At an individual level, it makes sense to take the easy way out and just toss it in the trash. However, at least in Hawaii, the site I linked to above makes an interesting point for businesses:
"Hard Rock Cafe. Hy’s Steak House. Sheraton Hotels. Hilton Hawaiian Village. They’re just a few of the restaurants, hotels and bars that have discovered the advantages of glass recycling.
Recycling offers an opportunity to minimize refuse costs. If you throw all of your glass in a dumpster, you pay twice – once to haul it away and again to dispose of it. On the other hand, because glass has a market value, it can often be hauled away at no charge. And with less waste in your dumpster there is an opportunity to reduce your disposal cost."
As mentioned in post #4, plastics are shredded and washed. I assume as long as the jar is moderately clean then there shouldn’t be an issue with recycling them.
I used to use the soak it in hot soapy water method, but now I scrape the last of the peanut butter out. Then I set it next to an ant hill with a heavy rock in it to keep it from blowing it away. The ants do the heavy lifting. Two days later it is clean! Almost no work on my part. I win, the ants win. this is a classic win-win situation.
I put the jar in the dishwasher, and it comes out pretty clean. The hard part, imo, is removing the label, not the peanut butter. The marginal cost/resource use of adding it to my dishwasher load is pretty close to zero.
That being said, I’m dubious of the value of “recycled plastic” and if it didn’t matter to my husband that we “recycle” as much as possible, I would just throw them out. Metal is usually worth recycling. Glass is easy to clean in the recycling process, and while the market for it is small (my town’s recycled glass is used for paving roads, too) I’m sure I’m not doing any harm by throwing glass jars into the recycling bucket rather than the trash bucket. I understand that plastic milk jugs have value, so long as they aren’t contaminated with other crap. My town saves money by disposing of newspaper and other paper as clean used paper, rather than as mixed trash, so I suppose someone much use it for something. Beyond that, I’m dubious about what is actually recyclable.
Ummm, the OP and most of the people here are talking about plastic containers, not glass. Glass is much easier to recycle, grease doesn’t stick to it as easily, and it doesn’t need to be as clean as plastic to recycle successfully.
I mean, it’s great and all that companies are embracing recycling of glass, but that’s not exactly what the rest of the people here are talking about.
I can clean ours out pretty effectively with a squirt of Dawn, filling with hot water from the tap, and capping / shaking / hitting remainder with a scouring cloth. But there’s a disclaimer: when we turn the hot water tap on and let it run until you’re getting full heat, you do not stick your hands under it and leave them there or you would pull back hand-bones with steam-boiled cannibal food hanging down from them. Our hot water is freaking hot.
In a professional kitchen there would probably be a device with steam under pressure for cleaning sticky & crudded-up cookware and eatware.
Recycling services around here are really wishy-washy across neighborhoods and vendors about what and if they recycle. I just spatula out the last peanut butter as able, then toss it in the recycling bin without washing. The recycling sorters pick through everything anyway for keep/scrap decision so I assume that is part of what I’m paying them for.
Lost in all the discussion are the motivations for recycling in the first place. The original ideas, in theory, were to reduce the depletion of raw resources, and reduce the environmental impact of tossing out all the junk.
If those are considered important, then we should be recycling stuff even if it’s not entirely optimal economically. We should be willing to pay to recycle, or pay more for products made with recycled materials, and recycling companies should be willing to accept stuff that may not be profitable. Governments should be subsidizing recycling companies, which of course means taxpayers are paying for it.
The willingness, or not, of everyone to buy into this paradigm tells us all we need to know about how serious we take recycling.
What Shodan said. It takes oil to make plastic. But odds are you are also burning hydrocarbons to wash the jar, to transport it to the recycling center, to cut it up, to clean the shards, to reprocess it into new plastic, and so on.
If you were actually replacing stuff with labor, you might have a case that you are shifting your resource spend from hydrocarbons to employment. But by and large, that’s not the case. And in general, price is a decent proxy for resources consumed. So if it costs more money to recycle plastic than to make new plastic, that’s probably because you are burning more oil recycling it than you are saving by not starting with new oil.
I got ticked off about a story on recycle advice on a news program in AZ. It was around Thanksgiving, and the reporter used an example of a can of pumpkin. He claimed the metal can was “useless” for recycling if it had ANY pumpkin residue inside, and oh yes, remove the label, too!
I ended up yelling at the TV. AZ is a desert state (duh!) and the entire Western US is in a drought! If the recycle plant needs the discarded cans to be pristine, I propose THEY do the cleaning! Commercial car washes brag they filter and reuse the water in the car wash. Why can’t a recycle plant do the same, rather than the consumer wasting water by washing out all empty cans before putting them IN THE TRASH?
~VOW