There is a lot of misunderstanding regarding the recycling industry. A general lack of educational programs for active and helpful participation in residential recycling mixed in with various deceiving marketing campaigns propagated by some of the biggest plastic-producing corporate giants (remember the cringe-y “Crying Indian” ad?) have resulted in people’s alienation from waste management procedures. Recycling is often brushed off as an easy environmentally-friendly solution to our hyper-consumer culture. However, its oversimplification and unnecessary obfuscation can have more harmful than aiding consequences to the environmentalist cause. For recycling to live up to its original intention (i.e. converting waste materials into new materials and objects in order to reduce for-profit incentive for extracting, refining and processing raw materials), it is absolutely imperative that people are well informed about how it works and how we, the common citizens, can most aptly participate in the process.

In this article, we aim to bust some of the most common, long-lasting and widely-believed recycling myths, both intentional and unintentional, to equip you with some more tools to rightfully navigate the waste management industry. However, before we start, I want to leave this disclaimer: while we do have responsibility for active citizenry and informed participation in the building of our societies, the waste crisis is not the individual’s fault alone, but also weighs heavy as the responsibility of a handful of companies who are producing most of the “throwaway,” disposable single-use plastic waste that is negatively impacting our oceans and polluting our lands and water. Our eco-shame and the apathy that results from it will not help us get us out of the situation we’re in. Let this knowledge fuel your will to action and empower you to make your voice heard when you are making a decision on how to vote with your wallet.

Recycling Myth #1: The process of recycling is the same everywhere.

What is accepted in one place as a recyclable good, might not be accepted in another as such. Recycling varies from town to town, even between municipalities. It probably would be easier for citizens if recycling was standardised, however there is a reason for it not being so: good-old markets. 

As strange as it may sound for some, markets dictate what can and cannot be recycled. While the process can vary from country to country, generally what happens is that after the gathering and separation of recyclables, each individual material is marketed and sold to different companies, both domestically and internationally. It will be these companies that do the actual recycling work; this is, the process in which items are transformed into something new. Without a destination (read: an end market) where these materials can be handled and reutilised, no waste would actually be recycled. However, these markets shift over time and are dependent on the current demands of the industry, making these variations in markets make it difficult to accept the same materials for recycling everywhere.

Recycling Myth #2: All plastics with a recycling symbol on them are recyclable.

Contrary to popular belief, just because something has what we’ve come to perceive as a “recycling symbol” on it doesn’t mean it’s recyclable. For example, the intended purpose of the Mobius loop, the widely-recognized triangle composed of three arrows looping back on themselves in clockwise direction, is only to indicate that the product is capable of being recyclable, not that it has been recycled or will be accepted in any recycling collections. There is not official regulation of its use, meaning it can appear on any item, many times being used as a greenwashing marketing technique to mislead the public about the environmentally-friendly nature of the product at hand.

The same symbol but with a number in the middle of it, is actually just a method to differentiate between types of plastics; it's not meant as an environmental claim, so it can legally appear on packaging and products that are almost never recyclable. There are some 40,000 types of plastic and the industry fits these into seven broad recycling categories. Most plastic packaging carries this triangular logo with a number from one to seven inside, denoting the chemical composition of the plastic. If it’s a 1, 2 or 5, most councils commonly recycle it. Number 4 is sometimes recycled. But 3, 6, and 7 are almost never recycled. On the contrary of what many might think, this number has nothing to do with how many times the given material had been recycled.

The same goes for the green dot symbol (which is indeed not always green). This symbol does not indicate that the packaging is recyclable, will be recycled or has been recycled. It simply is a symbol used on packaging to signify that the producer of the packaging has made a financial contribution to its recycling or reuse. 

Recycling Myth #3: Plastic Bags are recyclable. 

This is fast becoming one of the better understood, or at least more widely known, myths. In most places, you are not supposed to put your plastic shopping bags into a recycling bin at home or in your street bins, which is why so many stores now offer cheap reusable bags near the checkout aisle. There are two reasons for this. One is because plastic bags tend to do a fantastic job at jamming the machinery at recycling facilities. Every time that happens, people have to shut everything down and send someone in to try to cut out all the plastic bags. It’s a huge waste of time and energy, not to mention a kind of safety hazard. 

