Plastic Recycling Issues

[aimeeandbeatles]

Reusable totes/bags are just awful for lugging, I find. They cut off circulation in my hands and are just generally miserable. The cloth material feels almost sharp against the skin when it's weighted down.

I've found the handles will often rip right off the badly-made reusables, too.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

There is no question in my mind that the people designing the reusable totes are thinking that they are being lifted from a cart into a car, and then carried whatever short distance from a car to a house. That may well have merit, since I think that anyone who is actually shopping by pedestrian power needs to get, or even be provided with, some sort of cart conveyance they can take all the way home.

 

[Synobun]

I've found the handles will often rip right off the badly-made reusables, too.

This happens all the time with the paper bags they give you at QFC in Seattle!

 

[Cutlass]

Around here anyone without a car regularly steals the shopping carts from the markets and brings their stuff home with them. I've seen people with more than a dozen of them in their back yards. But some people will have their own foldable cart like this.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Cutlass what kind of stupid criminals hang out around there? Everyone knows you don't leave the stolen shopping carts in your YARD, you leave them in the street!

 

[Zelig]

The entire supply chain cost of recycling should be added as a consumer tax at the time of purchase.

 

[Cutlass]

Cutlass what kind of stupid criminals hang out around there? Everyone knows you don't leave the stolen shopping carts in your YARD, you leave them in the street!

It's not like the cops care about it.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

It's not like the cops care about it.

The stores do. Hereabouts if you had a bunch of shopping carts in your yard there's a guy who would look up your name from your address, contact the store to get permission to operate on their behalf, and file a small claims lawsuit against you for the cost of the carts, which are several hundred dollars apiece, plus damages due to disruption of business, plus covering his fees. It's pure boilerplate and takes him ten minutes to print and half a day at the courthouse to file them en masse, and a drop dead lock to be settled for return of the carts plus his fees...which aren't cheap.

 

[civvver]

wait, you guys still get bags at stores? I guess I've been at costco and aldi exclusively lately.

So here's a question, which I'm sure I could just google, but I'm interested if anyone knows personally. My trash service gives us one of those full size recycle bins with the lid, like this

Spoiler :

So I just chuck everything remotely recyclable into it, plastic bags, paper bags, junk mail, food containers like yogurt cups and soup cans, packaging, wine bottles, whatever. How do they sort that stuff and do you need to wash stuff out still? Like soup cans, don't they wash them? My mother in law still washes stuff and removes all the labels. And something like a pizza box that's soggy with pizza grease. Is that still recyclable? And if not and you put it in there does it contaminate everything else so it's all wasted?

 

[Hrothbern]

Are there in the US no longlasting shopping bags made of linen, fine woven burlap, cotton ?

and if you have one with long enough handles you can use your shoulders to carry it.

organic bio-shops started with (ofc) brown burlap, and I use them exclusively.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

So I just chuck everything remotely recyclable into it, plastic bags, paper bags, junk mail, food containers like yogurt cups and soup cans, packaging, wine bottles, whatever. How do they sort that stuff and do you need to wash stuff out still? Like soup cans, don't they wash them? My mother in law still washes stuff and removes all the labels. And something like a pizza box that's soggy with pizza grease. Is that still recyclable? And if not and you put it in there does it contaminate everything else so it's all wasted?

That is dumped into a truck, which dumps it into a 'first stage sorter.' The first stage sorter is a bizarre contraption with a bunch of belts that haul the stuff through an array of stations where various forces are applied that will have different effects on different material; magnetic, air flows, vibrations, all kinds of stuff. Cans jump, papers fly, the beltways split, and split again, and again. And sorted stuff is delivered to the input stages of the various processing equipment.

So to answer specific questions you have to look at two things; will it interfere with the sorter, and will it screw up the actual processor.

Your soup can should be washed out, because if it has residual soup gunk dried up in it that is extra weight. In the sorter magnetic forces are used to knock steel cans out of the stream, but the force used has to be carefully balanced so that it knocks out the cans reliably but doesn't knock them too far. Extra weight that isn't steel can make the sorter miss a can. Removing the label isn't necessary because the sorter is set up to accommodate that negligible difference. The processor will burn off any labels. It will also burn off any food residue, but only if the can makes it through the sorter properly.

Your yogurt cups and such will get blown off the main belt at some point, and if they are weighted down with dried food that can affect them too. They don't have to be clean, just don't leave them like half full of extra weight.

Glass bottles and jars are vibrated out of the stream because glass is the heaviest thing left after the steel is removed. Since glass is sorted out through processes that use its weight, food residue in a glass jar actually doesn't reduce the effectiveness of the sorter. Your jars and wine bottles should be uncapped so the lids can go where they need to go rather than being dragged into the glass processor. The first stage of the glass processor breaks up the glass and then it passes through a secondary sorter that will pull out the metal lids, but the lids will sometimes cause problems in the crusher that breaks the glass, and the secondary sorter at some recycling plants doesn't feed the lids back into the steel stream very efficiently so be helpful. Again, the glass processor will burn off any labels and food residue so don't stress about peeling them off and cleaning out that last bit of cheese dip in the bottom of the jar.

