Over and over, many Americans and Michiganders say they're not sure about what they can or should recycle. The uncertainty prevents some people from recycling — or causes them to recycle the wrong things.
There’s a patchwork of programs across Michigan. So an item that's recyclable in one place might be prohibited in the next town over. The rules change sometimes.
“Pizza boxes are recyclable now. It's really confusing,” said Alex Danovitch of Recycle Ann Arbor, a non-profit that collects and processes recycling in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. “A while ago, it was challenging for a paper mill. But now, with the newer technology, most paper mills are accepting pizza boxes.”
“If you have a really greasy pizza, you can just rip off the top part of the box and recycle that and leave that really greasy part. Ideally you could compost it," Danovitch said.
A little “quick rinse” can go a long way
If you try to recycle an item that still has a significant amount of food waste or residue on it, the item can get sent to a landfill.
That’s why recycling programs ask you to remove cheese from your pizza box and give your aluminum cans, peanut butter jars and glass bottles a “quick rinse” before putting them curbside or bringing them to a recycling drop-off center.
Unclean items can also “contaminate” the recycling stream. Contamination can lower the amount the recycled material is worth and increases expenses by gumming up machines and creating a need for more workers.
How “contamination” plays a role in what can be recycled where
In a 2021 survey, officials in Michigan communities that don’t have recycling programs often cited cost as the reason.
Communities have a choice: They can offer single-stream recycling, allow a wide range of products so they can get more items but also face more contamination risk. Or they can only allow a few products, require people to go to a recycling drop-off center and separate their recycling by material type themselves, reducing participation but potentially increasing quality.
Sometimes, communities do a combination of both. In Detroit, for example, many common recyclables are accepted curbside. But plastic foam, commonly known as Styrofoam, has to be taken to a drop-off center.
Recycle Ann Arbor also accepts plastic foam at a drop-off center. But Brian Ukena, the non-profit’s CEO, would prefer to see the material not get used at all because it’s “probably not going to get recycled again and again."
“Most other facilities, their purpose is to bring quarterly dividends to their shareholders,” Ukena said. “So they stuff as much material through the facility as they can. They run it as quickly as they can. We don't have to do that at this facility. So what we can do is really take a second look at where that material goes when it gets made into and try to reduce it.”
Want to know more? You can get an inside look at Recycle Ann Arbor’s operation and learn more about state efforts to boost recycling participation and impact from Michigan Public’s Morning Edition.
