Is it true that in the United States, when plastic or metal cans and bottles are recycled, the caps and lids are not recycled along with the rest of the item?

Baloo55th

Recycling is a complicated business. Metal cans may be of two different metals - aluminium or steel. They are easy to sort out, and there's no reason I can see why the tops of steel cans shouldn't be recycled with the rest of the can. Plastic drinks bottles are made of PET, which can be recycled when facilities exist. They're not common, and it's rather uneconomical to transport the stuff in the form of bottles - too little plastic and too much air. The lids are of a different plastic, and that isn't one that's usually taken for recycling. Beware of campaigns to collect bottle tops from plastic bottles to raise money for charity. This doesn't happen. If you could get money for those tops, we'd be collecting them in the Cub pack I'm associated with. (We do collect aluminium in any form - even past their use date crutches and zimmers! - and copper/brass/bronze, and zinc, and certain stainless steel. There's money for these. Ordinary iron and steel isn't worth it for us, and paper's out as well - not safe to store indoors anyway. Put them in the recycling skips.) Part of the trouble with plastics is the colours. I used to work in the plastics industry, and know how difficult recycling is inside a factory. You have to keep the different ones separate, and you can only regrind the sprues and waste shots for use in another batch of the same colour and grade. Any mixture and it has to be recoloured black - which is why most bin bags are black. They're made out of recycled carrier bags to quite an extent. This is also why much plastic ware that's inside machinery and hardly ever seen is black. There's a lot of regrind in the plastic, and the black colour masks the different colours in the scrap. Mar 07 07, 2:08 PM

lanfranco

In our recycling room, there are signs telling us to remove lids and place plastic lids in one bin, metal in another. I had assumed from this that all the lids were recycled, but now I'm not so sure. Are they asking us to put the plastic lids in a special bin for no good reason? Mar 07 07, 5:03 PM

What-A-Mess

Recycling is not yet affordable, economical nor good for the environment. Cleaning of the recycled materials creates large amounts of nasty chemical waste. More energy is used in recycling plastics than in producing new containers. Mar 07 07, 5:26 PM

Baloo55th

Frankie, the reason is probably to keep them out of the PET. Sometimes refuse collecting authorities cheat. They collect stuff for recycling, and no-one really knows what happens to it. My local council (Sefton) doesn't collect plastic, probably because they can't actually do anything with it. Last time I looked, there wasn't a PET recycler within economic distance. But a couple of hundred years down the road in West Lancs, they do collect plastic. The recycled PET will probably be brown, unless they sort out the stuff - which adds to the cost. (The commonest colours are clear, green and brown. Clear and green can be coloured brown in regrinding, but brown won't colour to anything else except black - and there's no market for black PET.) They will have to remove the little rings left from the tops, anyway, so they might sort it too. Neon, in fact W-A-M has a point there and isn't being political. It CAN cost more to recycle some stuff than to produce fresh. Aluminium is one of the exceptions, new aluminium costing vastly more than recycled. Glass manufacture actually depends on the use of cullet (recycled glass), but DON'T put window glass in the bottle bank. Not the same stuff. The increase in recycling now has given economies of scale, of course. And you'd be surprised where some of the stuff goes. Aluminium cans come back as cans. Aluminium foil comes back as car engines and so on. You can buy bog roll made from recycled paper (I do), but your expensive kitten soft stuff contains a large proportion of recycled - and always has! (Incidentally, whoever thought up that kitten soft? Who has actually wiped....) Anyway. In the UK, clear glass is worth more than coloured, partly because we export so much Scotch in clear bottles, and import wines in green and brown. Mar 08 07, 4:00 PM