Can I Recycle This? 5 Things You Should Always Recycle (and 5 Things You Shouldn’t)

If you’re anything like us, you’re constantly trying to figure out, Can I recycle this or not? We wish the rules were simple and consistent, but what you can recycle (takeout containers? shipping boxes? junk mail?) and where (curbside? recycling center?) largely depends on what your local municipality can — or will — handle.

The good news is that with a little effort, you can achieve zero waste. If you can’t leave a particular item curbside or in your apartment building’s recycling bins, for example, you can probably take it to a recycling center or donate it to a specialized recycling company like TerraCycle, an international firm that collects hard-to-recycle items and repurposes them into resalable products.
In 2012 alone, Americans recycled and composted 87 million tons of municipal solid waste, eliminating more than 168 million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, and saving 1.1 quadrillion British thermal units of energy — enough to power about 10 million households in the United States for a year. Decent numbers, but given that U.S. households create more than 251 million tons of trash a year, half of which ends up in landfills, we still have a long way to go. So, we asked Albe Zakes, global vice president of communications at TerraCycle, to help us get there. Here’s his simple guide of recycling do’s and don’ts. We hope you’ll pick up some key pointers. We sure did.
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5 Items You Can’t Recycle

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5 Items You Should Always Recycle

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These 10 tips are just a starting point. The ultimate goal is to rethink your lifestyle and reduce the amount of waste you produce to begin with. As the mantra goes: Reduce, reuse and recycle. “They’re in that order for a reason,” Zakes says. If you can’t reduce your consumption, reuse what you can; if you can’t reuse it, then recycle — even if it takes additional effort. “In reality, almost everything can be recycled,” Zakes says. “The only reason that something is considered ‘nonrecyclable’ is the economics behind it. So the cost of collecting and processing the material is too high versus the revenue that the end material creates.”
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that all aerosol cans cannot be recycled. NationSwell apologies for the error.
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Finally! Experts Give Us Solutions to Those Wasteful Single-Cup Coffee Pods

One in three Americans use them at home or at work. By 2016, they are expected to generate $5 billion a year in sales, according to market research estimates. Without them, you might not even be alert enough to read this.
We’re talking about single-cup coffee pods, the fastest-growing sector of the coffee industry. The caffeine fixes are superconvenient for the bleary-eyed; all you do is pop the top and toss the stump. Just like Elaine.
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But what happens when you toss that hollow pod? It doesn’t decompose like a muffin stump. Those capsules can’t be recycled, so they sit in landfills, piling up to millions of pounds in trash every year. And every year, it’s getting worse.
There’s another problem: No one has a solution — at least, not yet. So we set out to find some. In our cross-country search for coffee lovers and waste haters, here are four suggestions about what can be done to reduce the growth of these mountains of disposable coffee cups.

Darby Hoover

Senior Resource Specialist, Urban Program, Natural Resources Defense Council

“Just make a regular cup of coffee with a reusable coffee filter; wash your filter out and use it later.”
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Peter Bower

Senior Lecturer in Environmental Science, Barnard College

“I compost the coffee grounds when done and rinse the capsule. … The coffee is fresher and there is no trash at all.”

Valerie Thomas

Anderson Interface Associate Professor of Natural Systems, Georgia Institute of Technology

“When you’re not making coffee, turn the machine entirely off. Unplug it from the wall.”
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Morton A. Barlaz

Professor and Head of the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering, North Carolina State University

“Why are we just worried about K-cups? Let’s worry about bottled water, carbonated beverages and all the other applications of packaging, and not just pick on one.”
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