![]() ![]() “If something can’t be processed, sold or made new, it’s not really recycling,” Baldwin said. The more contaminants there are in a bale, Baldwin said, the less likely the “end markets” that buy the recycled materials will want them. If they are in the wrong bale they are considered contaminants.” If don’t know what it is, the black plastic winds up in the wrong place. “But optical sorters can’t read black plastic as plastic. “You wind up with bales of cardboard, bales of mixed paper, bales of plastic resin, bales of aluminum,” Baldwin said. She said single-stream recycling - when glass, plastic, aluminum and paper products are mingled together in the bin - requires machines to process the separation. Yes, that means your takeout containers and even your flower pots.”īaldwin said removing black plastic from the list was necessary and something that municipal recycling coordinators had requested for years. “In some parts of the country black plastic is allowed, but not in our region,” the email read. ![]() The lack of public knowledge about black plastic led the town of West Hartford to send out an email recently telling people to never put black plastic in their recycling bins. That’s the only change that’s been made since the list was created in 2017,” said Sherill Baldwin, an environmental analyst for the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, which regulates the consistency of recycling standards statewide. we reviewed the What’s In What’s Out (WIWO) list. Don’t do that, not if the takeout container is black, even if the container has that little triangular-arrows logo on the bottom.įew outside the recycling industry seem to know it, but black plastic was removed last year from the state’s list of items that are acceptable in home recycling bins collected weekly by towns. Connecticut environmental officials are begging you: Keep those black plastic takeout containers out of recycling binsĪ typical takeout scenario: You buy a meal to go, eat every bite, rinse the container and toss it in the recycling bin, just like you’ve done many times before. ![]()
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