Rick Meyers, the City of Milwaukee’s sanitation services manager, fielded many questions from people on a recent Doors Open Milwaukee tour about recycling guidelines. Here are some of them.
• Put pull-tabs into the empty can. The tabs are too small to make it through the system on their own, but if they are in the can, they make it through recycling. If bottles have screw-on tops, keep them on the containers. They are too small to make it through the sorting process alone.
• Aluminum cans should not be crushed. If they are crushed, they will not be properly detected by the 3D imaging.
• If you have shredded paper, compress it tightly in a rolled paper bag. If it is loose, it will not make it through recycling but will end up in the landfill.
• There is no need to remove labels from containers.
• Be sure to rinse out containers. If they are not rinsed, bacteria form and create unnecessary odors and contamination in the facility.
• Sometimes people will throw half-used or unused containers of food into recycling. Besides being messy and a source of contamination, these items will not make it through the automated sorting process because they are too heavy. They will not be recycled and will end up in the landfill.
• Aluminum siding scraps cannot be recycled.
• Do not put one-gallon disposable fuel tanks into recycling. They contain a residue of flammable liquid. The recycling facility gets about 70 of these dangerous containers a day. Most of them are picked out in the pre-sort, but some do get through. Meyers says there is at least one fire per month caused by these tanks if they make their way to the unforgiving baler jaws.
• Do not deposit plastic bags. They are the bane of the recycling facility. On a daily basis, workers have to wear harnesses to lower down into jammed equipment so they can safely free the entangled bags. On a recent gusty day, bags began billowing out the facility and into the street; workers had to chase and capture the bags. Plastic bags can be taken back to local stores or visit plasticfilmrecycling.org to find a convenient location for plastic bag recycling.
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For current City of Milwaukee recycling guidelines visit city.milwaukee.gov/milwaukee-recycles/dropoff/disposal-recycling-guide.
