A Dirty Peanut Butter Jars: Trash or Recycle?
It’s 4:30pm and I’m looking for a snack to eat to tide me over before dinner. I open the pantry, see that there is bread and peanut butter, and quickly start to make myself a sandwich.
After gathering all the utensils needed, I scooped out the last bit of the peanut butter I have in the jar. Unfortunately, I was faced with a conundrum; How do I recycle the plastic peanut butter container?
Do you fill it with water, use dish soap, clean it out, and then dry it out with paper towels, thus using excess resources to clean a container I’m going to end up recycling anyways? Or do I just outright throw it away, forgoing the recycling step? Are both the lid and the jar recyclable?
I decided to dive deeper to find out a solution to my always occurring problem.
For starters, I first found that all parts of the plastic peanut butter container is not all recyclable. According to Ecocycle’s article “Dirty Dozen,” which outlines 12 containments that should never go into the recycling bin, cites plastic lids as one. “Metal lids can be removed and recycled loose in the bin. Plastic lids and caps from glass bottles and plastic jars should be thrown away.”
In addition to the information about throwing plastic lids away, I interviewed a sustainable manufacturing student at California State University Chico State to fill me in on anything I was missing.
Camron Blonigan, a 2016 spring graduate, said “The problem with recycling isn’t that people don’t know what to do, it’s that people are to lazy to do it.” Camron commented on the topic of dirty recyclables, recycling items that shouldn’t be recycled (styrofoam, plastic baggies, etc.), and throwing away items that should be recycled (yogurt containers, peanut butter jars, etc.). “It’s a major problem,” states Camron, “and the only way to fix that problem is to help educate the public on the proper way to recycle.”
In more of a broad look at dirty recyclables, and not just plastic peanut butter jars, Recology, a recycling company in Chico and all throughout California, claims there is a solution.
When recycling first gets into a recycling plant, it is separated into different types (aluminum, paper, etc). From there, those different types are separated into quality bales; soiled(dirty) or clean.
According to a spokesman for Recology, Robert Reed, he stated that “If the bale is lower quality, there is less revenue coming back into the system from the sale of recyclables, which helps pay for the program.” When referring to how clean the recyclables needed to be, Reed said “Remember that you don’t have to get items clean enough to store food or eat from — so you don’t necessarily have to use so much water that they are sterilized or completely grime free.”
With that said, providing clean recyclables to these recycle plants, can save the city AND the taxpayers(you) money!
After much research and talking with sustainable manufacturers face-to-face at CSU Chico State, I’ve learned that the problem with dirty recyclables is that the public is just not accurately educated on how to recycle certain types of products. Once people are informed, then these small changes can make a huge impact on the landfills around the country.
