Carded Carts & Common Problems

Recycling should be loose in your cart.  Why?  This helps the sorting process.  (Watch what happens to your recyclables here.)

The only exception is shredded paper, which needs to be placed into clear bags.  The bags of shredded paper needs to be tied closed, and the bags must not be larger than a basketball.

If you absolutely must bag all of your recycling, the only acceptable way to do it is to use clear bags.

Black bags, gray bags, white bags, and any other bag you cannot see through is considered trash.  These are the bag types we are looking for in the recycling carts.

Sorters at the recovery facility have to assume any bag they can't see into will contain trash, so they are pulled off the line and discarded.  They don't want to risk opening them up only to have something awful fall out.

If you have used the wrong kind of bag, just empty out the good recyclables into the cart directly. Or, if you prefer to bag it, transfer them to a plastic bag you can see through.

What about putting your recyclables into paper bags?

Putting recyclables loose in the cart is best. (The only exception is shredded paper.)

Loose is the simplest solution, especially if you don't want to use a bunch of plastic bags.

The problem with paper bags is that you can't see through them, so the sorters can't tell what is inside of them.

Paper bags by themselves are perfectly recyclable and empty paper bags belong in the recycling cart.  And, yes, paper bags might actually just rip, or dump out when they are tipped into the collection truck.  But, they also might not rip open or spill their contents.

So, are paper bags "bad"? They are in-between.  

They aren't a certain problem like the black, gray, and white plastic bags we find in recycling carts.  But they aren't guaranteed to work, either, because if do not rip open or spill and they wind up getting all the way to the sorters at the recovery facility and they are still completely full of recyclables, then the sorters have no choice but to remove them as trash because they can't tell what's inside the bag.

We definitely understand the worry about recyclables spilling when carts are lifted and emptied, and there is the ingrained cultural norm of bagging up things we want to get rid of, but most recyclables should be loose the cart.  Maybe think of the cart as one big reusable bag for your recyclables (with shredded paper being an outlier).

If you have the right sized cart for the amount of recyclables you make, loose recyclables should not spill out when it is collected by the trucks. Here's a short little video that shows what it looks like when we collect a cart. You can see how the cart goes into the truck a little bit when it is lifted and dumped, so loose material should not spill out over the road so long as the cart is not overloaded.   In the video, you'll also see the cart that was emptied had a paper bag crammed full & a white plastic bag inside the cart - those aren't the best examples of what should be inside a recycling cart.

If your cart is overfull every week, then maybe swap out the cart for a larger size for free or purchase an extra one for a one-time charge.

If you want to use paper bags to carry recyclables from your home to the cart - great! Just tip the bag out into the cart and then toss in the paper bag after.

And to be perfectly clear, never put your shredded paper into paper bags, either.  You have to put shredded paper into see-through plastic bags.  That is the only way to do that.  

We know many folks would rather use paper bags and write "SHREDDED PAPER" on the side, but that will not work. The sorters need to rely on seeing clear bags of shredded paper on the conveyor belts.  They are not reading what is written on the paper bags.

This is a broad category of items that includes plastic wrap, grocery store bags, rope, hoses, belts, and many other similar items that are terrible for the sorting equipment at recovery facilities.

They get tangled into the rollers and jam robotic vacuums.  This leads to costly down time and the facility has to shut down and unwind all of these knotted up messes created by tanglers.

What you should do with your tangler depends on the item.

Plastic bags and plastic wrap should go to a retailer for recycling and never in the green recycling cart at your home.

Other tanglers are probably trash if it cannot be donated, but you are welcome to contact us for assistance.

Clothes, bedding, and curtains also jam sorting equipment that separates the bottles, cans, cardboard and other good household recyclables that should be in your cart.  These are basically tanglers, too.

Never place clothes or textiles into the green recycling cart.

The good news is that there are a lot of local options on where you can take your textiles and clothes.

If you are worried that what you have may not be able to be sold again, check with the place where you would like to donate items about what happens to items they can't sell.  You may be surprised to learn that many of the clothes and textiles donated locally that cannot be sold do find other uses as industrial rags or filling to punching bags and other possible uses as well.   

Lumber, pressboard, and other wood-like products do not belong in the recycling cart.  We are not talking about paper.  Think of things like shelves or other chunks or pieces of wood. 

This kind of material can damage the sorting equipment at the recovery facility.

If you want your lumber or wood products to be beneficially reused, you have to take it to a Streets Division drop-off site and place it into the wood bin.

We do not recycle the wood products into paper at the drop-off sites.  The wood  we receive at the drop-offs are ground up, and then used as road base at the landfill campus.

Never put styrofoam in the green recycling cart.

The sorting equipment will destroy these containers and fling the little plastic pellets all over other good recyclables, contaminating other materials.

If you want to recycle styrofoam, you must bring it to a drop-off site.

Styrofoam collected at the drop-off sites is not mixed in with all of the other recyclables we collect.

We gather all of the styrofoam into giant bags and then haul all of them to Reynolds Urethane Recycling on the east side of Madison where it is processed.

If you do not want to bring styrofoam to a drop-off site, then it belongs in the trash.

Cart inspectors are also looking for any other obvious problems.

In checking recycling carts, inspectors have found dog poop, box fans, bags of watermelon rinds, and other random things that do not belong in the recycling carts.

Cart inspectors are on the lookout for these obvious problems as well as the other five problems.

If one of these other obvious issues is found, they will write down the problem on the card they leave behind so you know what needs to be removed from the recycling cart you use.