It is important to properly prepare packaging for recycling in order to optimize the quality of recycled materials, but it can sometimes be confusing. How exactly do we know when it’s necessary to rinse our packaging and when it is more valuable to conserve water?
Determining whether rinsing packaging is necessary depends on a few factors, including how much residue is left, what was in the container, and whether the closure even allows you to easily rinse the inside of the container? Here are a few guidelines:
If you are making sure that every container is empty before recycling it, you’ve gone most of the way towards being an excellent recycler. Packaging that is still full or partially full is at high risk of being landfilled even if you place it in your recycling bin. You should compost any remaining crumbs or unused food products before recycling.
Any package containing a lot of thick and sticky residue, like a jar of peanut butter or a tub of icing, should be rinsed.
Any package containing soap (dishwasher detergent, shampoo, laundry detergent, hand soap, etc.) should not be rinsed. In fact, some plastic recyclers rely on residual soap to clean the plastics during reprocessing. After all, it is important to reduce, reuse, and recycle!
Rinsing does not need to be perfect. Don’t worry about getting every single spot of residue off, because that uses a lot of water. Just splash that salsa jar with a little water, replace the lid, and it’s ready to go.
If the cap or lid isn’t easily removed for you to get inside it and rinse, don’t worry; just make sure the package is thoroughly empty before recycling.
Look for the How2Recycle label that explains when a container should be rinsed or not. When in doubt, use your best judgment: a high quality, low contaminant recycling stream is important, but so is water conservation.
Lessons from TAPPI’s Introduction to Pulp and Paper Technology
There are two words that can describe the papermaking process: fascinating and complicated. Paper products are fundamental to our everyday lives, but how often do we actually think about how it is made? Prior to joining GreenBlue, the answer to that question for me, was never. When most of us think about paper, we think about forests and trees: where the paper comes from. I had the privilege of recently spending four, eight-hour days participating in TAPPI’s Introduction to Pulp and Paper Technology short course. TAPPI is a professional organization dedicated to the pulp and paper industries. It was during this course that I got an in-depth look at the pulp and papermaking. If you ever thought pulp and papermaking was a simple process, think again! Pulp and paper are developed through a soup of chemical, physical and mechanical processes. While it is relatively easy to sum up the function of each part of the process, as soon as you go beneath the surface, things get a lot more interesting and complicated. The course is taught by Dr. Mike Kocurek, one of the world’s most recognized educators in the pulp and paper industry. Dr. Kocurek was inducted into the Paper Hall of Fame over a decade ago, and he’s taught TAPPI’s Intro to Pulp & Paper course for over 33 years. Dr. Kocurek continues to be a great instructor exhibiting a level of knowledge that most can only hope to obtain in a lifetime. Day One: Dr. Kocurek opened up the day with a light intro on state of the industry, highlighting global market trends and statistics. Following this, the real content began with a discussion on the raw material used for papermaking: wood fiber. Different species of trees – hardwoods/softwoods – pulp differently from one another and as such have implications on the paper properties. After trees have been harvested, their first stop is the woodyard to be debarked, chipped, and then cooked in pressurized vessels called digesters. Another way to think about this process is to think about cooking pasta, first you start with the hard noodles, then you cook it until it’s soft and ready to eat. Only in this process, you cook the wood fiber in a medley of chemicals to make pulp. De-barking machine Our activity of the day involved sorting out a wood chip pile into the various chip quality categories, which can be seen in the image below. We spent the second half of the afternoon with an overview of the pulping process, where we primarily learned about the Kraft process, the dominant pulping method in North America. Day Two: Our second morning began with a segway into pulp processing and bleaching. Before pulp can be turned into the beautiful, bright white color, it must first be processed by washing, screening, and cleaning it. After being processed it is then time for the bleaching process. Initially facilitated by chlorine chemicals, during the 1980s scientists began detecting chlorinated compounds in fish downstream from paper mills. Given the health risks of such toxins, the industry phased out their use of chlorine. Today, the dominant method is Elemental Chlorine Free (ECF). We spent the afternoon exploring paper recycling, which provides approximately the United States with 50% of its total fiber. This topic was particularly interesting in how it relates to our work as an environmental nonprofit, in recent years it’s been interesting to see that with the proliferation of single stream recycling and overall increases in recovery, the quality of the paper recycling stream has suffered from contamination, making high quality recovered fiber a commodity in high demand. Day Three: This can also be referred to as “the day that went over my head”. We opened up the morning with a discussion on paper grades and properties, followed by the next step in the process: stock preparation and forming. Stock prep and formation is a multi-step process that involves a lot of big machines