The other reason has to do with so-called single-stream recycling, which is used in many towns around the world. Single-stream recycling is the process in which you dump all of your recyclables into one container, and those items are mixed together with all of those from your neighbours. At a recycling facility, workers then separate plastic from glass from cardboard, and so forth. Lightweight bottles and cans are separated from glass by air jets. Aluminum cans are electrically charged and repel into their own bin as magnets pull out other metals. Infrared light can detect up to seven different types of plastic. In the end, you get bales of compacted, recycled waste.

The bags get complicated at just about every level. When you toss them into the recycling bin, they get wet and dirty from the other items, making the bags too nasty to resell. There's not enough staff to clean and dry the dirty bags. Then, there is no mechanical process for separating plastic bags from other recyclables. Worst of all, the bags get tangled up in the sorting equipment or accidentally end up in the bales of separated paper. If just one half of a percent of a bale is contaminated with other materials, it can't be sold to reuse companies. In sum, a truly perilous ingredient in the recycling game - one you might as well just keep and reuse if you already have them, or avoid getting your hands on them at all if possible. 

Recycling Myth #4: I don’t have to Rinse my recyclable goods before throwing them in the recycling bins.

Well, in this case it’s important to consider your local recycling system when trying to figure out your recycling strategy. If your handler uses a single-stream process, where all materials are collected in the same bin and sorted at the facility, then leftovers on anything you throw in the bin is a potential problem. This is because of contamination: when garbage, food leftovers or non-recyclable items are mixed in with valuable recyclables in the bins. The contamination can cause an entire load of recyclable material to go to the landfill instead of being recycled. For example, according to a study by the University of Florida, today the average contamination rate in this particular American state sits at around 25%. That means that roughly 1 on 4 items placed in recycling containers are actually not recycled. However, generally, the most important thing to remember here is that water is an absolutely precious, not to mention scarce, resource. So, make sure you’re not wasting any of it unnecessarily. A quick rinse, preferably with dishwater runoff, should do the trick.

Recycling Myth #5: In case of doubt, put in recycling bins anyway.

The rhyme "if in doubt, leave it out" has got things right in this situation. There’s a lot of free-wheeling, hope-for-the-best attitude towards tossing empties into the recycling. The truth is that chucking a non-recyclable item in with the rest could risk ruining a whole batch.

Putting items in the recycling bin that can’t be recycled can contaminate the recycling stream. Moreover, similarly to plastic bags, which can become tangled around the machinery used in recycling facilities, common trash items can also clog up the equipment. If recycling facilities have to employ people to specifically sort through the content coming in for heaps of regular trash, it makes the cost of recycling more expensive which...isn't really the point. “Wishful recycling” or “aspirational recycling” happens when people mean well, but actually do more harm than good. Waste management can only be successful if we, the citizens, are informed about how to appropriately participate in it, so let’s help each other out on that front.

While all of this information is important to know for us to appropriately participate in our local waste management procedures, the most important thing to remember is that recycling means little without its counterparts: reusing and reducing our consumption of material goods. While it’s great that we have found ways to break down our waste to create something else (or the same thing) with the recycled materials, recycling still requires a lot of energy. What’s more is that, if we simply recycle everything, we are likely still using new resources each time we buy an item again. The only way by which we’ll manage to get out of the climate emergency is if we wholly and utterly halt the extraction of natural resources from the ground, so that we can stop carbon from burning into our atmosphere.

Article by Helena Leonardo

Helena is a freelance educator and writer, trained in the fields of sociology and cultural studies. Her current mission is to take part in the advancement of the regenerative development paradigm through theoretical, empirical and active investigation on the transformational potential of intersectional ecofeminism, cooperativism, community-building and the ecovillage movement.

Primal Gathering is an environmentally, socially, and psychologically regenerative gathering empowering people with skills to be self-sustainable in their day-to-day lives. Our mission is to restore people, forests, and ecosystems all over the world. Leaving both people and places better than how we find them. Join us at the next Reforestation Gathering here or sign up and receive more content like this in a monthly newsletter here