty products. More information allows them to properly dispose of the product. It’s okay to give too much info than to leave them with vague details. An example would be that perfume bottles often don’t list their ingredients, so they may require a whole separate process for disposal.
This isn’t to say that you can’t still recycle some items. For example, some products (while containing toxic material) still come in glass or plastic containers, which can be recycled still. It’s important not to pour these products down the drain, so if this is the course of action that you wish to take, be sure to dump the contents of the product in the trash (as much as you can), and from there clean the container. Once again, the goal is to avoid pouring the contents down the drain at all, so try to clean them without the use of your sink. Rather than the sink, you can often use a paper towel or rag to get the bottles clean
Taking Care of Take-Out Containers
What makes up a pizza box? Cardboard. Guess what chinese pack boxes are made out of. Also cardboard. Can you guess what’s the common link here? Contaminants. Think back to the bottle caps section, when we discussed the problem with mixing different materials. Food waste is also a part of that topic. Even if you were able to scrape off all of the cheeses, meat scraps and renegade noodles, you’re still left with a box of greases and fatty acids that have soaked into the cardboard. If you try to recycle that you’ll only be adding to the landfill because you’ll be contaminating all of that material. As a rule of thumb, if you use any paperboard products with food, chances are there’s no way to effectively recycle it. It should be noted though that paperboard that has been in contact with food product can be composted, meaning you can put them in a compost bin or a trash bin without fretting over the environmental impact.
How Do You Recycle Styrofoam?
One particular hot topic is over Expanded Polystyrene (EPS), which is more commonly known as styrofoam. Because it’s a synthetic material that easily breaks down, many people believe it’s just as recyclable as plastic or paper. Many also believe that it’s alright to simply burn EPS.
The fact is that styrofoam is recyclable, under certain conditions. Throwing Styrofoam into the recycling bin will result in your load simply being thrown out, as the recycling companies can’t melt it down with other materials and they simply don’t have the time, fund and resources to pick through everyone’s bins to separate them correctly. To make matters more complicated, only certain types of styrofoam can be recycled, the rest have to be thrown away. The only type of styrofoam that can be recycled is PS 6, which will be marked on the back of all the pieces of styrofoam. It isn’t able to be recycled if that PS 6 symbol is not present on the back of it.
You may be putting yourself at risk if you burn styrofoam at home. Burning polystyrene will result in the release of deadly black carbon and carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. Not only is this bad for the environment, but it’s also an immediate risk to you and anyone nearby the burning styrofoam, as carbon monoxide poisoning is likely to occur. Nearly 30,000 people a year are hospitalized from carbon monoxide poisoning, and nearly 500 people a year die from it. Needless to say, it’s just better to let the professionals handle it.
However, there are other alternatives to recycling Styrofoam. For example, companies such as Publix, located in the southern part of the USA, allow for donations of styrofoam so that they can reuse it for their own products that they’re packing. You should get online and look for one of the many other companies throughout the nation that offer similar programs. If there are no businesses in your area with a similar program, you can always contact your local recycling plant for a hassle-free drop off, where they will then take care of it’s disposal.
Recycling Shredded Paper
Another hot button you can press is the topic of recycling shredded paper, and it’s not without cause. It isn’t so much a problem regarding the environment as it is the actual logistics of using shredded paper. Every american uses an average of about seven trees a year for paper, and only 66% of recycled paper is even able to be reused. Shredded paper is much more difficult to recycle than regular paper, so of the few companies that are willing to take it, most require for it to be put into clear bags separate from the rest of the recycling.
The best thing you can do is to not shred paper. This isn’t a reasonable thing though, as often shredded paper has sensitive information on it that shouldn’t be easily accessible to the public. As a compromise, you should only shred documents with important information on them, such as checking account information, credit card numbers, anything involving your social security, etc. By minimizing the amount of shredded paper produced, recycling plans can concentrate on maximizing their output from their recycling process.
Should I Recycle Juice and Milk Cartons?
It’s often thought that juice boxes and milk cartons are able to be recycled. Based on the texture one might think they’re a type of cardboard of paper-based material. They are, as it turns out. These items are around 85% paperboard. The big problem is that both juice boxes and milk cartons contain a thin lining of plastic on the inside, which is also known as Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE #4). It keeps the walls of the container safe from dissolving due to exposure to the contents. You may destroy all your hard recycling work if you carelessly toss your juice boxes into your recycling, as it may then be all tossed away.
The way companies have attempted to address this issue is by switching their containers to being purely plastic. A simple solution is to simply by only plastic bottles of milk and juice. The greatest thing you can do while recycling is to cut out the middleman as much as possible, so if you can cut your usage of these boxes and cartons altogether, then the less impact you will have overall, despite using more plastic bottles potentially. Once again, the idea is to reuse as much as possible, and mixing materials will just end up in a landfill anyway.
Can You Recycle a Diaper?
People want to keep landfills from being overwhelmed too quickly, so they often wonder if there is a way to recycle diapers, which can take up to 500 years to decompose when inside a landfill. Again, you have to think about the logistics of it. Your average diaper contains not just paper, but plastic as well. Not to mention that it takes time to sort through contaminants in order to ensure no cross-contamination occurs with the other materials in the recycling plant. Realistically, it’s just not possible to safely recycle diapers.
There are other ways to dispose of diapers, however! One way is to buy more eco-friendly diapers, and luckily for us, there is a massive market of these in circulation. They’re made to decompose at a faster rate, so their time in the landfill is minimized greatly.
Can I Recycle My Ceramics?
Ceramics are usually made from clay and heated in order to take form. Known as sinter, the process involves partially melting the materials used, then allowing them to cool and solidify together in order to maintain their shape. In a sense, it is very similar to glass. However, similar and the same are two very different things. You cannot recycle ceramic. The material is not easy to salvage, so if you break a mug or a plate you’ll have to throw them in the trash. It should be said that you might be able to compost your ceramic pieces, depending on how much clay there is in them.
If you don’t want to send the pieces to the landfill, and you can’t recycle them, you could try reusing them yourself. You might be able to make a small plant pot from a mug that’s lost it’s handle by sanding down where the handle broke off from. Art pieces, like mosaics, can also be created by using broken ceramic. There are even ways to file down and reuse ceramics for gravel.
What Should I Do With My Plastic Bags?
Plastic bags are a big problem. Aside from plastic bottles, plastic bags make up a large percentage of waste in our landfills, our oceans and our national parks. Unfortunately, you can’t recycle these either. Due to the danger these bags pose to machinery and people alike, most recycling plants will be unwilling to take in these bags. For this, there’s a simple solution: Don’t use plastic bags. The only feasible means of keep them out of the environment, due to the lack of means to recycle them, is to stop using them all together. Since both paper and reusable bags have risen in popularity, only luxury is a reason to continue using plastic bags. To reduce your carbon footprint, help the environment, and cut down on overall production costs for businesses, one of the easiest solutions is for you to buy several reusable bags, store them in your car, and have them at the ready whenever you next go shopping.
No comments:
Post a Comment