On the topic of recycling. Domino’s pizza boxes now have printed on them very large that they’re recyclable. I’d always heard that the grease contaminated cardboard recycling, so they had to go in the trash. Westrock, the company that makes the Domino’s boxes, did a study (pdf) they claim shows the small amount of grease does not matter, and the reconstituted paper is just as strong as paper from non-greasy source material.
The study may be right, I have no expertise to judge that, however, my trash/recycling company explicitly says that greasy pizza boxes go in composting or trash. However, Domino’s website says that greasy pizza boxes are “implicitly accepted” in my area, though I’m not exactly sure what that means. Particularly because in my area each house contracts their own trash and recycling.
I hope the study is correct, and this brings about a change where cardboard recyclers start accepting greasy pizza boxes. My concern is that if I do put the pizza box in recycling, that I’m just making extra work for the sorters who have to pull it out, and then it ends up in the trash anyway.
Recycling guidelines in your area suggest that corrugated pizza boxes are accepted, however, it is not stated explicitly. Studies have found that empty corrugated pizza boxes are technically recyclable. Recycling guidelines in your area should be updated to explicitly state their acceptance."
Sounds to me like no one’s told Domino’s to knock off their claims in your area, so it’s implicitly accepted. Weasel words.
Not in California anymore. The law prohibits giving single-use anything unless specifically asked by the customer. That’s straws, sachets, utensils, pretty much anything they would toss in the bag except paper napkins.
If you’re going to be creating glass anyway, and you will not be recycling it, and you will be crushing it for safety purposes, you could use the crushed glass instead of sand for concrete. If glass can be made from a larger variety of sand than direct-to-concrete sand, then it would conserve that type of sand. You’ll still be using a lot of energy, though, I would assume.
That’s pretty much how I interpreted what Domino’s says. However, my trash company explicitly says “no” to greasy pizza boxes, so Domino’s is not merely being weasely, their wrong. It’s statements like that which make me have suspicions about the whole “safe to recycle greasy pizza boxes” thing.
They do accept unused pizza boxes for recycling, but I don’t get those at home.
Both @WildaBeast and I live in the same area of CA and I can tell you the law is not followed much of the time. I have handfuls of dinnerware from food deliveries to prove it.
Your area is different than mine, obviously. I have to remember to ask for things, because a notice is posted at every drive-thru window and they are really good at not tossing random stuff in my bags. Don’t know if it is county enforced or what, but in my town they have really cracked down. Obviously you aren’t in the 909. Lucky bastards.
My town does a sort of compromise and tells us we can rip the tops off of pizza boxes and recycle them if they are clean. But now that California collects organic materials for composting we’re told that’s the best thing to do with pizza boxes.
Not to hijack or anything, but I would advocate this also to include AA type alkaline batteries. Anything, really, that is made to be used and thrown away, but batteries in particular need to not end up in landfills.
This law led to the invention of what I call “origami cardboard”, which must be cheaper than styrofoam, as it mostly replaced stryrofoam in packaged electronics and other fragile items in about a year. I guess I don’t know for certain there was a direct cause-effect, but I read about the German law, and saw products I purchased (that had international sales) switch over about a year later.
Like a carbon tax, this puts the burden on the producer, but lets them figure out the most efficient way to mitigate the burden.
I have seen a little bit of a decline in styrofoam all around. Disposable hot-drink cups are almost never styrofoam any more, either having a sleeve or having that weird plastic fur. And a lot of boxes that used to have massive styrofoam blocks in them to pad the contents now make use of cardboard braces.
The precisely shaped cardboard braces, often folded from a few flat pieces of cardboard, are what i meant by “cardboard origami”.
I don’t think it was just the German law. MacDonald’s won an award when they introduced the styrofoam clam shell to protect their sandwiches, and they switched to cardboard, at around the same time. But i do think all the electronics and glassware, etc., That used to be packaged in form-fitting styrofoam, and is now in cardboard origami, were directly influenced by the German law.
That used to be a really big deal for kids that could scrounge public bins at places like parks, ballfields or roadsides for bottles. Today, even in states that have bottle deposits, I’m not sure it’s worth a kids time for 10 cents a bottle.
Back when sodas were switching from glass to plastic I talked to a regional rep for Coke. Pepsi had already went plastic and Coke was in the process of switching over. He told me at that time that the number one reason for the switch was because of safety reasons concerning kids and glass bottles. Apparently they got quite a bit of pressure from parents and parent groups to switch to plastic.
Nuts/bolts/nails/etc., lynch pins, batteries, medical supplies such as thermometers and pill boxes, dog toys, sewing notions, paper clips, chlorine test kits – I could go on. They’re all over the place. And some of these things have arrived via online sales. The manufacturers probably aren’t doing two sets of packaging (or lack thereof).
That may not be the only issue. The reconstituting process may not start immediately after pickup, and the recyclables may need to be stored somewhere in the meantime – and that ‘somewhere’, if the recyclables are contaminated with food trash, may fill up with rats and/or other critters looking for the food. The composting area presumably is designed to deal with food trash; the recyclable storage may not be.
Emily Post apparently said it in 1922; in the context of an article about how to give a dinner party.
It’s an interesting, if from my perspective quite weird, article. But I do hope that your wife doesn’t expect your household to follow all of Emily’s advice!
Those can be taken in for recycling here; you can’t put them out with the recyclables for pickup, but a number of places will take them for recycling. Are they also not getting genuinely recycled?
I cannot seem to find any figures on it, but I suspect that a lot of people just toss them into the waste stream because either they are not aware of the issues or that there are recycling programs or that recycling is too frou-frou or too much effort.
Okay, that’s sort of what I was thinking that you meant, but I wasn’t sure, thank you for the clarification.
Though I have to say that a few of your items on your list, like paper clips and nuts/bolts, I’ve never seen in plastic packaging, and I’ve seen some dog toys like that, but the vast majority have been just the toy with a little plastic zip tie to hold it to a piece of cardboard.
Some do, some don’t. I almost always see the hard to open packaging in stores, and very often easy to open (and it seems less plastic involved) from online sales, but not always. I assume it saves the manufacturer money to use less packaging, and if they aren’t trying to prevent theft, then they will do what’s cheaper.
Which is part of the reason why it’s so annoying to have them show up in plastic bubbles: because it’s so obviously unnecessary, since not only were those until recently not in use, but there are also still many examples of them being for sale without the bubble.
Sometimes finding the other packaging would be a matter of driving to multiple places miles apart, and/or trying to hunt through online info in order to find out how the item will be packaged if ordered from various sites. I had no idea, and I doubt my sister did, how the dog toys she gave me and ordered from Chewy would be packaged.
So you’re driving miles to avoid plastic packaging? How much petroleum is in your average blister pack? Can anyone quantify how much energy is saved by the weight reduction and size reduction of plastic vs. glass? A semi full of Coke in glass has to be multiple tons heavier (and with less product) than one in plastic. Scratch that–probably the same weight but remarkably less product. We avoid clamshells and the like as much as possible, but they do keep produce from spoiling as rapidly. It’s complicated.
