News Reporter: Climate Coach: How to recycle that messy peanut butter jar

Special offer: Subscribe for $20 Billed as $20 for the first year, then $140/year. Pricing subject to change. Cancel anytime. →

PUBLISHED BY

READ ONLINE | SIGN UP

By Michael J. Coren

Welcome. This week, baby boomers up-size, and EVs overtake gas cars in Germany. But first, here’s the secret to recycling that peanut butter jar.

((Elysa Weitala/For The Washington Post))

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.

Click here to read the column

Learning Curve

The Colorado River is in free fall. Water levels are at record lows, and federal officials may impose large cuts in water use across seven states.

The river supplies drinking water for 1 in 10 Americans, including major cities from Denver to Los Angeles. It also supports massive agricultural operations growing feed for cattle. But big changes are on the way.

“This is the year when everything is coming to a head,” said Doug Kenney, director of the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado.

Read more about how a looming Colorado River decision will affect millions.

Scoops of the Week

Jake Spring delivers our scoops of the week:

President Donald Trump’s construction projects around the White House and National Mall are now practically their own journalism subgenre. There’s a reason for that. The administration’s lack of transparency creates the opportunity for reporters to step in and uncover what is going on, one scoop at a time.

An "Iran war participation trophy" art display, on the National Mall this month.

Last week, that meant using my sourcing network around the National Park Service to help my colleagues — in this case “the Dans,” White House reporter Dan Diamond and Pentagon reporter Dan Lamothe — figure out what was happening at the park just south of the White House, known as the Ellipse. It turns out it was being made into a temporary landing zone for the presidential helicopter. A day after we published, Trump boarded his first flight there.

Snapshot

Last week, an orange haze blanketed cities across the United States from wildfires burning in Canada and Minnesota.

The sun is obscured by wildfire smoke, seen from the Lincoln Memorial on Friday.

D.C. was no exception as the city was plunged into a gloom that made for unhealthy conditions and striking photos.

See more about how wildfire smoke blanketed U.S. cities.

A member of the National Guard at the Lincoln Memorial on Friday.

Second Degree

Last week, I wrote about how the 10-mpg RV has met its all-electric successor.

Some of you were excited about a silent, all-electric trailer that wouldn’t foul up a campground with diesel fumes.

Other veterans offered their road-tested advice.

One was to buy quality first. “Nothing says ‘living the dream’ quite like spending a week staring at fuel pumps, eating your third Jimmy John’s sandwich, and becoming best friends with the guy who empties the trash cans,” wrote one reader. “People love posting photos of sunsets over the Grand Canyon and campfires by the lake. Nobody posts the picture that says, ‘Day 5: Still waiting for the water pump to arrive.’”

Another suggested hauling the home in “mobile home” wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. “No one ventures into the great outdoors in an RV,” a reader wrote. “They are just dragging the great indoors with them.”