Return plastic bags to the store: What to recycle, and what not to recycle in the Triangle

When it comes to curbside recycling, you usually don’t need to rinse containers, take lids off bottles or remove tape from cardboard boxes. But please stop putting shoes and batteries in your recycling bin.

That’s right: People put shoes and batteries in their recycling bins.

Don't put clothes or plastic grocery bags in there either.

Bags and plastic films can usually be recycled at your grocery store. But when you put them in a curbside recycling bin, they gum up the machines that Sonoco Recycling and other companies use to sort recyclables, wrapping around machine parts and shutting down the system.

Don’t bag your recyclables either.

This is some of the advice that local recycling programs offer as they try to clean the stream of bottles, cans and other recyclables that come through their facilities, and boost the percentage of cast-offs that actually get recycled by curbside sorting programs across the state. WRAL News visited one of the Triangle’s largest sorting facilities to see how it works.

There’s a large bin of them at the Sonoco facility in Raleigh, which sorts curbside recyclables for a number of Triangle cities, including Raleigh and Durham.

If it’s not packaging, it probably doesn’t belong in your curbside bin, according to Scott Byrne, the director of global sustainability services at Sonoco.

If it is packaging, you can usually just throw it in the bin without worrying about taking the metal top off a glass bottle or a paper label off the plastic bottle. Rinsing is fine, and recycling centers certainly don’t want containers with food in them, but it usually doesn’t take much rinsing.

Peanut butter was, forgive the pun, a sticking point. Sonoco said you can toss an empty bottle in the bin without wiping away residue. Wendy Worley, the state Department of Environmental Quality’s section chief for recycling, said that thinking may not be universal for curbside programs.

But glass ends up crushed, and plastic gets shredded before a final wash.

Sonoco’s Raleigh facility processes somewhere between 400 and 500 tons of waste a day, according to the company. There are lots of flies. The plant runs around the clock, except when the company shuts down machines for maintenance.

Sonoco estimates 20% of what comes in ends up in a landfill, and Worley said that’s about average for these facilities.

A front-end loader pushes piles of refuse onto conveyor belts that carry recyclables through the vast, multileveled Sonoco warehouse.

The facility uses gravity, magnets and blasts of air to separate things by weight and size. Optical scanners recognize shapes and colors. Large spinning screws separate items, with cardboard riding over the top and smaller containers falling through.

At one point, an electric current passes through the flow, causing aluminum cans to jump across a space between belts, separating them from the rest of the stream.

Aluminum is the most profitable thing to recycle. It's also the easiest thing to recycle, Sonoco managers said.

Soda and water bottles are by far the most common items in curbside bins. They make up roughly 60% of the plastic stream, and the polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, that they’re made of can be recycled into a wide range of other things, including new containers, carpet and clothing.

Riverkeepers across North Carolina use litter traps to monitor garbage in state waterways. They say the most common problem is often Styrofoam, which recycling facilities typically don’t accept, and which essentially lasts forever, breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces. Also common: plastic bags and bottles.

“Those are all things that can be avoided,” Haw Riverkeeper Emily Sutton said. “And we really need to put the responsibility on the corporations that are making things so cheaply … But, as a community, as a society, we need to think about how we are creating this waste and demand change by the way that we are spending our money.”

Officials at Sonoco and at Waste Management, which operates a Morrisville sorting facility that handles curbside recycling from Wake County and Cary residents, say North Carolina has an advantage in plastics recycling. Several companies in the area, including Unifi in Greensboro, use recycled plastic to make fibers for various products.

Strategic Materials in Wilson makes products from recycled glass. Sonoco itself uses cardboard and paper products to make new packaging and other products. Waste Management spokesperson Marla Prince said the company exports very little material overseas and no post-consumer plastics.

“The mass majority of our materials stay in the southeast,” Prince said in an email. “North Carolina is lucky to have mill outlets for several commodities within the state and others in surrounding states.”

That’s a reason to keep recycling, even if you see national stories about a poor market for certain materials.

“Recycling is local,” Sonoco’s Byrne said.

“It’s going to damage equipment,” Sonoco Field Procurement Manager Patrick McDonald said. “We’ll take the steel soup can, but not the pipe.”

Those who find their recycling bin full before pickup can often call for a larger one, or a second one. In some communities, this is free.

Another rule of thumb: Plastic bottles are recyclable, but small ones can clog machines. Anything shorter than two inches probably shouldn’t go in your recycling bin.

Clogs are the most common reason for plant shutdowns, though it’s usually clothes and plastic bags that do the clogging, wrapping around screws the plant uses to separate items by rigidity and size.

Recycling sorting centers such as those run by Sonoco and Waste Management are called Materials Recovery Facilities, or MRFs. There are 17 in North Carolina, plus another five close enough to the border that the state Department of Environmental Quality lists them as resources for North Carolina businesses in need of feedstock for their products.

PET, which is what most drink bottles are made of, brought about 40 cents a pound. Newspaper, at times, is worthless. Crushed glass had value this summer if it was separated between brown, clear and green, but not if the colors were mixed.

Not all North Carolina curbside programs accept glass, but the ones that don’t have drop off areas for glass, which gets shipped to Wilson, according to Worley, the DEQ section chief.

“What I hear from manufacturers,” Worley said, “is that they are always looking for more material.”

During WRAL News' trip to the Sonoco recycling facility in Raleigh, we asked company officials to go through a box of items and tell us whether they can be recycled curbside, and if not, why not. This video walks you through it.