Are you unknowingly contaminating your recycling?
It’s your birthday! You pull a shirt out of the gift bag your aunt and uncle gave you. Trying your best to pretend you love it, you toss the bag aside. Your aunt stops you and says there’s something else in the bag. You look back inside. Hidden at the bottom is a $100 gift card—a gift card you came close to losing out on…
This is what can happen to materials in your blue bin when you put them inside other recyclables (also known as nesting). The difference is your aunt was there to let you know about the gift card. There’s no one to tell the machines and workers who sort your recycling there’s a soda can hidden at the bottom of a cereal box.
Nesting recyclables is recycling contamination.
Nesting may seem like a harmless way to save space in your blue bin, but it’s a form of contamination.
Even if all the nested materials are accepted for recycling, the different materials can end up getting baled together. This is because most recycling is sorted by automated machinery. Magnets pull metal food cans and lids, and optical sorters use lights and sensors to identify and separate plastics. The sensors can’t detect when there are other materials inside containers or boxes.
Recycling processors have staff who sort nested materials when they see them, but some get missed. Winnipeg’s residential recycling program collected an average of 210.4 tonnes of materials per day last year. It’s impossible to catch everything that doesn’t belong, and some bales get contaminated—but that doesn’t necessarily mean the bales don’t get recycled.
Read more about contamination in the blue bin here.
What happens to contaminated recycling?
In most cases, contaminated bales still get recycled. So, what’s wrong if they’re contaminated with other materials? Let’s think back to the soda can in a cereal box example.
When the bale of boxboard gets to a paper mill, the soda can and any other non-paper materials in the bale get thrown out.
Not only does the soda can not get recycled, but it also wastes energy, money, and time by going through the collection, sorting, and shipping processes just to end up in the garbage.
What if materials nest themselves?
Let’s say you do your best and put your recyclables into your blue bin individually. There’s a chance that gravity and movement will nest some materials on the way to a recycling facility. How can you prevent this from happening?
An empty, collapsed box can’t nest anything. Neither can a plastic tub with a lid on.
However sometimes things just don’t have a lid. What now? The best thing to do is avoid overfilling your bin. All materials should be loose in the blue bin.
How to save space in your blue bin.
Too much takeout? Too many deliveries? Too many bulk store visits? Sometimes it feels like the blue bin is filling faster and faster. Here are some tips to get more space without nesting materials:
- Try to reduce the amount of packaging you go through. Some containers are unavoidable (e.g., food, especially for large families), but if your bin is filling quickly, consider buying items where the packaging can collapse (more boxes, less plastic).
- Use reusable containers: Instead of buying single-serving snacks or drinks, use reusable containers and refillable water bottles.
- Reduce junk mail: Did you know you can request direct mail to avoid your mailbox? You can unsubscribe from junk mail! Check how on Canada Post website.
- Collapse cardboard and boxes; no need to remove the tape.
- Crush beverage cans by hand. Crushing cans by hand Is fine, but using can-crushers can increase the chance of cans falling out of bales.
- Crush plastic bottles: Squeeze or crush plastic bottles to minimize their size. Make sure to put the cap on so they don’t get lost during the sorting process.
- Empty and rinse containers: You don’t need to scrub them spotless, but try to remove any remaining food, liquid, or other substances. Put the lids back on all containers (except for glass containers with metal lids). Having lids on will prevent smaller objects from getting inside.
- Only put accepted items in the blue bin. Your recycling could be filling fast because you’re wish-cycling – when you have an item that isn’t accepted, but you’re not sure, so you put it in your blue bin and hope it gets recycled. The intentions behind wish-cycling are good, but it leads to contamination and is counterproductive. The collection, sorting, and transporting of contamination from the recycling facility to the landfill leads to more emissions than if you had disposed of it properly.
To stop guessing and make sure everything you put in the blue bin is accepted, download the Recyclepedia.