The number one cause of shutdowns in sorters, by far, is thin film bags that get caught in the works. Those really cheap, really light bags that are generally used to bag your groceries fly around in the lightest breeze. There's no effective way to get them out first, and there's no effective way to keep them from drifting along with whatever is being removed from the stream at every step, so they wind up everywhere. They get jammed in gears that drive the belts, fly out of the recycling center on the breeze and infuriate the neighbors, jump in and out of various high temperature processors and turn into flying incendiary weapons...no kidding, they are the reason that recycling centers and programs get abandoned. Do not put thin film bags in unsorted recycling.

Then there is the pizza box. It will get sorted just fine in the first stage sorter and come out with the rest of the cardboard and paper. Now, take two pieces of paper, get one soaking wet, and then cut them both with scissors. Notice how the wet paper doesn't cut, so much as it just rips into a soggy mess and gets stuck between the blades of the scissors? That's what the pizza box does in the shredder. Cleaning gooey pizza box residue out of the shredder blades requires shutting down the paper processor after some limited number of pizza boxes, making them the second biggest drain on the efficiency of your recycling center. Compost them.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

There is no question in my mind that the people designing the reusable totes are thinking that they are being lifted from a cart into a car, and then carried whatever short distance from a car to a house. That may well have merit, since I think that anyone who is actually shopping by pedestrian power needs to get, or even be provided with, some sort of cart conveyance they can take all the way home.

When I lived in the same neighborhood as my grocery store, I just used one of their carts to get my stuff home (I asked the manager's permission and promised to return the cart, so he said it was okay). When I next headed in the direction of that store, I'd return any carts I found along the way (others in that building also used the store carts and would leave them in the alley).

That said, I was using canes to get around at the time, so the carts weren't awkward. Now would be impossible, since I use a walker and have discovered that it's difficult to impossible to push two wheeled things at the same time (not to mention frustrating other people who can't predict which way I'm going). So I've had to come up with other solutions to getting purchases home - since drivers don't help the clients in with their stuff, I'm limited to what I can carry myself, either in a box or in bags. That's why short-handled reusables aren't very useful for me since they interfere with hands-free operating of the walker and getting doors open.

The entire supply chain cost of recycling should be added as a consumer tax at the time of purchase.

The entire cost? So that minuscule enviro fee we pay on all bottles/tetra paks would be much more?

Are there in the US no longlasting shopping bags made of linen, fine woven burlap, cotton ?

and if you have one with long enough handles you can use your shoulders to carry it.

Ask a disabled person how useful that would be. Unless the handles/straps can go cross-body (thus hands-free), they would not be useful for me.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

The entire supply chain cost of recycling should be added as a consumer tax at the time of purchase.

But why put the burden on the consumer? It's the companies that choose to pack things inefficiency.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

That said, I was using canes to get around at the time, so the carts weren't awkward.

Really? I've found using shopping carts to be a huge hassle because I can't properly maneuver it with one hand without it veering all over the place. I found a method involving leaning my entire arm against it but that kind of gets painful.

 

[civvver]

Ok Tim so I should trash the plastic grocery bags and pizza boxes? I don't have a compost.

 

[Synobun]

I know that my grocery store accepts plastic bags as they have a dedicated supply line for recycling them.

 

[Bamspeedy]

I put the plastic grocery bags into a large bag that I have hanging up (in a discrete place like the one foot gap between my refrigerator and the wall-next to, not behind it-) and use those small bags for my garbage. Takes more frequent trips to 'take out the trash', but it doesn't take days to fill up a large kitchen bag that stinks up the house. If I ever have too many extra bags I could recycle them at the store. Haven't had to purchase 'trash' bags in years and that was for moving/donating lots of clothes.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Ok Tim so I should trash the plastic grocery bags and pizza boxes? I don't have a compost.

Bamspeedy presents a good option, and as Syns points out there are places where thin film bags can be fed into the recycling system in a presorted way that works. Even throwing them in the regular trash, which is not ideal to begin with since they can be recycled, is extra bad because they are a problem for landfills. They form a huge percentage of the 'blown away before it got covered' mess that landfills are berated for.

The pizza boxes are just plain trash if you don't compost. Soggy cardboard, grease, and cheese are ideal landfill components though since they degrade and get absorbed very quickly.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Soggy cardboard, grease, and cheese are ideal landfill components

TIL I've been eating the wrong type of pizza

 

[civvver]

I put the plastic grocery bags into a large bag that I have hanging up (in a discrete place like the one foot gap between my refrigerator and the wall-next to, not behind it-) and use those small bags for my garbage. Takes more frequent trips to 'take out the trash', but it doesn't take days to fill up a large kitchen bag that stinks up the house. If I ever have too many extra bags I could recycle them at the store. Haven't had to purchase 'trash' bags in years and that was for moving/donating lots of clothes.

We reuse them too but we still have extra.