Originally Posted by
brucie
Comment on the plastic and city/county door recycling. I saw someone posted on another post that their city took 1-7 number plastic in their house bin. I may be wrong on this for some areaas but i think most people see the 1-7 and dont look into the rest of the restrictions. If people call and check w/ their collections i think they will find they do not in fact take all 1-7 plastics.
Most city/county recycling only take 1-7 of certain items and most of those are of bottles/jar w/ the neck narrower than base, or little food containers like gladware throwaways and some places take buckets and plant containers. I mention this because in the past I would throw all 1-7 plastics in my container, and i found out that things that dont fall into the above restrictions are being removed at the collection center and trashed. this was in 3 different cities that i lived in. Kind of a bummer and sometimes it is easier to feign ignorance especially when you dont have any other place to take it. I looked into the recycling boxes you see at schools and they are picked up by the same trucks as the house recycling.
What i was told by a collection rep was that when bottles like coke bottles or clorox bottles are melted down they do not mix well w/ plastics like from appliance frames. Same reason why some places make you remove the lids; the lids are not the same plastic as the bottles. I have never researched the reasoning so dont take that as law.
if you have called and your city does take everything... that is great.
Here is some info about plastic classification that I know of. ( I run a small recycling service and we do all plastics, paper, etc.) There are 7-8 different kinds of plastic, ranging from PETE to ABS. #7 plastics are known as "Other" in the plastic world, and encompass all plastic that is not classified as 1-6 (Obviously). The plastics in the #7 category are plastics that are unique or not used often and in curbside recycling, ABS would be considered #7 (If you look at keyboard casings, they say #7 on them so ABS would be #7 if you want to be really picky about it). If you put it in your curbside recycling bin, it should get recycled as #7 because the optical sorter that sorts plastic should identify it as such. But, every city is different so I would recommend finding a plastic recycler in your area. I hope this didn't confuse anybody, it's really hard to explain in text!
I couldn't find a good video about how an optical sorter works, but here it is. After all of the paper, metal (!), and trash have been removed from the recycling stream, the plastics go to a separate conveyor belt to go under the optical sorter. The sorter is a camera that has some fancy sensor in it that can identify plastics in a blink of an eye. After the camera has spotted a particular type of plastic (Usually PETE (Soda and water bottles) and HDPE Uncolored (Milk Bottles) The sorter sends a strong blast of air in the area of the plastic item, and shoots it into the appropriate bunker, where it is sent to a baler. The other plastics go down the line to a group of people who take out any garbage that was missed and colored HDPE bottles (Detergent bottles, orange juice, etc) and put it in another bunker where it is baled. The remaining plastics (3-7) go to another bunker unseparated and are baled into a mixed bale. The HDPE and PETE plastics are the most valuable and are sold as that kind of particular plastic. The 3-7's are sold as a mixed bale. I also hope this makes sense! It's a very confusing process!
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