Don't clean your recycling!

I was reading this blog (sorry guys that blog is kind of aimed at women, but this post is estrogen free!), and I decided that's a really good topic, because I love recycling and it sort of goes along with the polymer theme. Plus now I can explain something I mentioned I would say before, that is, why some environmentalists are to blame for the fact that we can't recycle styrofoam in this country! (I'm excited, because I know you really wanted to hear that story!) Well, if you read the blog I linked to, she's right, and so is ideal bite--you do not have to wash out your bottles and cans before recycling.

In fact, you don't even have to peel the labels off of the bottles/cans/whatever. I really have know idea why your 4th grade school teacher decided it was important to teach you to wash/unpeel everything! It seems like a great big deterrent to me! We're trying to encourage recycling, not make it so difficult no one will participate. Plus, it's kind of a stupid idea if you think about it. If every recycling plant were set up to only take nice clean, peel-free bottles and cans, one bad bottle in the mix could majorly mess up the whole process!

So here's how it works: You take your stuff to a collection center run by folks who probably don't know how the actual plant is run, but that's ok (they mean well, just don't ask them questions about how it all works, or you may get the crazy-plastics-girl stare). They take everything, and remove caps and such, because the caps are made out of stuff that's generally not recycled. Then they send them off to the plant where everything is shredded. So if there was a label on your can/bottle, it is now labelless. Then, they wash all the little shreds to make sure there's no left over mountain dew or bush's baked beans stuck to the side of anything, because that would make for a not so polymerized batch of polyethylene terephthalate. Anyway, after they wash everything, they sort it all out to keep the paper wrappers out of the PETE out of the aluminum cans out of the glass bottles. There are many ways of doing this: there's the float/sink method, which is used for some plastics. They can use magnets to make certain types of metal 'jump' into a proper bin. There's even some very high-tech work going on in the area. Some plants even use 'on-the-fly' spectroscopy and other forms of detection to pick alloys out of other alloys hurtling down a conveyor belt, while using precise air blowers to blow the scraps into the correct bin.

All in all, recycling is pretty darn cool, and I love it! And now I think I owe you a story about what kind of impact McDonald's has on the recycling industry, and why we can't recycle styrofoam. I should start by givin away my source. I heard this story in a polymer processing class at MIT. David Spencer, who was then CEO of wTe Corporation, was giving a guest lecture, and this is where I received most of my knowledge of the recycling industry. Anyway he told us that away back when, McDonald's food containers were made mostly of styrofoam. Apparently some environmentalists were a little upset that McDonald's was using this awful, awful material, and demanded that they switch to something more environmentally friendly. Mickey D's gave in after a while and switched to a plastic coated paper, which it turns out, is completely non-recyclable, thus, just looks environmentally friendly. "So where did the environmentalists go wrong?" you ask. Well, I'll tell you. What they perhaps didn't know or look into was that all the waste created from many happy American children and families eating at McDonald's all the time, was enough styrofoam to keep many styrofoam recycling plants open and doing well. When the massive fast food company switched to plastic coated paper, all these styrofoam plants pretty much went out of business . . . good job, friends . . .

And as a closing to this veritable smorgasbord of recycling information, I'll leave you with one more anecdote from David Spencer's guest lecture. He told another fun story about hippies . . . I mean . . . He also told another fun story. This one's about hippies and also shorter. Back in the 60s, we were discovering that the chlorine in PVC is not so good for the environment, so naturally the hippies started protesting that as well. Until, he says, they were informed that their 'vinyl' records were actually made with PVC . . . there were no more protests after that.

Happy Recycling!