Rethink What You Recycle

Though a willingness to recycle is a big step in the right direction, Keller says it can backfire if consumers don’t understand what can—and cannot—be recycled. Look in your blue recycling bin. Odds are that one out of five things shouldn’t be in there.

“If there’s doubt whether something can be recycled, people will toss it into the bin and hope the facility will sort it out,” Keller says. “This can hurt people in the sorting facility, break machines, cause fires, and contaminate the end product so that it can’t be sold.”

What can’t be sold ends up in the landfill. And we’re not just talking about the errant items—the entire bale gets tossed out.

Common offenders include flexible plastics like grocery bags and food wrappers, which the sorting machines can accidentally direct into the paper zone, where they can foul up the works and make the paper unusable.

Food, whether soaked into your pizza box or clinging to the inside of a peanut butter jar, can also make recyclables unfit for processing. Remember that recycling is a marketplace, like eBay or Etsy, and a dirty or diluted product is going to be worth a lot less, if it sells at all.

Of course, recycling alone won’t solve all of our environmental challenges. But along with reducing and reusing what we consume, it moves us toward a greener future. Print out and post this recycling guide near your waste bins. That way you’ll always know what to throw away and what can be a part of the solution of recycling, rather than part of the problem.