Live Green and Earn Points
Recyclebank
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Do Contaminants from Paper Make It Risky to Compost?
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Proper Green: Popular Resolutions for Health, Home, and Environment
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Can I Recycle Receipts Made of Thermal Paper?
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A Primer on Paper
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What Should I Do With My Junk Mail?
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Can I Recycle Sticky Notes?
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Should I Set Out My Recycling Bin in the Rain?
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Can I Recycle Books?
88 comments
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I always recycle my sugar and flour bags. -
My township has designated bins for shredded paper at our recycling center, so that's where I take my shredded paper. Once in a while I'll put some in my compost bin if I need to add some brown material. -
Small pieces of paper or torn paper can be used for crafting (free art supplies!)
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After two years I'm back but I don't see too much.
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I think a lot of people forget that recycling needs to be both efficient and profitable for it to work...and for communities to keep supporting it. Most recycling facilities (especially when it comes to single-stream recycling) still have a "human component" of workers who separate materials into their various categories. That being said, the more work you create for the sorters, the less profitable the whole operation becomes. So it's really not a good idea to load up your recycling bin with a bunch of small or unbundled paper items. I would encourage everyone to please think proactively about the size and quality of the items that you put in your recycling bin. The same goes for removing any leftover food from jars as well as separating lids from their containers if they are made of different materials.
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I agree with you 100% . I am always making sure things are clean and dry. I am from CA where everything had to be separated to be recycled and so when I move to AZ a very long time ago I couldn't figure out why I only had one recycle container. I learn about the single-stream recycling and knew that it wasn't as profitable as the other due to the human factor. And that is the reason that our county stopped collecting it because it just wasn't cost efficient any longer. But they didn't take in to consideration how it help the environment, and didn't care apparently. -
I dunno, I think most facilities have machinery that sorts the majority of the stuff out. -
Of course. I'm aware that most facilities have automated sorting systems that will recognize and sort known items such as glass bottles or aluminum cans. But the machinery is not perfect and humans still have to catch what the machines miss. Either way, the point I was trying to make is that adding a bunch of tiny scraps of paper is not really contributing to the efficiency of recycling in general. If you insist on recycling small pieces of paper, consider bundling them together so the recycling facility does not have to waste the resources (AI or human) dealing with it. People need to use their brains and think about what they are throwing in their recycling bins--they are not garbage cans.
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