and a lot of mechanical engineering. Of course, this is all very interesting and relevant for those involved in papermaking operations. However, while it is possible to get basic grasp on the topic, safe to say it’s something probably best left to the chemists and engineers! Day Four: Our final day began with the pulp being fully prepped and ready to be pressed, dried and rolled into paper. While this process, like the others, is highly technical, it is evermore fascinating. After the stock has been prepared and formed, it is still full of water, so then it needs to be pressed together and dried. These are massive machines, to give you an idea. It’s from these massive machines that the paper you have sitting on your desk comes from today. After the paper has been dried and rolled, it is then ready to be shipped out and/or converted into any kind of paper product imaginable ranging from a magazine to a corrugated box. After completing this 32-hour course, my knowledge of papermaking went from being basically a general idea of the process, to being conversant on a technical level.Additionally, as I was sitting in the Tampa airport waiting to board my flight home I realized that, while I was leaving a work event, it felt more like leaving a group of friends. Every day after the training sessions, I had the opportunity to engage with mill-level industry employees which was both enjoyable and enlightening experience. I would highly recommend the Introduction to Pulp and Paper Technology course to anyone who is looking to get a look under the hood of pulp and papermaking operations. Despite having almost no background knowledge in this field, Dr. Kocurek presents the information in a digestible way that, even for the most novice of attendees, is still relevant and useful. In addition to this course, TAPPI offers a wide range of continuing education programs for everyone in the pulp and paper industry, click here to view the events calendar for 2017.
Not everything is recyclable, and for most unrecyclable packaging, the supremely-coveted designation cannot be obtained without achieving the impossible: creating systemic change within an economically-stressed establishment full of inertia and wary of anything that isn’t a conventional “core” recyclable. The Carton Council did just that, and their replicable method deserve applause. Acceptance in recycling programs is often measured by examining the instructions given to consumers, so it would seem logical to encourage municipalities to include the item in their recycling instructions and one day declare that the item is accepted enough to be called “recyclable.” This is not what the Carton Council did. The correct way to improve an item’s recyclability is to start three steps beyond collection and work your way back. That means starting with end markets. First stop: the end market. Without demand from end markets, recycling falls apart. Somebody actually has to want the material, meaning they have to be able to do something with it in an economically-viable way, and this potentially obvious aspect of recycling is too often ignored. The Carton Council addressed this first, working with recycled paper mills to understand how they could utilize the fibers in used aseptic and gabletop cartons and helping them optimize their systems to do so. Armed with confidence that recovered cartons have a final destination, the next stop is one step back: recycling commodity brokers and the specifications used to sell recovered paper products. Because now that cartons have a destination, they need to get there. Most bale specifications for fiber products were crafted to be applicable to an average mill. Cartons, though, don’t fit with the repulping capabilities of an average mill. Only a select few can process them. A new bale specification was needed. Grade #52 was born, and the path to those select few mills became paved a bit more. Second stop: Material recovery facilities identify and sort recyclable packaging by unique physical characteristics, and there was not an established sorting method to recover cartons. The exploited physical characteristic of most paper items is their flatness, but cartons, or course, are not flat. The Carton Council had to work with material recovery facilities to identify novel techniques of automated identification and sortation to get those cartons out of a mixed recycling stream and into those grade #52 bales sent to those select few mills. They did that. A carton bale Third stop: sortation. It’s time to address the issue of acceptance in collection programs. This part is easy when the last steps are addressed first. When a municipality can be told that their sorting facility can process the material and sell it on the commodity market, why wouldn’t they include the item in their list of accepted recyclables?
The Carton Council has done a tremendous job transforming an unrecyclable item into a recyclable one.. But the work is far from done. Now that cartons are recyclable, we need to see them recycled, because it’s never enough to put a recyclable package on the market and wash your hands of the recycling challenge. So it is with admiration that we celebrate the Carton Council’s accomplishment, and anticipation for other industry groups to replicate their success.
Here are a few guidelines:
I had the privilege of recently spending four, eight-hour days participating in 
Acceptance in recycling programs is often measured by examining the instructions given to consumers, so it would seem logical to encourage municipalities to include the item in their recycling instructions and one day declare that the item is accepted enough to be called “recyclable.” This is not what the Carton Council did. The correct way to improve an item’s recyclability is to start three steps 
