Smarter: ♻️Which Plastics Are Actually Recyclable?
By Pang-Chieh Ho | March 1, 2022 | Consumer Reports
In a perfect world, all the plastics we put in our recycling bins would get recycled, but (spoiler alert!) we don’t live in a perfect world. This week, I’m examining an uncomfortable truth about plastics, namely, how only certain plastics really get recycled, and the do’s and don’ts of recycling. I’m also going to talk about why you shouldn’t store your fire extinguisher under a sink and have you guess which state has accumulated the most trash in its landfills.
THE BIG STORY:“I Was Doing Recycling All Wrong”
The time: That inevitable moment every month when your fridge forces you to do a reality check.
The scene of the crime: A fridge half-excavated. A kitchen littered with leftovers in various stages of metamorphosis.
The suspect: Me, disgusted, staring at a takeout container with contents that have gone past the food stage and are now squarely in the surreal stage. Mold has laid claim to my once-lunch, made a whole thriving civilization out of it, really, and its smell is, to put it in one word, memorable.
I have two choices. I can toss the container into the trash can and forget about it. Or I can be responsible. And by responsible I mean wash out what I’d aptly called “The Thing”—because if Stephen King could see what my lunch had turned into, he would have written about it—so I can recycle the plastic container. At that time, I believed all dogs go to heaven and everything we put into recycling bins gets recycled.
I was wrong. Well, wrong about the second part, not the first part (that will forever be indisputable, incontrovertible truth). Though perhaps wrong isn’t the right word, as it’s complicated. Turns out, plastic isn’t that easily recyclable. As I very recently found out, only about 9 percent of plastic waste is recycled, according to 2018 data from the Environmental Protection Agency.