How to recycle Amazon Al/Cardboard hybrid bags

I’ve started buying some stuff from Morrisons via Amazon, and anything that needs to be cold is stored in these cardboard bags with an aluminium lining. It says on the bag,fold flat for easy recycling, but where? I don’t think the cardboard guys or the metal guys will want them.

Amazon says to recycle it with cardboard. That surprised me.

I rarely get food deliveries and those bags are part of the reason.

Where do you live? Recyclability is usually determined by your local providers and market conditions. Call your service provider if you’re not sure.

In the US at least, this can vary drastically depending on locale… the same thing that’s recyclable in a bigger city (especially in a blue state) will just be landfilled in a smaller town an hour away. If you try to recycle it anyway, they’ll just trash it for you, and maybe send you a warning or a fine if you keep doing it.

A lot of hybrid materials aren’t recyclable except by the most advanced facilities, which overwhelmingly means they are just greenwashing and 99% of the time it’ll be trash. That’s probably what happens here.

I live in a midsized English town. I am certainly not seeking out specialists. Cardboard and cans do go in the same recycling box though, so I’ll just give that a go and see.

If it works anything like it does in the US (which I’m not sure about), that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be recyclable in the end. Here, it would just go through one or more sorting stations, and then ultimately some machine or human would decide “nope, that’s just trash rubbish(?)” and throw it away on your behalf.

Not sure how that works in your municipality and country though. If you toss in the same bin as everything else, it goes into a “not your problem” machine, but won’t really answer whether/how it gets recycled :slight_smile:

There is a lookup tool here: Recycling collections - GOV.UK, but not sure if it will have enough detail. Somebody who works at your nearest Materials Recovery Facility would probably have the definitive answer. It basically boils down to whether your area has the labor or machine sorter capable of distinguishing that particular hybrid material from trash, and whether there is a willing buyer for the separated material, either domestically or overseas. Usually there isn’t. Most recycling except aluminium is a lie…

“What they will let you toss into the recycling box” and “what actually gets recycled/reused” are two entirely separate questions. The first is the top end of a very, very broad funnel, but the end of that funnel is minuscule, and most of it is landfilled.

Recycling abilities are highly localized. There is some basic standardization but different counties and even cities within the same county have different abilities and rules.

And even the same city/town at different times may have different results, depending on market conditions. It’s a whole supply and demand thing, and if the price for a recyclable gets too low, they may end up landfilling it instead during those months. If it stays low, they’ll just stop collecting it altogether (for recycling).

Although probably better discussed under Thread Games, the next topic in my list is What Do Mohels Do With the Foreskins. Oh my!

We just throw them away (the bags, not the foreskins).

…And I just realized that I’ve been reading the thread title wrong. I was thinking, I know that artificial intelligence is the big buzzword right now, but how does Amazon think it applies to bags?

Googling, it might be possible to separate the foil lining from the paper bag and then recycle at least the paper. Another idea; reuse the bags or see if someone else could use them.