At recycling places, I sometimes see the warning: One contaminated item will ruin the whole batch and it will all have to go to the landfill!!!111
But I find it hard to believe, with all the advanced technology (like the miracle that is single stream recycling) we have that they don’t have ways to safeguard against the occasional contaminants so that the above doesn’t happen.
So are they exaggerating to make sure people don’t throw contaminated stuff in en masse (which I could actually see leading to a problem)? Or will one bad apple really spoil the whole bunch? (Will one pizza box really ruin the whole pile of paper? Will one jelly jar with some jelly still inside ruin the plastic pile?)
Also, assuming the do have ways to cope with contaminants: How do they do it? How do they separate the contaminants like oil and organic material from the good material?
They are warning all (except literal pedants) that some contaminated things can ruin a whole batch, and don’t try to figure out which ones, just segregate all your stuff Please.
When I worked in a restaurant back when single stream recycling was first really coming into use in our area…2007 or 2008 I think.
The first year we basically just threw away our recycling in a bin no rinsing or anything, then we got a letter saying that all customers must now rinse the recycling or their services will be suspended.
I assumed it was basically to keep rotting food away en masse. They fully suspect that there will be food or other contaminates. Just a way to mitigate the effects.
Just a WAG hopefully someone on this board works in recycling!
I’ve had the same thoughts. One nagging thought that has been at the back of my mind for a while is that the scaremongering about contaminating a recycling stream is really true and that, because most recycling bins that I see around here have some “illegal” items in them, that recycling more or less doesn’t happen nowadays because nothing is pure enough and it all gets sent to the landfill anyway. So maybe there’s no point in trying to recycle this properly labeled and recyclable bottle, it’ll go to the landfill anyway, because Bill stuck in some unrecyclable plastic spoons or Mary stuck in a Styrofoam cup.
The traditional way to store hard fruits and vegetables for a winter was to bury them - preferably in a root cellar, but outdoors if temps not much below freezing were normal would work, too. You built a pyramid of apples, potatoes, turnips, whatever and then buried it in reasonable clean, well-packed dirt. That would preserve the fruit for a long time, but you had to use up a “pyramid” once you broke into it, because the decay would speed up once it was exposed.
The absolutely critical factor was to choose perfect, unblemished fruit. One bad apple, or potato, or beet would indeed “ruin the whole batch” and you’d dig in to find rotting items instead of ones that were nearly fresh, late into the winter.
That said, most recycling includes washing/rinsing and other decontamination and separation stages (to get rid of paper labels, for example) so AFAIK moderate food contamination on containers is not an issue. I think the push is to make the bulk job easier by offloading it on the consumer/disposer.
In the case of apples, I always thought of it as more an ethylene gas issue. The rotten apple was likely riper to begin with than the rest, and as it continued to ripen, it emitted more and more ethylene, causing the others to prematurely ripen and rot.
In the context of recycling, I always assumed it was an economic issue; it costs the recycling company money to have someone fish the pizza boxes and other non-recyclable what-not out of the recycling stream, so essentially they want you to do it for them for free, and cloak the request in the noble cloak of not sending stuff to the landfill, instead of the ignoble reality of wanting to save a buck at your expense.
We only have to separate paper from other stuff now. I’m guessing they had do enough sorting anyway that it wasn’t worth the effort to get people to separate other items anymore. All metal and plastics go into one bin, doesn’t matter what type, even non-recyclable containers.