What isn't recyclable or compostable?

Question

My community has single-bin recycling. Most consumer-level metal, plastic, and paper can go in there to be sorted at a recycling center. They don't take plastic grocery bags, cellophane, paper towels, and pizza boxes. Most of these I can recycle at a more specialized location if I'm feeling like a good citizen.

So most of garbage is food, paper towels, and cellophane.

I'm researching composting, and it seems like the only "organic" things I can't compost are cooked meat and dairy products. A site I'm reading mentions "some paper". Maybe that means paper towels.

But what I'm wondering is, what would be left after disposing of everything I can using the above methods? I get that this is a question with technically an unbounded answer. The sites I've read so far say something like "everything else!" I get that. But what do most people regularly consume and dispose of that wouldn't go in the "trash" bin if they had bins for trash, recycling, and compost?

The first thing that jumps to mind is batteries, but those shouldn't be thrown in the trash if we followed their instructions. Big items like old computers or broken chairs (or whatever) don't normally go in the bin, and generally have better options for getting rid of them (donations, etc.).

So if I'm doing the mostly bare minimum but still following the basic rules on all of the above, what would be left? Dirty diapers and greasy pizza boxes and blocks of cheese that went bad?

I feel like I must be forgetting something obvious.

Answer 1

The big challenge for recycling is composite materials. Say a "juice box" tetra pak which is cardboard lined with foil. The foil prevents it from going in the "cardboard and paper" stream and the cardboard prevents it from going in the "foil" stream. Shiny "foil" wrapping paper presents the same problem. Plastic lined cardboard cartons are another problem composite. IF you can, don't buy things in containers like these. Find a brand that comes in a can or a glass bottle.

You mentioned paper towels - they can be composted even in a home compost heap if they were used, for example, when eating a peach. Dirty diapers are welcomed in many municipal compost systems, as are paper towels with nastier contents than peach juice (bacon fat, dog vomit, whatever.) Film plastic including plastic bags are less commonly taken, but I happen to live in a place that takes them. Batteries are "hazardous household waste" and there is often a day for them once a year; in North America many electronics stores will take them (look for a large cardboard bin vaguely near the door, usually sort of hidden behind things they can make money selling.)

Depending on where you live, things like Styrofoam egg cartons might not be taken - so choose the eggs that come in cardboard. (I take egg cartons back to the farm where I got the eggs, to be filled again for someone else.) If you buy berries in those green gridded punnets they generally can't be recycled -- I take those to the farm also so she can use them for her berries. I also reuse fruit and veggie bags many many times before recycling them. Some places don't do the clear rigid plastic that bakeries use. Some places don't do plastic plant pots, though generally the place that sold them to you with seedlings in them will take them back afterwards. By finding other forms of packaging, or other places to take the packaging back to, you can cover a lot of ground.

The big difficulties in North America are the waxy/plasticky liners of cereal boxes, potato chip bags, and composites. This is why my mother has to throw out one small (grocery-sized) bag of garbage every six months. Everything else goes in her (or my) recycling.

Answer 2

Composting Meat and Dairy is entirely possible, I recommend Burying it. Otherwise it may become extra smelly and could attracts scavengers like raccoons, bears, possums etc. I typically bury items I am worried will attract critters.

Computer Recycling centers are a thing where I live, and my workplace has a battery recycling bin. Your local recycling center may have a battery option.

Here is an article on dairy composting: http://homeguides.sfgate.com/dairy-composting-78325.html

And a post where people discuss compositing meat: https://www.houzz.com/discussions/1686413/whats-best-way-to-compost-meat-and-dairy?m_refid=us-ptr-mpl-ir-5454-372747-10078&irgwc=1

Believe it or not I found an article about composting pizza boxes. http://keenforgreen.com/b/composting-pizza-boxes

Answer 3

A typical compost is organic. There is a natural chemical process for the organics to break down and can then be used in the lawn or garden. It will tolerate some paper. Paper came from trees so it technically is organic.

Recycle like plastic would take much much longer to break down. They would also interfere with the natural chemical process of the organics. Plastics do not have food value plants.

Plastics break down with UV leaving them out in sun would be better than compost.

Answer 4

Not much is left.

I made a game of it one year when I was single. I heated with wood. This also handled all my paper waste. Vegetable matter went onto the compost heap. Meat, fat, and most bones went to the dog. I didn't buy stuff in tetrapacks. Polyethylene is essentially a heavy wax, so with care to do it with a hot fire, it could go that way too. So my waste stream was about 1 bag a month -- more in summer when I didn't use the fire. Some plastics I wasn't sure of, glass jars, a few tin cans lid ends from frozen juice.

Degredation time:

Some years ago in an oil field in, I think Oklahoma the engineers of the field collection network heard that PE didn't degrade. So they made the network out of PE pipe. MUCH easier to work with than steel. Three years later the pipes were failing -- oil field had a bacteria that thought that PE was a good source of energy.

I told this story to my brother, who is a professional microbiologist. "Sure," he said. "If there is a chemical reaction that produces energy at reasonable temperatures there is almost certainly a bacteria that will exploit it." I refer to this now as "Skipper's Law" Not always easy to find the bacteria that will do what you want.

The problem of waste is one of economics, and is fairly easily solved.

A. Require companies to accept their own products back for recycling. This in effect requires a reverse distribution network. It is now to the companies advantage to make products that can be easily recycled at a place closer than the factory. They then contract their recycle obligation to a more local source. This hits products such as tetrapaks hard. No one is willing to take them apart. I suspect that these would quickly vanish to be replaced with plastic coated cardboard, using a plastic that was easily burnable.

B. We used to recycle bottles. Beer bottles in particular were universal, and made 6-12 round trips before getting lost or chipped. The introduction of the long neck, then fancy shapes, and colours made this more difficult. So this problem can be solved in a different way with a tax incentive. Create a set of categories (dripper size, beverage, soft foods, hand access) and sizes. The most popular of each container gets the lowest tax. Something like 20c/liter base charge, then 10R^2, where R is the popularity ranking for that category most popular, rank 0, next most rank 1. A company that uses a custom bottle now has an absurdly high rank, and pays an enormous surcharge.

C. Everything is barcoded or rfid coded or taggant coded with the part and material. (A taggant is a tracer added to explosives. It consists of a thin chunk of ceramic coated with multiple coloured glazes, then ground up. The glazes aren't harmed by the explosion, and they can be easily sequenced with a microscope. Should be ammenable to robot sorting.) Fluorescent dyes could be added to materials. this allows material to be sorted by their fluorescent spectrum under UV scan.

D. Robotics, and machine vision. Clever machines can sort most of the material.