Judging from my inbox, Climate Coach readers have a burning question: Do I need to clean my peanut butter jar before I recycle it? You may laugh. But the peanut butter jar — sticky, messy and, for the recycling inclined, guilt-inducing — represents what’s vexed and broken about our recycling system.
Properly designed, our recycling system could work more like the one in Germany, where roughly two-thirds of municipal waste (and almost 90 percent of plastic “#1” PET bottles, like those carrying most peanut butter) is recycled. Instead, the United States’ patchwork of thousands of local programs ends up recycling about 24 percent of municipal waste (around a third if composting is included), according to the most recent federal estimates, from 2018. Meanwhile, Americans burn or bury nearly 180 million tons of trash each year. None of this discourages Miriam Holsinger, co-president and chief operating officer of Eureka Recycling, a nonprofit recycler in Minneapolis. Each year, Holsinger’s materials recovery facility, or MRF, receives roughly 100,000 tons of stuff tossed by Minneapolis, St. Paul and surrounding communities, including car parts, bowling balls, diapers and other items. Yet the vast majority ends up as new products, thanks to a gantlet of machinery, including massive ballistic separators and optical sensors, that sorts more than 1,000 items per minute. Reclaimers — the next stop, where bales are washed, shredded and processed — pay for these raw materials. “I’d love it if people put more things into the recycling bin,” Holsinger said. “Half of recycling is going into the trash.” Eureka’s success shows how advances in single-stream technology are making it remarkably efficient to separate a jumbled pile of mixed recyclables into clean streams of paper, metal, glass and even plastic.
We have the ability — if not yet the political will — to recycle far more than we do. To understand what our recycling system could be, I retraced a peanut butter jar’s journey through a facility like Eureka’s. First, the answer you came for: A quick scrape is all you need to recycle your peanut butter jar. Just don’t leave enough to weigh it down. In fact, scrubbing in hot water at home may negate the energy savings of recycling them (tossing the jar into an already-full dishwasher is fine if you want). “Just use a rubber spatula,” Holsinger told me. “Honestly, I give mine to my dog and let him worry about it until I put it in the recycling bin.” Read the full column to see how the machinery inside a recycling plant separates different items and materials. Write to me at climatecoach@washpost.com. I read all your emails.
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