Recycling – Things I Didn’t Know

I am amazed at the things I have learned in the past year while attending Boy Scout trips and outings.

Recently our pack traveled to the recycling museum, where we were provided a tour of the recycling plant.  Our town puts all recyclable items into one container, and the plant sorts it all out.  Really cool!

What I didn’t know was that I was recycling things improperly, causing them more work than needed.  As with my previous post, I thought I would pass along what I learned, seeing that every adult on the trip did pretty much what I did with recycling.

Plastic bottles and containing #1 and #2 are what they want, currently.  Soon they will be able to process all plastic items #1 through #7.

Caps are bad.  They are made from a composition of plastics, and are therefore not recyclable.  The caps need to be removed and discarded separate from the recycling.

Same for jars – no caps allowed.  Even though them are often metal, they are a composite and not a pure metal, and most have a wax or plastic seal in them.  Caps get discarded.

Cans, lids to cans, flip tops (soda cans) – all accepted.  Paper, of any kind, all accepted.  For every cube of recycled paper they create (and they create many every day), they save seventeen (17) trees.  On our tour we observed hundreds of these cubes awaiting train transport to Canada for re-use.

I am looking forward to the day we can put all plastics into the bin (as I have been doing unknowingly) so that we can better preserve our environment and natural resources.

CRRA Recycling Museum in Hartford, Connecticut – I highly recommend visiting them, especially if you have kids.