I swear I must use 10 times the environmental value of the damn plastic in water, paper towels, soap etc.
I do not have a dish washer for the record.
Fill it half full with really hot water. Then close the lid and shake it around. The heat, the water, and the agitation should do the job.
I’ve never been able to get a plastic nut butter jar (of any species) clean, by either hand- or machine-washing. Recyclers probably just throw them away.
Yeah, I just get the water as hot as it gets, fill the jar and let it sit in the sink for a while. Then I pour it out and rinse with hot water. That’s as good as it gets for me. I sometimes shake it, as Nemo says.
Some googling tells me that plastics are shredded and then washed, so I’m hoping any residual amount of contamination gets washed away.
I’ve found the “natural” peanut butters (the kind where the oil separates from the peanut solids) easier to get the bottle clean. But the OP is almost certainly correct; that completely cleaning out the bottle has a higher environmental footprint than will be recovered by recycling the bottle. (And there’s the fact that a lot of plastics aren’t getting recycled today.) Probably best just to toss the bottle in the garbage.
I buy “natural” peanut butter in glass bottles. (Adams brand, if you must know.) When empty, I fill them with water, let soak overnight, shake well, and drain. What remains, I scrub out with a soapy Scotch Brite. (I also have a drain strainer in my sink which catches most of the glop. That goes into a plastic bag in the freezer.)
BTW, when soaking in water, I soak the outside too. Then the paper label easily scrapes off. The Scotch Brite easily gets off the remaining gummy glue.
AFAIK, glass jars aren’t recycled directly, but are melted down to make new glass and any residue is destroyed by the molten glass In theory, glass and aluminum can be endlessly remelted. Glass beer and soda bottles are sterilized and reused until they’re eventually melted own.
Fill it with dish soap and water. Let it soak overnight. Empty and fill with clean water. Put the lid on and shake it.
As I understand it, washing is the first step in the recycling process anyway, so it doesn’t need to be perfectly clean when it goes in the recycling bin. Just sort of clean is fine.
Interestingly, Honolulu, Hawaii by law, uses crushed glass in glasphaltfor paving roads.
“A City ordinance requires the use of crushed glass, when it is available, in the asphalt-treated base of all reconstructed City roads – it’s called glasphalt. Glass shipped to the mainland is made into new glass bottles and jars, which saves energy and conserves natural resources.”
"What you can Recycle
Clear, green and brown glass bottles and jars
Remove bottle caps. Labels do not need to be removed.
Do NOT recycle these glass items:
Mirrors
Ceramic cups & plates
Clay flower pots
Crystal
Light bulbs
Window glass
Oven ware
Drinking glasses"
Trivia. Some rubber tires are recycled into playground mulch. If the playground surface is bits of loose black rubber, it’s shredded tires. The good stuff is virtually wire free. But cheap products can contain bits of wire.
I spent some time as a supervisor in a plastics blow molding company. Our own scrap was problematic enough in use. We limited how much was used in a run because using it increased our scrap rate. The level of issues that would be caused by trying to simply burn off stuff from used bottles strikes me as enormous. There was a reason we only used virgin plastic and scrapped production parts we ground in house.
Industrial washing probably helps. It didn’t help enough at the time for us to use any post consumer content in our packaging. That stuff is just a recipe for wasting lots of energy and effort to produce scrap.
I will say as a small blow molder that operated in the custom part and custom color niche we had more room for error. Every now and then we would get a dark color or black colored part that would let us run our crappiest recycled material. There is a lot of dirt that can be covered in navy, brown, or black non food grade containers. Take a look around at the store during your next visit, though. Colors, let alone dark colors, are the exception rather than the norm.
Don’t get me started on feeling up bottles for quality issues. I am less anal retentive than I used to be two decades later. It still happens in the store, though.
There is a very big crisis in recycling now: there simply aren’t any markets for lots of the materials–so it ends up cheaper just to landfill most of them. China used to be a major market and they have mostly quit buying and other countries in Southeast Asia have followed suit.
So just throw the peanut butter jars in the general garbage (after keeping out a few for storing small hardware and other items).
Use a jar spatula (example) to get out every last bit of peanut buttter.
Lick off jar spatula.
Wash jar (probably only needs rinsing) and spatula.
Set jar and spatula on counter top dish rack to dry.
Use a ‘tin snips’ (or your equivolent) to cut the jar in half length wise.
From that point, either clean/recycle it or toss it out.
Huh? “Glass” items?
Technically, ceramics set through a vitrification process, so “glass” is actually accurate. But probably they’re more just worried about people thinking “It’s one of those things that breaks when I drop it, so I’ll recycle it in with the glass”. Never underestimate human stupidity.
As for the OP, I know of a whole class of live-in workers who will be more than glad to clean out your peanut butter jars for you.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I do and it works like a charm.
They don’t.
The RATS clean it out, for them.
I’d consider nuking it in the microwave first without the lid on and filled up with water not quite to the top. Then putting the lid on and shakin’ it out. Never tried that, but thinking it would work quite well considering that nuking a bowl of water up for a number of minutes does wonders for cleaning all kinds of stuff off the inside of a microwave.
Exactly. After the initial pristine spoonful when the new peanut butter jar is first opened, this final removal is the best part!
I used to do the soak-in-hot-water thing for plastic PB jars. But it seemed to me I was using more resources than would be recouped if the jar was recycled (operating under the assumption that that is still technically possible at all). So I stopped and they go into the garbage now.