Hopecycling

Waste

As I’ve grown up, I’ve come to realize that the typical American household generates a lot of waste. Some of it seems inevitable, like some food scraps, or used up consumables, or broken devices. Some of it, not so much, such as plastic bags, one time use saran wrap, or pan liners, tissues, and paper towels. This preventable waste was from products that lead to slightly more convenience, but that I wasn’t really committed to, or didn’t really need. With this realization I tried to cut down on how much waste I produce and started looking into what actually happens with waste, and specifically about recycling.

Landfills

Waste/garbage is simply put into a landfill and I won’t really talk about it here. There are good articles and videos describing how we deal with that, here’s a good link https://youtu.be/HRx_dZawN44?si=7_Yl1f8_yi1QG8c5. I’ll focus on avoiding landfills, which are kind of a last resort (like incineration). Although I’ll quickly mention some obvious downsides of landfills including possible water contamination, land use with bad smells, and animals gathering, etc.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

I’ve realized that the best way to avoid the problems of landfills is to avoid needing them. The classic ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ adage is a good one and is a good guiding principle, like ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ (for my non-imperial unit friends it would be ‘a gram of prevention is worth a kilo of cure’). This mentality has also helped me to save some money as well, which is another motivator for me.

Reduce/Reuse

The following are parts of my life where I decided and tried to reduce my usage of some consumables. Part of the reduction of consumables entails cases of reusable replacements

• Tissues
  • Handkerchiefs, which can be washed are great for a quick runny nose, and they are sturdier and more absorbent.
  • I haven’t had to purchase tissues in a while now and this one was a great success!
• Paper Towels
  • Towels, similar to above, can be reused, and while they can get gross, they can be rinsed and wrung out.
  • I still purchase and have one roll of paper towels for particularly gross spills, like milk or chicken juices, but I use them infrequently.
• Shopping bags
  • I keep some reusable sturdy bags in my trunk and I’m proud to say I haven’t used the plastic or brown paper bags from the grocery store in quite some time.
• Rags
  • Why purchase rags for my dirtier projects when I can use some old t-shirts haha. I have so many that using them as rags gets them out of the bottom of storage, and I get to enjoy them more!
• Laptop
  • Although it has been very tempting to buy the most recent piece of technology that’s come out, I have still been using my laptop from college that I purchased in 2012. I’ve been using linux on it to get it to run a bit quicker, but it works quite well for lightweight tasks, such as browsing the web, studying, or even editing this blog, writing files.
• Car
  • You can see my other notes about my car, but I’ve decided to try and repair my car, so long as it’s financially viable. Avoiding mechanic costs are a good way to keep repairing a car and make it worthwhile. I don’t blame anyone else for not doing this, as it can be dangerous or costly doing repair on an older car, but in my case, it’s a fun hobby, and it prevents another car from becoming waste.

Recycle

I’ve learned that recycling is not as straightforward as some people think it is, which had lead to ‘hopecycling’, but I’ll get into in a bit. Recycling is the reuse of products or materials, such as cardboard, paper, glass, or certain plastics. In certain cases the product may simply be reused after cleaning (as in some glass bottles, although this is less common now), or the product will be broken down into its constituent material and that raw material can be cleaned and sold for reuse. I believe that this is what most people thinks happens for all recycled materials, but of course the devil is in the details.

Hopecycling

I heard this phrase a while ago, and thought it was apropos. It means to put something in the recycling and just hope that it will get recycled, regardless of what it is made of or if it can be recycled. While recycling is a good thing to do, hopecycling, and putting a significant portion of non-recyclable material in the recycling can cause more harm than good. It may be possible that some of the material may be recyclable, but recycling centers will have to sort through this material and keep only the recyclable material, discarding the non-recyclable waste. This makes the job of the recycling center even more expensive and cost prohibitive. The best thing we can do to enable effective recycling is by knowing local guidelines. Most townships that offer recycling will pay a service which has specific guidelines for what they take and in what way they take it (broken down boxes, certain types of plastics, etc).

Recycling Guidelines

Here are some guidelines that I’ve picked up by reading a bit. I’m by no means an expert, but hopefully this can help lead people in the right direction. Of course, you can always check with how your local service recycles, as they’ll clearly give the best advice.

Separation

Probably the best thing you can do to make the job of the recycling vendors are easy as possible is to separate the different types of recyclables, dispose of non-recyclable material and only include the recyclable components in the appropriate category.

Cardboard, Paper, Metals, and Glass

These materials are pretty straightforward. They will generally be broken down, cleaned and sold as glass pieces, shredded metal, or paper pulp. If the material is too dirty, I don’t think it will be used, such as with significant paint or oil, or aluminum foil if it were cooked on. Also specialty papers with wax coatings cannot be recycled generally. Also if materials can’t be adequately separated it won’t be able to be used.

Plastics

This is the meat of my knowledge on recycling, and I hope is helpful to people. Plastic is a term used to describe different types of macromolecular hydrocarbons. There are different types of plastic that most people have heard of before such as polyethylene or polystyrene. This is as much detail as we need to know about the plastics, that there are different types. And just like the guidelines for recycling paper are different from recycling glass, recycling different plastic types varies with the recycling service.

Types of Plastic (Numbers)

You may have noticed that in most plastic products, there is a little recycling symbol with a number in it. This symbol is generally a deformation of the plastic or is printed on the plastic. These numbers indicate the types of plastics as listed below:

1. Polyethylene Terephtalate (PET)
2. High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE)
3. Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC)
4. Low-Density Polyethylene (LDPE)
5. Polypropylene (PP)
6. Polystyrene (PS)
7. Other

!Note that 7 can be any type of plastic that isn’t 1-6. Generally 1-5 can be recycled, although there’s a lot of variability across vendors. 6 is generally not recyclable, and 7 is almost never recyclable, except in specialty programs (such as CD recycling services). There are other exceptions though.

Films and Bags

One of the exceptions are thins films and bags. Even if the bags or thin films are made of one of the recyclable types, they generally are not recyclable by vendors. They may be recycled at grocery stores, which often accept these materials to remake these bags (although using reusable shopping bags is obviously preferred if possible).

Conclusion

Here in America recycling isn’t taken very seriously, and as a result, if you want to be involved in it, it takes additional work. There is no standardized system, which is a shame, because a lack of effective recycling leads to excess cost and waste in the long run. We can fight against this, by pushing our local towns to use better vendors and by recycling as effectively as possible, when we can’t reduce or reuse. I hope these this information helps.