Dear Jennifer,
We'll take your pizza box.if it's clean. While fiber in food is a good thing, food on fiber isn't. Paper fibers are not recyclable if they are contaminated with food.
However, sometimes a pizza box is fairly clean with minimal or no grease stains. If that's the case, we'll happily take it. If you have dried up mozzarella cemented to the lid of the box, I'd ask you to rip that half of the box off and give us the good half. Let the compost bin or the trash can have the greasy lid. If there are just crumbs and some red sauce, please wipe the surface off before you toss it in the recycling bin. Above all, please be careful not to leave your dried up, uneaten pizza inside the box. We'd love to share your pizza with you, but we like ours fresh and preferably not delivered in a recycling bin.
Dear Ted,
You're a very thoughtful recycler, and you're right-in some ways it was easier for us when materials came to us "source separated" (a little recycling lingo for you there, use it to "wow" your friends). Much of what came in could be shipped to market with little sorting on our part.
But ease for us is not the goal; environmental protection is. By mixing materials together, far more natural resources are diverted from the landfill with much more efficiency and much less pollution. Here's why: for one, you can collect a lot more materials from the curb or from drop-off centers if you don't have to keep them separated. To collect all the items included in the "commingled containers" or the mixed paper categories now accepted with many curbside programs, you'd need more than ten separate compartments on the truck. (That's a mighty long truck.) Different sections fill up at different rates, so the wasted space in the less-full compartments would mean less efficiency and more pollution. It doesn't make sense to haul air around town; you'd do more environmental harm than good. More types of materials collected at the curb mean fewer trips for individuals to make to the drop-off centers (again, minimizing polluting emissions).
Studies show that allowing the convenience of mixing materials together is key to getting more people to choose the recycling bin over the trash can and key to increasing tons of recyclables collected. According to Skumatz Economic Research Associates, national experts in strategies to increase recycling, commingling containers increases recycling by about 20 percent.
We do appreciate your concern, but it's not as inconvenient for us as you'd think. Thanks to continued improvements being made in recycled paper mills, markets allow us to send them more paper types mixed together without our having to separate them. Also, advanced sorting equipment automatically separates much of the commingled containers and pulls out corrugated cardboard from the paper mix. For all these reasons, the future of recycling and waste diversion includes more commingling, not less. Picture a world where all you do is sort your discards according to whether they're wet or dry (compostable or recyclable). That's where we're going next! Never fear though, Ted. You still have the most important responsibility: making sure you include only the materials listed in the guidelines and that you prepare your materials correctly. Thanks for doing your part!
