I Toured a Recycling Facility Near Me

A recycling facility near me allows people to tour and learn more about the local recycling system. Here’s what happened:

During Earth Month, I toured the Republic Services recycling facility with Lauren & Keema of Crunchy Boutique / Natural Parenting Talk with Lauren & Keema. We had a lot of questions, and they answer many of them for us. We watched this recycling center tour video before we went, and they showed it to us when we were there on the tour, as well.

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What I Learned While Touring the Republic Services Recycling Facility Near Me

• Some plastic bottles now are created with an extra layer of plastic that wraps all the way around the body of the bottle. In order for this to be recycled, you MUST remove the plastic film layer.
• You don’t have to meticulously clean out containers, but they must be DRY.
• Don’t crush coke/soda cans because that can cause them to be misidentified. When that happens, they don’t go into the correct recycling area.
• When China stopped accepting our trash, my local recycling facility stopped accepting plastic bags from their corporate recyclers. This is further reason to use plastic bag alternatives – reusable bags.
• One bad apple DOES spoil the bunch. If one greasy pizza box is in a bale of cardboard, the entire bale is considered “contaminated.”
• Contaminated bales of recyclable materials are basically trash.
• You need to stay up-to-date with your city’s recycling rules. I’ve seen two different recycling bins within streets of each other in my city. One says what you can and can’t recycle, but I’ve seen plenty of the “can’t recycle” stuff still in people’s bins.

You can watch our tour of the facility and listen to a Republic Services employee answer all of our questions about recycling here: