There is nothing like a hot cup of tea in the morning.
That is, until I’m done, and I have to decide what to do with my cup.
Can I recycle it?
Is that a trick question?
Yeah this is a great question.
I just figure you can recycle anything that’s cardboard-esque.
I can’t recycle this?
Knowing what you can and can’t recycle isn’t easy.
The rules depend on where you live, and there are hundreds of products and materials where
the rules aren’t always clear.
I hear that that's not recyclable.
I don’t know if that's like a legend, an urban legend or something.
My roommate and I actually have this discussion where I’m like I’ll throw paper towels
in there and she’s like ‘I don’t think you can recycle them’ and pick them out.
Like, I don't know, it's paper.
I don’t know, this is so hard!
The confusion means things that are actually garbage still end up in the recycling stream.
About 25% of what Americans try to recycle, can’t actually be recycled.
Waste management experts say what's going on here is something called "aspirational
recycling": When people are unsure if an item can be recycled, they recycle it, because it
feels like the right thing to do. And while our intentions are good, this behavior isn't harmless.
Even small amounts of contamination can turn entire hauls of otherwise recyclable materials
into trash -- and the problem has been growing.
The rate of recycling contamination more
than doubled in the last decade.
So why is this happening?
Well, it is at least in part due to a major shift in how Americans recycle.
Beginning in the 1990s and 2000s, municipalities implemented “single stream” recycling programs.
Paper, metal, plastic and glass no longer needed to be sorted.
They could all live in one bin.
Communities quickly adopted the practice and by 2014, 80% of all curbside recycling programs
in the US were single stream.
The problem is, there's evidence that when we put all our recycling into one bin, we're
more likely to throw trash in there along with it.
Take two neighboring counties in Florida, for example: Palm Beach County, where residents
must pre-sort their recyclables, had a contamination rate of only 9 percent, while Broward County’s
single-stream program had a contamination rate of 30 percent.
Single-stream recycling takes the responsibility to sort off of the individual, and shifts
it to Materials Recovery Facilities, or MRFs, where trash gets sorted out from recycling
by machines, but also by workers, who often have to remove waste by hand: pizza boxes
contaminated with grease, electronics that aren’t processed at standard recycling facilities,
even the likes of Christmas lights, animal carcasses, and bowling balls.
In Portland, workers remove thousands of dirty diapers every month.
In a perfect world, everyone would know how to recycle correctly, but short of that, there's
something we can all start doing differently right now: Unless you are absolutely sure,
don’t recycle it.
In fact, recycling education campaigns encourage the opposite: when in doubt, the best option
may be to throw it out.
Most people want to do the right thing, and sometimes the way to be a good recycler is
to throw stuff in the trash.
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