“No!” I cry, alarmed, as they appear ready to toss them trashward - “I reuse!” And I save those red plastic cups everybody uses at parties. I will do none of them but I do save the clear plastic bags the dry cleaner folds my shirts into (even Charles got with that program). Here are 38 things you can do with plastic bottles. Or you could find ways to recycle stuff yourself. How nuts is that? (See? Canada isn’t perfect either, though it comes close.) Ideally, Google will turn up a video for your own town, because some of the things you can recycle in New York you can’t in Winnipeg. If you watch these videos, you’ll have a better sense of what goes where and why.
#Can you recycle bubble wrap windows
Now I get why I’m supposed to do this.ĭon’t worry about the staples in your magazines or the glassine windows in your junk mail. Which I found both interesting and helpful. That’s possible because - if you live anywhere - this 8-minute video shows you just how all your stuff is sorted once it gets to the “murf” and then what happens to it after that. At least as of this 2o13 video, Winnipeg was a one-stream city - everything recyclable in one big bin. If you live in Winnipeg, here it is in 3 minutes. New York is a “two-stream” city (basically: paper stuff in one stream, glass, metal, and plastic) except now the city has begun picking up “compostables” separately (click here for instructions, here if you want them in Bengali) and electronics even more separately still. If you live in New York City, here it is in one minute. That goes in this bin.I’m not an idiot, and my neighbors are not idiots - and many of them have housekeepers who are not idiots - but do many of us really have any idea what happens to the stuff we “recycle?” And what goes where?
#Can you recycle bubble wrap download
You can download and print the new August 2017 guidelines for your whole building right here, and you can now be that San Franciscan who lords over your neighbors and says, "Uh uh uh the recycling rules have changed. (Just to confused things, milk cartons without plastic spouts, and all waxy cardboard, are technically still compostable, but they want them recycled now.)Īlso for the blue bin: bottle caps, spray cans, clean pizza boxes (greasy ones go to compost), empty and dry paint cans with no wet paint, and fabric and clothing of all kinds it just has to be clean, and placed in a clear bag.īlack bins, headed to landfill, still get all polystyrene packaging and packing "peanuts," broken glass and ceramics, diapers, light bulbs (incandescent only, not fluorescent), pet litter, shiny wrappers, disposable gloves, disposable razors, and "mixed material" bags and packaging like the bags that roasted coffee comes in. In the good news column, for those who enjoy sending less to landfills, Recology will now accept plastic bags of almost all types (preferably bundled together inside another plastic bag), bubble wrap (also stuffed into a plastic bag), plastic wrap (same), plastic over-wrap like from a tray of water bottles (same), inflatable air pillows used in packing (deflated, stuffed into a plastic bag), juice boxes, empty paper milk cartons, and paper coffee cups along with their lids. Some new Recology recycling guidelines that have been outlined here by but have not yet appeared on the Recology website, give us a whole bunch of new things to remember when it comes to what goes in what bin.