Recycling

Research recycling in your area and what can and cannot be recycled, both at your recycling center and for curbside recycling, if that’s available to you.

We had a good general idea of how to recycle but we visited our residential waste handler's website and still learned a few things:

• Plastic bags and plastic film wrappers cannot be recycled 
• plastic-lined items like to-go coffee cups and juice-boxes cannot be recycled
• Cardboard boxes should be broken down and flattened
• Dirty paper (i.e. the greasy part of a pizza box or to-go containers) cannot be recycled
• Recycled items should be clean, empty and dry to facilitate sorting and to avoid contaminating the paper and cardboard in the single stream.  

We also found a recycling center in walking distance from our home that take and reimburse for California Redemption Value packaging (aluminum cans, plastic, and glass bottles) as well as larger metal items.  My daughter loves visiting here to turn in Dad's aluminum cans because they often give her a handful of candy in addition to paying for the items.  

For e-waste, we keep a look out for the semi-annual times and locations our waste handler offers drive-through e-waste disposal of batteries and electronics.

Determine what you can put into recycling instead of the garbage, and set up a recycling system for yourself. If your area doesn’t support recycling, find other ways to reuse. Do this for a week. 

We are spending the month of January focused on auditing our trash stream.  For more detail, see our updates on this post.    We are also finding ways to reduce the total volume of recycling by buying unpackaged produce at the farmer's market using our own bags and experimenting with from-scratch copy-cat recipes.  For instance, we made a DIY batch of mochi and stuffed it into packaging bound for the recycling/trash.