Straight From Our Sorters to You: Here are updates and tips to help keep our single-stream recyclables clean.
Staff Report
Once your recyclables show up at the Boulder County Recycling Center, Eco-Cycle staff members separate and prepare your materials for sale. Our marketers are the first to learn of new recycling opportunities, and our sorters see, firsthand, contamination issues we need to fix. Here are the latest updates from the front lines:
Click here to watch a video of our recycling sorting equipment in action.
It’s now OK to recycle plastic caps from plastic bottles and jugs as long as they are attached to the container and as long as the plastic bottle or jug is empty.
What??! That’s right. After 20 years of telling you not to do this, it is now OK.
Here’s why: The bottle recycling plants say they can now recycle these caps, so now 100% of a plastic bottle or jug is recyclable
Please NO: Plastic caps or lids of ANY kind on GLASS bottles and jars
Loose plastic caps or lids
Flat lids on plastic tubs
Please don’t flatten containers
To help the single-stream sorting process work correctly, please do not step on or flatten aluminum cans, milk cartons, paper soy milk boxes, plastic bottles or any other food or beverage container.
Here’s why: You may have wondered how single-stream materials get separated, now that paper and containers come to us mixed together. The separation is done primarily with a series of sorting equipment. The first piece of equipment is designed to separate two-dimensional, or “flat,” paper materials like paperboard, newspapers and office paper from three-dimensional, or “round,” food and beverage containers.
The key is that the containers need to stay three-dimensional. If containers are flattened, the equipment misreads them as two-dimensional and incorrectly sorts them in with the paper, where they become a significant contaminant. So, please help the flats stay “flat” and the rounds stay “round.”
Please NO medical sharps or medical waste
This would seem obvious, but from time to time we see these materials on the sorting line, primarily inside detergent bottles. Because having this happen even once is too much, we must emphasize that medical sharps (needles) should NOT go in your recycling bin, nor should syringes, test tubes, latex gloves, etc.
Here’s why: Plastic bottles containing sharps break open, posing a significant threat to recycling sorters who use their hands to spread materials out. Workers are using steel enforced gloves, but there can be no tolerance for exposure to medical waste. Sharps pose a threat to trash workers as well. Materials like syringes, tubes and gloves are not recyclable and, even worse, may be biohazards.
Learn more: Please check with your medical services provider (including your veterinarian) for disposal boxes and safe disposal programs for sharps. For more information on how to safely handle sharps, please visit our A to Z Recycling Guide at www.ecocycle.org/htrg and scroll down to Sharps.
Watch the Boulder County Recycling Center's
sorting machinery in action!
Please NO medical sharps or medical waste