Waste Disposal Categories for Recycling Centers

Coupled with effective waste reduction and reuse strategies, recycling is a valuable tool for reducing the volumes and toxicity of wastes sent to landfills and incinerators. Recycling also creates manufacturing jobs, decreases the need for extraction of virgin materials and preserves usable materials for future generations. Many communities have effective and easy-to-use recycling programs. All you need to do is properly sort your recyclable materials and learn a few basic categories.

Plastics

• Plastics, made from petroleum resins, are easily recyclable and accepted by most municipal recycling programs. By law, plastic bottles have numbers printed on them identifying the kind of resin used to manufacture them and how they can be recycled. These numbers go from 1 to 7 and, while all seven are recyclable, some municipal recycling centers do not have the capacity to recycle certain resins. Some recycling centers will also ask you to categorize your plastic by number. Be sure to contact your local recycling center to ask what plastics they accept and if they take unsorted plastics or would prefer that you divided your plastics by number.

Glass

• Glass is one of the few materials that can be collected, melted-down, reshaped and resold indefinitely without loosing quality or usability. In other words, glass can be recycled an infinite number of times, making it an easy material accepted by almost all municipal centers. Most centers have a single category for glass, but some will ask that you divide your glass by color --- blue, brown, green and clear --- to facilitate the recycling process. Some recycling centers also have a separate category for broken pieces of glass, designed mostly to protect workers from injury while the glass is being transported and handled.

Paper

• The paper recycling category includes everything from standard paper to stationary, books and cardboard fibers, making up a huge part of the municipal waste stream. Paper is also the most readily accepted recyclable material in municipal recycling centers. In most cases, you will only be asked to separate paper products into paper and cardboard. These materials will later be broken down into pulp and incorporated into new paper and cardboard products.

Metals

• While recycling opportunities for aluminum cans are available in most local programs, recycling centers that accept other products such as used wire, steel cans and clothes hangers are somewhat harder to find. All of these materials, however, can be recycled and your local recycling center should be able to provide information on nearby drop-off centers or scrap yards that accept them. Given the value of metals such as copper, you may even be able to receive payment from a scrapyard for your recyclable materials. When metals are sub-categorized, it is usually by metal types such as copper, aluminum and steel.

Others

• Highly specialized and complete recycling centers sometimes have additional disposal categories. These often include categories for automotive and construction wastes; used electronics that can be reused or properly recycled to avoid elements such as batteries from leaking; hazardous materials including medical supplies that need special sanitary treatment before being recycled; and garden wastes that can be composted rather than taking up space in a landfill.

  Your local recycling center should be able to provide information on what additional materials they take or point you to other recycling providers such as pick-up points established by the manufacturers of certain electronics, engine parts and building supplies.