America Recycles Day: How to Do It the Right Way
Most of us recycle by tossing things in the blue bin and hoping for the best. Hope is not a recycling strategy. Here is what actually works.
America Recycles Day lands on November 15 every year, and most of us celebrate it by tossing things in the blue bin and hoping for the best. Hope is not a recycling strategy. A bin full of good intentions can send an entire truckload to the landfill.
This guide covers what actually gets recycled, the handful of rules that work in almost every city, the items that quietly sabotage the system, and why the best recycling habit is buying less that needs recycling in the first place. If you only read one section, make it the one about plastic bags.
Why Recycling Is Harder Than It Looks
Americans generate about 4.9 pounds of trash per person per day, and only 32 percent of it gets recycled or composted. Half of everything we throw away goes straight to a landfill. Those are the latest national figures from the EPA, and they have barely moved in a decade.
The gap between materials is huge:
Read that last number again. More than 90 percent of plastic, including plastic with a recycling symbol on it, ends up landfilled, burned, or loose in the environment. The chasing arrows on the bottom of a container identify the resin type. They are not a promise that your city can recycle it.
When a food covered tub, a plastic bag, or a tangled hose goes into the blue bin, it can jam sorting machinery or spoil a whole bale of otherwise good material. Haulers call this wishcycling: tossing something in and hoping it counts. It usually makes things worse, not better.
Five Rules That Work Almost Everywhere
Recycling rules are set by your local municipality, not by the brand or the package. These five hold up in nearly every program in the country.
Search your city or county name plus "what can I recycle." Print the list and tape it inside a cabinet door. Ten minutes of research will do more than this entire blog post.
Rinse out food residue, let it dry, and leave the item empty. A quick swish is enough. You are not washing dishes, you are keeping peanut butter off a thousand pounds of paper.
Not as a liner, not bundled up, not with recyclables inside. Bags wrap around sorting equipment and shut down the line. Take them back to a grocery store drop off instead.
Everything goes in unbagged so the sorters and the machines can see each item and sort by the materials of those items.
It feels wrong, but one questionable item can contaminate a whole load. Trash is the safer default for anything you cannot confirm will be recycled.
The Usual Suspects That Do Not Belong in Curbside
These are the items that show up constantly and almost never get recycled.
| Item | Why it fails | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Plastic bags, bubble wrap, film | Tangles sorting machinery | Grocery store film drop off. Reduce or eliminate usage. |
| Greasy pizza boxes | Oil ruins paper fiber | Tear off the clean parts to recycle; compost the rest. |
| Anything smaller than a credit card | Falls through sorting screens | Collect bottle caps inside a same type bottle, or trash them. |
| Coffee cups and takeout containers | Plastic lined paper, mixed materials are not fiscally worth recycling | Trash, or bring your own cup to reduce the waste entirely. |
| Hoses, cords, string lights | Wrap around equipment | Hardware store or e-waste drop off |
| Clothing and textiles | Not sorted by regular city recycling facilities | Donate, Buy Nothing Groups, find a textile drop off, Retold Recycling or Trashie bags. |
| Batteries and electronics | Fire risk in trucks and facilities | Retail take back or household hazardous waste day (depending on your city). |
| Black plastic | Optical sorters cannot see it | Trash, and avoid buying it. |
| Compostable or bioplastic items | Contaminate plastic streams and do not break down in landfills | Commercial compost only if your city accepts them; otherwise trash. |
A cup or fork labeled compostable belongs in an industrial composting facility, not the recycling bin. Most cities do not have one, so check before you buy.
The Bathroom Is Where Recycling Goes to Die
Most households recycle in the kitchen and nowhere else. The bathroom produces a steady stream of shampoo bottles, lotion tubes, cleansers, and then some, and almost all of it ends up in the small trash can under the sink.
A few fixes:
- Put a second recycling bin in the bathroom. This one change doubles what many families capture.
- Rigid bottles (shampoo, conditioner, body wash, mouthwash) are usually recyclable once rinsed. Pump tops with metal springs are not; pull them off.
- Squeeze tubes for toothpaste and lotion are mixed material and go in the trash in most cities, no matter what the label implies.
- Toothbrush handles and floss containers are too small or too mixed to be sorted. Trash, unless the brand runs its own take back.
- Cardboard boxes from soap, toothpaste, and cotton swabs are fine. Flatten them.
In the kitchen, the common misses are aluminum foil (ball it up to fist size and recycle it if your city takes foil), glass jars with the metal lid left on (remove the lid and recycle separately), and cartons for milk and broth (accepted in some programs, not others, so check). Styrofoam= NEVER recyclable curbside so bag it and throw it away.
"Nobody Else Does It, So Why Should I?"
It’s easy to look at the overflowing bin next door and wonder why you bother. And the frustration is fair: contamination is real, and one careless load can send good recyclables to the landfill along with the bad. But that’s a reason to care more, not less. Giving up doesn’t fix a contaminated truck. It just adds one more bin to the problem.
What you can do is get your own bin right and let people see it. Good habits can spread. A neighbor who watches you rinse, sort, and flatten every week is more likely to start doing the same, and a friendly conversation over the fence can do more than any flyer from the city. Most people who recycle badly were never shown how to do it in the first place.
Not every item you sort will make it all the way through the system. Plenty will, though, and each one that does is waste that never reaches a landfill. Every little bit you do reduces the total, and the example you set can multiply it.
Curbside recycling is one of the few habits that is literally on display at the end of the driveway every week. A bin that is full and sorted properly does more to change what other people do than any article, including this one.
Recycling Is the Last Step, Not the First
The EPA's own waste hierarchy puts recycling third, behind reducing and reusing. With plastic recycling stuck around 9 percent, though other sources report an even lower amount of 5-6% plastics actually getting recycled. The most reliable way to keep plastic out of a landfill is to never bring it home in the first place.
That is the idea behind most of what we make at Me Mother Earth. Every product we sell ships without plastic packaging, and many of them replace an item that would otherwise be a plastic bottle or tube in your blue bin or trash.
At Me Mother Earth, there are no plastic bottles to decode or rinse out here, and no resin codes to look up. Our packaging is glass, aluminum, paper, and cardboard, materials that most curbside programs accept. Rinse the containers or keep them to refill, flatten the box, and check your local guidelines if you’re unsure.
How to Actually Celebrate America Recycles Day
Pick two or three. You do not need to do all of them on November 15.
Progress Over Perfection
Nobody recycles perfectly, and the system is not built to make it easy. Recycling correctly is mostly about doing less: fewer bags in the bin, fewer guesses, and fewer plastic containers coming through the door in the first place. Get the plastic bag rule right this November and you will have done more than most.
Nothing to Sort When It Arrives
See what a low waste bathroom and kitchen look like in practice. Plus, every order ships without plastic packaging- ALWAYS!
Shop SUSTAINABLE Essentials